Recurrent pregnancy loss

Recurrent pregnancy loss is a defining part of Bernadette Fox’s early family life in Seattle: it repeatedly interrupts her hopes of having a child and of making a home, while Elgin Branch tries to support her through the losses. The history culminates in the birth of their daughter, Bee Branch, whose serious heart condition brings a new medical crisis to the family.

Background and course

After Bernadette and Elgin move to Seattle, Bernadette becomes pregnant and experiences a series of miscarriages. Elgin recalls the first loss amid a difficult pregnancy: Bernadette was eventually placed on bed rest, leaving the renovation of their Queen Anne home unfinished. They lived with leaks, drafts, and other signs of the house’s deterioration while prioritizing her health. Bernadette later gives the scale more precisely, recalling that she had four miscarriages after coming to Seattle.

The losses also shaped Bernadette’s plans for the dilapidated former girls’ reform school she had bought. She had intended to turn it into a home for herself, Elgin, and the child she expected to have. The building’s many restrictions appealed to her as a design challenge, but repeated pregnancies and their losses made that hoped-for future uncertain. The unfinished house therefore registers both a practical interruption to her architectural work and the collapse, repeated over time, of a family life she was trying to build.

Grief and support

Bernadette describes the losses as a source of continuing grief and self-reproach. She remembers telling Elgin that she was to blame; he answered that she was not. Elgin’s account similarly emphasizes that he was present and tried to reassure her. Their recollections frame the experience not as a simple source of marital division or unity, but as a strain each encountered differently: Bernadette’s attention turned toward the pregnancies and their outcomes, while Elgin describes responding with support.

Consequences for the family

When Bernadette finally carries a pregnancy to term, Bee is born prematurely with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Bee’s condition requires a series of operations, and Bernadette becomes deeply absorbed in her recovery. Elgin describes himself as working longer hours and treating the arrangement as a partnership in which Bernadette made decisions and he paid for them. The narrative thus connects recurrent loss to the family’s later medical ordeal without presenting Bee’s illness as equivalent to the miscarriages: it is a distinct crisis that redirects the couple’s attention and shapes their early experience of parenthood.