Echolocation or Can You Do IVF if you have rabies?
I was not planning on going into the office because I had scheduled myself to be anxious that morning. I had never had an embryo transfer in the afternoon, and this was my very last embryo transfer ever, so I couldn't get anything done! But I kept getting these alerts on my phone for the church camera. The alerts themselves named the intruder an animal, so I tried to forget about it until my administrator, who was supposed to be on vacation, called. "It's a bat, " she said of the intruder. "You can see it clearly posing for the camera." "That's nice," I said. "No," she insisted. "I have a volunteer coming in today! She shouldn't be responsible for catching a bat! What if she gets bitten?" Oh right.
So I drove to the office to catch a bat on the day of my very last frozen embryo transfer. I've caught a bat before and released it back outside. Except- what would happen if *I* got bitten? My Director of Christian Education was also with me; she is not afraid of much but she does happen to fear bats and heard a faint squeaky, and (to her) terrifying mewling. Alas, neither of us could echolocate and didn't want to move furniture looking for the bat. I called Animal Control, and they were nearby and came right over. I helped the animal control officer look, finally finding the bat just on the floor by a box.
The animal control officer was delighted and pulled out her super elaborate bat catcher: a red plastic coffee can with the logo for the coffee company crossed out with black permanent marker and the word BAT written beside it. She cooed to the bat as she put it in the can, and then she sauntered off to set it free.
I laughed with the Director of Christian Education before I left, wondering. What would have happened if I was bitten?! Surely one cannot undergo IVF and rabies shots at the same time? Would my reproductive endocrinologist have thrown up her hands if I had to cancel a cycle for such a bizarre reason? I could hear her saying, "Shannon, you give me too much trouble. No more IVF for you." Was this a sign? As I pondered these questions, I still had time to be anxious before my appointment, but instead I was just laughing at the absurdity of the day.
And I wasn't just laughing- I felt strangely comforted. First, my mother-in-law, with whom I was close and who died in 2017- her favorite job was working for animal control. She used to talk about it all the time. And bats aren't birds, but they are flying creatures, and I had begun to think of my then only living child as a creature that had flown free of my body. I have tattoos of trees to represent my first three miscarriages and the deep-rooted experiences of these babies in my body- they never flew free in the world. Our daughter Autumn I didn't see as a tree even though she, too, didn't fly; I saw her as a fox like in the Little Prince, and we did hold her and love her. A bat flies like a bird but is a mammal like a fox: could this also be a symbol of connection between my last three children? I’m straining too hard to hear the echolocations, perhaps, but I felt love making these connections.
Poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa, in a passage from the book A Ghost in the Throat that I listened to driving home from hearing this baby’s heartbeat for the first time, writes, “To glimpse a bat in flight is to sense a flicker at the periphery of one’s vision, phantom inverted commas tilting through the dark. A complex system of echolocation allows her to navigate the night, guided by the echoes that answer her voice.” I am guided as a parent by the echoes of my loved ones before, at least the echoes I notice in answer to my question (not the one about rabies): what next?
We create meaning for ourselves in the world. I do not actually believe my mother-in-law was speaking to me from The Beyond through an animal control officer who was far more animated talking to a bat than to me. I do not actually believe that the bat's mammalian nature and wide wingspan was some cosmic engineering of speech from my dead daughter Autumn with an unconscious whisper from my first living child. I could have just as easily latched onto a frog as a symbol for the embryo placed in my uterus later that day, since we ended up giving the child that embryo became the same name as a famous bullfrog. This is just me thinking too hard about silly things. Besides, my family has endured so much senseless pain that I can never believe that now it's jumping neatly (even if weirdly) into some sort of meaning. I am the one that gives these moments meaning.
And so I choose to relish this little weird memory because it helps me highlight the laughter and silliness of the day I ended up getting pregnant with a child who brings me deep joy. I choose to create connection to the ones I continue to grieve because I want my living children to fly free in the world knowing just how vast and unshakable love is. I write my own little story seeking to find my own within an infinitely larger story. Even if that perch has me hanging upside down.
