Miscarrying in a TJ Maxx
By Rae Zalopany
Standing near the kitchenware aisle near an end cap was where I’d felt the warmth before the cramping. I’d been deciding between two Hello Kitty mugs, one in each hand, like Themis with her scales and sword. Other shoppers were filtering behind me, hovering as I stood at the display, my mind devoid of anything but sensation. It was like when you know you’ve broken an arm but start focusing on other aspects of your body: discharge, early period, partner’s fluids, pee. I recounted everything that could be dispelling from me instead of what was.
Currently sitting in my kitchen cabinet were three Hello Kittys, two Kuromi and Keroppis, and a My Melody mug. The collection was starting to get out of hand. “You know there are people who wake up and stand in line waiting for TJ Maxx to open to buy the newest mugs and sell them on eBay,” I’d told my husband, showing him one of my first mug purchases. He likes to look at each mug I buy with keen interest, claiming that if he were a character he’d be Badtz-Maru, and our son would be Pochacco.
My Hello Kitty collection started when I was around six years old. I’d inherited my eldest sister’s Chococat tin purse with gingham siding and a baby blue strap. My collection grew from there: Hello Kitty cloud phone, television, stickers, pencils, playsets. Hello Kitty was my first journal, fuzzy and pink, where I wrote the word bitch in it and promptly threw it out, because I was worried my mother would discover my curse word. I apparently hadn’t discovered the eraser. By the time I was in middle school I came to the same crossroad as my eldest sister—I could keep collecting or assimilate. Growing up, I thought, meant shedding the hyper pink kawaii snakeskin.
In the year that I’d first became a stay-at-home mom, TJ Maxx became my third place. I’d walk around and gaze at the mostly junky items during my free time. Combing each aisle thoughtfully, asking myself if this was the year I would wear false eyelashes or if I was a slippers and robe person. Sometimes, I’d just end up driving to the parking lot to sit in my car to read or cry or make a phone call to an unsuspecting friend for a chat.
It’s funny a lot of my friends have commiserated in their TJ Maxx visitations. Apparently, I wasn’t the only person who used TJ Maxx as a life palette cleanser. When discussing, we eventually found a common thread. “Your mother was a retail therapy girlie, wasn’t she?” and indeed she was. I believe I used to complain about it at length, heckled her at a later point. We’d go, me and my sisters in tow, and stay anywhere between forty-five minutes to four hours. I had to get creative, because my mother didn’t like me climbing inside racks or running in shared spaces, so I often imagined the store was my grandma’s attic and that I was discovering new treasures I’d inherit someday all in the confines of my head.
What I didn’t realize was that my mother took me and my sisters here to get away. Whether that meant for her own mental wellbeing, or to get away from my father during a fight, or to just to exist in a space that anticipated every need imaginable from toothpaste and melatonin gummies to snail excretion face masks. My mother found peace walking the aisles to Alanis Morissette, tuning out her ungrateful children who she shopped for and with. Now I often subject my son to the same fate.
One might call me a generational Maxxinista.
I had my fortune read to me, foretelling my pregnancy when I was nine years old.
My mother threw her first and only Halloween party ever that year. It was quite shocking, because they’d always been dinner party people. Throwing intimate cookouts with one family or two max. I helped my mother prepare, excited at the prospect of catered food—something I thought was only possible at weddings. At that time, I was obsessed with two things: Hello Kitty and Cat Woman, played by Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns. She made my stomach queasy in the most luxurious way, a little secret I kept to myself as I watched and rewatched the DVD on my pink Hello Kitty TV. A sexual awakening, for sure, but not my first. There had been an onslaught of television crushes like the animated Megara or Spirit (like the Stallion of the Cimarron) or Johnathan Taylor Thomas, but none that I wanted to mirror. My mother helped me pick out the outfit: black velvet bodysuit, cat tail and mask, bullwhip, and calf heeled boots. When I looked in the mirror I said, Me-ow.
I went to go get my fortune told later in the night waiting for privacy. The adults were drunk, scream-signing Toby Keith’s Should've Been a Cowboy, when I slinked into the dining room. My mother, in her hostess glory, had hired a psychic for her guests to have their futures told. The room had emptied besides the medium. Initially, I didn’t want my future told. Even as a child I had a sense of constant doom, thinking that the psychic could read all my bad doings. The lying, the boogers on the headboard, the way that I would throw everything out when my mother asked me to clean (mail, jewelry, socks, anything in my path that I didn’t want to put away). Here's what the medium told me: I would do something creative as my profession, that I would be ill by eighty, and that I was going to have twins.
All of this seemed well and good. Eighty was ancient to me and yes, I aspired to be Harriet the Spy. Having children, well, that’s what adults do and at least I could get two for one. Everything made sense.
I’ve miscarried twice in my life. The first time was when I was eighteen years old. I stared at the clots of blood and knew that it was weird. That what I was looking at was a compilation of me and some guy who I’d never talk to again. I cheered after the initial shock wore off. Not outwardly whooping, but mentally thanking the universe for its aide in the avoidance of my plight. Shortly, I got a prescription for The Pill and went on my merry way. This miscarriage felt like an asteroid shooting over my head.
There are women who morn this loss and I don’t fault them for it or feel like they shouldn’t. I grew more empathetic to women mourning pregnancy loss in first trimesters after my second miscarriage. It is the idea of what could have been, the physicality of the act. It took me a full week after miscarrying in TJ Maxx to understand my feelings.
On one hand, pregnancy isn’t easy for me. I found out I was pregnant with my eight-year-old by going to the emergency room one night after waking up to a swollen leg. I went into the ER thinking that I was bitten by a spider and came home a week and a half later with three blood clots on a major artery and a four-month-old fetus in me all at the ripe age of twenty-one. When I got home, I stared at the full-length mirror for a long time, naked and looking at my flat stomach and bloated leg. What kind of woman was I to not have known? That would be a question asked and disbelieved by most professionals and a few family members. Surprisingly, cryptic pregnancies are more common than people think.
My blood doctor told me to come back to see him when I was ready for my next baby. Next? Did he really think I wanted another child after learning I had a chromosomal disorder that would always threaten my life? After giving birth, I asked my gynecologist for a hysterectomy and she refused, citing that I was so young and would most likely change my mind. I hate that she was right but not all the way. If I’d gotten my uterus removed, I don’t think I would have changed my mind. I would never have had the idea or option for a figurative being inside me, therefore would never miss what I would never have.
My son was born and so was I. How could he not change me? It was just him and me, until I met Tyler, who after a year met my son and proved himself to be an admirable, loving, and dedicated father. He adopted our son, but it felt like he was there the whole time.
A week after my miscarriage I cried in the TJ Maxx parking lot thinking about what that baby could have been and how it would feel to have a pregnancy that was full of love and care. My son, the happy surprise that he was, started in isolation. I couldn’t help but envision a pregnancy where I was taken care of and adored. Where my cravings would be met, and how our son would’ve put his head on my belly to say hi. I mourned this fictional life I almost had and felt guilty for it.
In May of 2024, Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect. If you Google abortion clinics in Florida, a lot of the links advertised take you to Crisis Pregnancy Centers—fake clinics run by anti-abortionists meant to scare and shame women into following through unwanted pregnancies. Throughout the month of May I watched people advise deleting period tracking apps, information on IUD insertions, and costs of vasectomies. I considered throwing water bottles from my car window at anti-abortion protesters smugly cheering out front of Planned Parenthood. It felt good, the thought, but I didn’t want to inadvertently give them water.
In Florida, Anya Cook had to deliver her four-month fetus in a salon bathroom after being turned away by a doctor who wouldn’t deliver it. She hemorrhaged half her blood. A fourteen-year-old rape victim recently was forced to carry to term, along with a woman who was mandated to carry a fetus she knew would die immediately because it was missing its kidneys and lungs.
I Google, is it illegal to miscarry?
Google tells me no, but I think, not yet.
My period has always had had a mind of its own, I thought of her as her own entity—rude, independent, a Virgo. Instinctively, I knew that it wasn’t period blood that I was feeling no matter how random my periods chose to come. I often wished I was the type of woman to track my periods. There are those who meticulously mark their calendars with a dainty red dot or an aggressive sad face emoji in preparation and awareness for the big bad day. They’re smart, like storm trackers ever prepared with a tampon in the little slot of their purses meant for coins. I on the other hand vibe it out. I let my breasts be my compasses giving me a week’s notice or sometimes it just jumps out of nowhere ruining a perfectly good pair of Levi’s. My IUD gave me a false sense of security. If anything, I now realize that I’m intoxicatingly fertile.
My sister gave birth the same week I miscarried. Her and her partner had undergone invasive and extensive lengths for her pregnancy. Their dedication to having a baby was shocking to me. I’d never wanted a baby that bad and couldn’t relate. But in my sister’s mind it was now or never. The clock, as they say, was ticking.
She texted us during each trial and appointment, updating us on eggs that didn’t take. In my mind, the eggs weren’t anything but ifs and possibilities. To her they were ifs and possibilities.
My niece’s arrival wasn’t coated in bitter sweetness, but I did feel the universal irony of the situation. My if and possibility was six feet below floating down in the Florida drain system or in the belly of a gator.
The day my niece was born I was getting group chat notifications of hospital updates every hour. I didn’t tell any of my family besides my husband.
“What’s to tell,” I told him, “It’s no big deal.”
I felt this urge to suppress my innate emotional response the same way I tried to omit my love for Sanrio.
In the early oughts, being feminine was linked to stupidity. It’s why movies like Legally Blonde were so popular—a hyper feminine, pink loving blonde is hot AND smart? Shocking. I grew up in a household that was at war with these binaries of masculine and feminine. A house of three girls, four counting my mother, and a father who got mad if we cried. It seemed to me that being feminine was something I could lean into as a child but once I was a teenager had to grow out of. It no longer was cute, but just an attention grab for the male gaze. My make up and clothes were no longer for play. So, we became little women who laughed with their father at their mother’s expense, hoping that we wouldn’t be made to be the butt of the joke one day.
The truth is we will never escape the scrutiny.
We can be God-loving, chaste women who have a career, pay fifty-fifty, watch three kids, and still be penalized for having an ectopic pregnancy.
My niece is not an if or a possibility now. She is a person, fully formed with a brain, a heart, and an affinity for eating the monstera plant’s dirt.
My mother and I often meet at TJ Maxx in-between our houses to exchange my son after or before a sleepover. We stroll together in tandem, chattering about our week or exchanging candle scents from a shelf. My son partakes in our ritual too, grabbing a Hello Kitty item that he thinks I’ll like and presenting it to me with genuine excitement.
My mother was the one who cried with me when I told her about the miscarriage. She sent texts asking me how I was. I hate that I’d spent years rejecting what I thought was silliness, when really it was emotional aptitude and empathy.
Luckily, I found my inner girl in my mid-twenties. A single mother with a baby at twenty-one made me reflect on who I wanted to be to this child. I found the joy in glitter eyeshadows, monochromatic pink outfits, and of course, Sanrio again. My son and I watch Sailor Moon and sing Chappell Roan and play nail salon when I cut his fingernails. He doesn’t huff and whine in TJ Maxx. When I bought my first Hello Kitty mug, I put it down and picked it up about three times. I don’t need this, I kept thinking. When I put the mug down a fourth time my son grabbed it and said, “Mom, you have to buy this—it’s so cute.”
“Do you think you could build us a peg board for Rae’s mugs,” My husband asked his dad who’s a very skilled carpenter. My father-in-law happily agreed and looking over my collection to make sure he gets the dimensions just right.
I’m thirty and married. Sometimes I forget that I’m of the age where if you tell someone you’re pregnant they’ll congratulate you instead of saying, “You need me to drive you to the clinic?”
In truth, I don’t need or want another child right now. I don’t even think I could safely be pregnant in the state I live in. When I was pregnant the doctors told me I’m lucky to be pregnant young, that it would be harder when I’m older with my chromosomal disorder. What would Florida medical doctors do to me, should I need help? Too many ifs and possibilities. Sometimes I like to imagine though, sans political climate, me with a big belly and an impossible amount of love.
I read the other day that Hello Kitty isn’t a kitty but really a little girl who was five apples tall and weighed three apples. Why is it, if she’s a girl, that she’s portrayed as a kitty? None of her friends, to my knowledge, are actual children. They weren’t and aren’t real, never would be. But it’s nice to live in the colorful, cute world of Sanrio from time to time.
I imagine that the lump that slid down from me wasn’t even an apple slice in matter. Not even one apple slice tall.
Rae Zalopany is a writer based out of the Tampa Bay area. She is a MFA graduate from the University of South Florida. Her work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, South East Review, The Boiler, and elsewhere.