THE BUTTERFLY KIT
Creative Nonfiction
In the middle of May my sister sent a butterfly kit to my four and nearly three-year-old daughters to our home in New Mexico. I opened the box and the caterpillars were already large and plump, the plastic container they were housed in showing delicate strands of cotton candy-like silk stretched across its walls. The bottom of the container was covered in a hardened, brown substance that looked like peanut brittle or jaggery, the unrefined Indian sugar. I don’t know what the caterpillars’ food was made of and it was a stretch to connect it to the thin, purple plums, bright, red strawberries and the giant green leaf in Hungry Caterpillar, but I read it to the girls anyway. I was aware that they were just beginning to learn the basic concepts of life cycles, and that the success of the project largely depended on my conveying enthusiasm for it.
The instruction booklet was straightforward, a two-page pamphlet that offered two or three sentences for each stage. I placed the container at the back of the buffet table in our dining room, away from drafts and direct sunlight as told, but more importantly, away from small and eager hands. As the girls peered over the edge of the table, our two-year-old on her tippy toes, I explained to them that we must be very careful with the jar. I told them that the caterpillars would keep spinning silk and soon surround themselves in a cocoon, just like in the book, and emerge as butterflies for us to then set free. Without any further comment, we walked back to the family room scattered with toys big and small, where they quickly got back to work.
Each morning and at least once throughout the day, we checked on the caterpillars’ progress. They were growing quickly, almost doubling in size after two days. By day five, I awoke to see them attached to the top of the lid, and the very next day, they had formed their chrysalides. I looked at them with my daughters and noticed that one of the chrysalides was not covering the entirety of the caterpillar, and that a small part of its fuzzy body was sticking out the top end. Knowing close to nothing about the process, it was easy to imagine that the survival of the butterfly, or at least its ability to function properly, depended on the entirety of the caterpillar transforming. I imagined that the part of the caterpillar still visible housed what was crucial to the creation of its wings, its head, or antennae. I walked away with an unsettled feeling, as though my participation had somehow contributed to this error, perhaps we moved the jar too often, or were too loud around them.
While the kids were watching Sesame Street and I was cooking dinner, and after they’d gone to sleep and I poured a glass of wine, I thought of the butterfly kit. The feeling I had was not a fully formed feeling of dread, but something like it. When I woke the next day, I checked the chrysalides before going to the girls’ room. Any hope I’d had that the one caterpillar hadn’t fully formed its cocoon was gone. All of the chrysalides had further hardened and I felt a swift return to my childhood, remembering seeing chrysalides up close on thin, tree branches or on the ground in my backyard. I realized that I didn’t know what they were then. My mother would have been inside. It was a different time when it was considered safe to let your children play outside by themselves, leaving nearly everything to their imaginations.
I looked through the box to see if there was any further material describing the process beyond the basic instructions. In my unfortunate newfound haste that had become a habit of doing things less thoroughly than I used to, always anticipating a small child needing something, I saw that I’d looked past a small, yellow insert at the bottom of the box underneath an activity workbook. It read 6 Things You Need to Know About Your Butterfly Project, with “You Need to Know” in bold. I scanned down the list, skimming over one that was already covered in the instruction booklet and otherwise obvious (Don’t shake the cup!), but the others were certainly Need to Know: I must remove all silk around the chrysalides using a toothpick or Q-tip before transferring them into the mesh habitat or the butterflies could became entangled upon emergence, deforming their wings; the chrysalides may shake during the cleaning process when moved, a natural response to ward off predators; a chrysalis could fall off the top of the lid and what to do if it does; when the butterflies emerge they would likely expel meconium; and that it was not guaranteed that all five would become butterflies.
I had taken it for granted that the process was straightforward. I’d assumed that all five caterpillars would perfectly perform the complex task of transformation and that in under two weeks, we would release the butterflies and watch them fly around our purple Russian sage bushes and drink nectar from the wildflowers and untamed rose bushes in our backyard. I hadn’t yet thought of the possibility that the project would not go perfectly, and that I’d have to explain why to the girls.
The details of miscarrying my first pregnancy are clear. We lived full-time in Brooklyn, a place we still call home for part of the year. It was pre-kids, a time when things in my life happened and I had time to think them through. I compartmentalized my feelings around certain events with the hope that I could remember what I wanted to and allow other memories to fade away. What I remember is that I had sudden and alarming episodes of dizziness and a loss of appetite, different from the times I’d experienced lightheadedness in the past, usually from a hangover, low blood sugar and not enough sleep. We had only recently started trying for a baby, not in the sense of downloading an ovulation calendar app, I didn’t know yet that those existed, but more of a “let’s see what happens” kind of trying. I took a test by myself and told my husband as soon as he entered the apartment. We sat on the couch, stunned and giddy, and walked to the diner on DeKalb, where I had a hard time sitting over a simple cup of minestrone, the smell alone making me feel like I might throw up.
Within days, my dizziness was replaced by what felt like the feeling of my ribs expanding, a sensation that would thankfully signal pregnancies to me later. In the OB’s office, we saw the fetus’ heartbeat. It was around nine weeks. My husband and I looked from one another to the screen and listened for the first time to the sound of a tiny heartbeat, like a quick, fluttering of wings, and I felt the impossibility of being able to fully comprehend that I could grow a life inside of me. I experienced nausea at nearly every meal, unless the meal was cold grapes and plain, whole milk yogurt. Someone later told me that the phrase “morning sickness” was introduced by a man who witnessed his wife throwing up only in the morning, because after that, he went to work.
The morning of our next doctor’s visit, I awoke with the feeling of expansiveness in my ribs gone. I sat on the side of the bed telling my husband that I felt like I was back to normal, hoping it meant my symptoms of discomfort had already passed. I knew though, well before my husband did, while the cold jelly was being rubbed around my stomach during the ultrasound, that something was wrong. I listened to the inner parts of my body, so similar to the sound of being underwater, and watched our OB’s face, concentrated and perhaps a bit practiced: this wasn’t her first time holding onto the ultrasound wand for ten seconds too long while she thought of something to say. And I don’t remember exactly what she said, other than a confirmation of what I already knew, an intuition I’d hoped was wrong. The feeling I had between my knowing and her speaking was a feeling of fear I would carry with me throughout each pregnancy afterwards, as well as now, in motherhood. It’s the constant feeling that life, as a phenomenon, is outside of my control.
When it was time to transfer the chrysalides to the mesh habitat I thought of doing it without the kids, fearful of making a misstep if not given the quiet I would need to concentrate. But it didn’t seem fair to not include them in part of the process. I took a Q-tip from our diaper changing station in the family room and carried the jar and habitat to the kitchen table. The girls climbed up on the chairs while I slowly pulled off the lid that the chrysalides were attached to. Immediately, they began to shake. They shook so violently that they made clacking sounds against one another, like miniature maracas. “This can’t be what nature intended,” my husband said, as I tried and failed to gently wipe and twist away the silk with the Q-tip, eventually having to pluck it off with my fingers.
I was amazed at how strong the cremaster was, holding tightly to the surface of the plastic lid. At some point, the part of the caterpillar that didn’t make it into the chrysalis fell off and I swept it into the trash. I thought of the dried bit of umbilical cord I’d kept in a plastic baggy in a drawer in our kitchen that stored all things related to the girls’ hair and general daily upkeep: barrettes, hair bands, detangling brushes, nail clippers, small bottles of cream and tubes of antibiotic jellies. At least once a day as I rummaged I moved the baggy aside, no longer sure whose it was, but unable to part with it.
I inserted the lid into the brown plastic stand that was meant to look like a tree branch. The chrysalides went from their vertical hanging positions to laying flush against the lid, and I lowered them into the mesh habitat. They settled into their new positions, and the shaking stopped. I felt relief that my biggest responsibility of the project was over, and that all there was to do was wait and watch. I took the habitat and put it in the same place on the dining room buffet and threw the plastic jar away.
I felt fiercely committed to the idea of giving birth “naturally,” a trending word in the pregnancy world that in essence means giving birth vaginally without the intervention of drugs. It was a word I would use proudly later when telling mother friends and acquaintances my birth plan for our first daughter, almost all of them nodding their heads with a tight smile on their faces, understanding in a way I couldn’t yet why women are told to write down a birth plan and then throw it away. Without asking the OB the questions I should have about the differences between a D & C and passing the fetus naturally, I opted for the latter. I could see her jerk her head back an inch, surprised at my self-assuredness, before explaining that I would feel intense cramping and see a lot of blood.
My husband and I walked into Central Park, a place I only went to about a half dozen times a year, enough for it to feel both familiar, yet still like I was a visitor. We sat by a large chunk of black bedrock in the lower part of the park, shielding us from the faces of the people around us but not their laughter, my husband oscillating between comforting me and grappling with his own sadness. I know some things about how I process grief, and knew that the feelings I had, my thoughts numbed by shock and forcing myself to stay calm, would soon turn into private moments of despair and blaming myself for things gone wrong.
After an hour or so in the park, when our thoughts had become silent, my husband suggested that we go to the Columbus Circle mall, a place we rarely ever went to, to buy him a suit. It was a necessity for an event he had coming up and one he’d been putting off. I knew he suggested it as a distraction, that if we pretended to get on with our lives in the middle of a crisis that at some point we would. I focused on the fit of each suit with precise clarity, the fit of the legs, the length of the arms, until we found the perfect one.
Even as my grief was rising, I was able to process that my optimistic husband looked incredibly handsome. I thought of my parents, both just over seventy-years-old, and understood their cautious happiness at my having a baby at nearly forty years old. My dad would later tell me that when I told them about the miscarriage it was one of the saddest moments he’d experienced, this from a man who had patients die on his operating table. At the register, I stayed within reach of my husband, knowing if I wandered on my own that I would quickly become inconsolable amongst racks of men’s attire.
The butterflies emerged from the chrysalides within five to six hours of each other. The chrysalis that hadn’t fully formed was the last to hatch. I could barely bring myself to keep going back to the habitat with the girls to look at the butterflies, until the one time we did and all of the cocoons were empty, split in half and dried out like the shed skin of snakes. I looked for the butterfly that was the last to emerge but it was impossible to tell which one it was. Two were larger than the others and they seemed especially restless, fluttering their wings only to hit the sides and tops of the confined space. I mixed the processed sugar packet that came with the kit with water as instructed, and poured it into the small round sponge with plastic pink, flower petals attached to it, and gently lowered it into the habitat. For variety, I dropped in small slices of strawberry, mango and banana, the girls delighted when they saw the butterflies sitting atop the fruits.
There was a thunderstorm forecasted on the day we were to release the butterflies. I kept them inside the habitat for another day and we returned several times to look at them. Their wings were dotted a brownish-orange and grey with small, blue spots on the tips of the undersides. It seemed as though they had active and inactive phases, all of them staying still at the same time, the tips of their thin, fragile legs delicately balanced on the sides and top of the habitat. “Are they sleeping?” my two-year-old asked me. Even though there was only the one final step of letting them go, I was tired of the project. I never saw any of them eating the processed sugar water, and when I looked up whether or not butterflies sleep, I found conflicting information.
It was nearly two weeks before my body was ready to expel the fetus. In the interim, I went to work and didn’t tell anyone, refrained from alcohol at bars when I really wanted to drink to the point of forgetting, and attended a yoga class where I started crying in Warrior 2 pose while Cat Steven’s “Peace Train” played loudly throughout the room, the teacher bringing me a box of tissues. It was a heavy and bizarre feeling to know that I was walking around and living my life while something that had once been living was now deceased and still inside of me. By some miracle - and I really did feel it was something of the sort - I had an appointment with the OB scheduled for a follow up the day it happened. The cramping had begun about two hours earlier and was coming in waves. By the time I met my husband at the doctor’s office they were so painful and consistent that I realized what she really meant were contractions. If I had been at home by myself, or worse, with an audience at work, I would have called an ambulance, certain that something had gone terribly wrong.
When I was on the chair for the ultrasound the OB could see the fetus still inside of me. After I pushed for ten minutes or so she was able to remove it with her hand or an instrument, I couldn’t be sure which. She asked if I wanted it tested and nearly delirious with the aftereffects of being in a lot of pain, I responded “yes.” It was against my philosophy of doing everything “naturally,” certainly people a hundred years ago never had that option. I’m still not sure if knowing why the fetus didn’t survive was helpful or harmful, or even relevant. We would have dozens of genetic tests and results ahead of us, all covered by insurance because I was over thirty-five. Each of them gave me concrete answers to partially satisfy the analytical part of my mind, the rest of it left to wander.
In our backyard I set the habitat on the ground, unzipped the plastic top, and peeled it back. Our two daughters peered over, chatting excitedly. “Come here, butterfly, come here,” our older daughter coaxed. Almost immediately, one of the larger butterflies flew out, and one by one, each rose out the cage, until a final one remained, hesitant. It was easy to project that it was the caterpillar that formed into a butterfly without the entirety of its body. Its wings were fluttering while its body stayed in place.
Our oldest, understanding that the food they needed came from flowers, plucked a small yellow flower from our yard and waved it over the top. “Here’s a flower for you,” she said, nurturing coming easily to her, as an older sibling, as something she learned from me, as a human being, until some are taught otherwise. We watched the caterpillars turn to butterflies over the course of nearly two weeks. I’d suffered one miscarriage and carried two children to term. Obstetricians study human biology for years and witness many pregnancies and births and assist with the things that need to go right in order for nothing to go wrong, but no one was able to tell me why my fetus didn’t have an X chromosome. Please fly, I thought, the plea in my head louder than my daughter’s coaxing as she waved the yellow flower over the habitat, the top wide open.
Written in 2020