Held Together: A Shared Memoir of Motherhood, Medicine, and Imperfect Love

In this moving debut, physician Thompson weaves an account of her complicated path to becoming a mother with recollections from colleagues, friends, and patients on their own experiences with parenthood. She recounts miscarrying, getting her right ovary removed because of an ectopic pregnancy, and anxiously monitoring whether her placental tissue would become cancerous as the result of a rare complication before giving birth to a healthy baby boy on her fourth pregnancy. Among other contributors, one mother describes the “roller coaster of heartache and disappointment” she felt through four rounds of IVF. Others focus on social rather than medical complications, such as the case of a woman who put her child up for adoption after getting pregnant as a high schooler. Elsewhere, contributors share unvarnished accounts of living with grief over an adoption that fell through and dealing with the disappointment of being unable to bear children after a life-saving hysterectomy. The varied selections prove there’s no single, “normal” route to motherhood, and throughout, the writers keep the focus squarely on the steep emotional toll of unsuccessfully trying to have kids (“Nothing could distract me from the obvious void. Everywhere I looked, women were snuggling babies in carriers,” Thompson remembers of the months following her miscarriages). This will be a comfort to anyone who’s experienced pregnancy complications. (Apr.)