As an eternal student of this thing called life, I have been reflecting on what I’ve learned within the months and seasons, of this year. While I look forward to the day when I can record all of the beautiful life skills I’ve learned- this, dear friend, is not that time…
Instead, here’s what I’ve learned this fall-
Humanity shows itself, in both good and bad ways, at the most non-ideal of times. During the election, whichever “side” you were on, it was clear to see terrible behavior coming out. The stress has been increasingly higher, and the intensity of such a heated political moment did not do us any favors.
On that note- politicizing LIFE and humanity issues is something I’ve learned I do not tolerate.
The 2020 “time out” intentional holidays continue to be special. Though this year has been one of revelation regarding true accounts of history, (hard-hitting our misconceptions of Thanksgiving, deservedly) I’ve valued the opportunity to reframe my thoughts and priorities…
Crazy risks usually pay off. It may wind up looking nothing like you’d thought, but there is almost always a pay off.
Trying something new, while upholding beloved traditions is ok.
Anytime someone posts on Twitter/Instagram/Facebook calling for people to share their “handles” for a follow/support/connection/____________, the majority of people who post will be the “collectors”. (you know… The ones who have a huge volume of followers while following hardly anyone.) Listen, it’s so validating to grow our platforms, but you DO NOT have to do it like the ego-maniacs of social media. CONNECTION is always the right answer.
It is ok to say “no” and draw a line, even when it feels like everything fits and something should be “right” right now…
There will always be unexpected reminders of things you’ve lost and heartbreaks you’ve had. We can’t hurt-proof our lives. It’s ok. Give the reminder love, say a prayer for them (if it’s a person) and then let go again… Sometimes you might have to let go a billion times. It’s ok. Remember: the things in life that are meant for you- the people in this life who truly love you- they’re still here.
Supermarket pie will probably always be the wrong choice.
Sometimes you just need to throw down a nacho bar and have close friends (who are healthy and safe, of course) over for an impromptu Nacho-Movie night.
BONUS: I have experienced, first hand, the beauty of a supportive writing community! I love my writing squad and learn from them DAILY!
Extra bonus: in case you missed it, I condensed strategies from my client work into a holiday reframing/coping/survival book course! You can get it here!
I was twenty-four years and seven months old, to the day.
The doctor who had saved me with a shot six long years before had been the one to tell me, with saucer wide eyes, that my uterus had been the biggest mangled mess he’d ever seen.
That poor piece of me had survived through so much brutality. I was sad that she was gone, but also relieved too.
My eighty-nine year old soul was tired…
The thought of never having to wonder if I was pregnant, or if I’d lose a baby again, was something only alive in my past.
Seven little babies who would never know me, my arms or the beautiful bits of this world, had become in that pocket of me. The excruciating loss of those seven little heartbeats would forever be the ugliest bits of this life, for me.
I had a scheduled procedure which led to an emergency hysterectomy. In the course of one day my body experienced the equivalence of a catastrophic train wreck in my endocrine system. As I lay, half drugged, in my hospital bed, the doctor tried explaining to depth of it all to me.
I could barely comprehend the reality that my uterus was gone, much less the information about my last ovary being taken too, the discovery of cancer cells, screenings for the rest of my life, or the hellish journey that lay ahead due to the sudden halt in my hormonal system.
My second day in the hospital resulted in the worst migraine I have ever known. While I screamed and throbbed, begging for help, the nurses had to restrain me because I had an abdomen full of sutures and staples that needed care. When I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t help my head pain, they expressed their matter-of-fact answers about this being what happens when a woman loses her ovaries before her body is ready.
I was warned nearly every time that a doctor or nurse visited my bedside, that I was at an incredibly high risk of breast cancer now. I was also being automatically put on HRT (hormone replacement therapy), which they cautioned would increase my odds of breast cancer significantly.
“It’s a little scary that you’re so young and you’ll take it for so long. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared for you.” one nurse muttered, one morning as she took my vitals and changed my bandages.
In so many ways it seemed like there was a community opinion that I were there as some consequential result of a horrible decision I’d made.
There had been so many hospitals, so many nurses and doctors, over those years. SO MUCH negative, so much pain, and so little compassion… When I was wheeled to the car, the day I was discharged, I was filled with relief at the closing of that horrible chapter.
It has been twenty long years since that day. Two decades of life and loss, love and light. So much time has passed, so many things forgotten, and yet…
And yet, I can travel back to those moments where my aching heart fragmented over and over again, in an instant. Trauma is like that.
I could be both the woman who had lost her babies, and the woman who flourished beyond those chapters of my life. It is possible to be both, because I am. Remembering the big, dark things, is as important as reminiscing about the brightly lit ones too. Life is a balance. Acknowledging the hard does not mean we won’t move on.
“Getting over” a horror, is not healthy. Let’s stop expecting that of grieving mothers. Those babies, though the other side of heaven now, are just as much a part of me, my story, my purpose and my every breath, as anyone’s babies are.
~~~
October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. Miscarriage and pregnancy loss is something seen as unacceptable to talk about, by more people than not. The silence translates a disregard and implies that we should know how to deal with this trauma… Cliche’ sentiments tell us that this loss of life was meant to be.
It is imperative for women’s emotional health and well being, that we share our stories and normalize our experiences with loss. It doesn’t matter if the mother was a teenager, or forty-two, loss is LOSS. There is grief and trauma and so many things that are so misunderstood and, tragically, so many things that women are encouraged to bury and ignore.
This month I have shared my stories here, and others via the podcast and social media. I will use my voice and platform to spotlight resources. I will adamantly state, for the record though, that I believe the most powerful resource we have is that of connecting and empathizing with others… Through one of the most isolating and lonely experiences in this life, I want to be a voice that tells others this: YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
It is not that I didn’t fight to get pregnant, and once I did, to stay pregnant. I did the holistic creams on the belly, I drank the raspberry leaf tea. There wasn’t an internet in those days, so whenever some well meaning person had some “advice”, I was willing to take it.
When I found out I was pregnant, for the third time, I was surrounded by all of the people who chimed in with third times a charm, as if this was some fun game I had been playing. I was working the night shift, in those days, at a physically taxing job. Immediately my doctor (new to me, because I was always on the lookout for a professional who seemed to care) notified them I was a “high risk” pregnancy, and while it seemed my employers were very irritated, they were flexible. It was only three short weeks of their begrudging accommodations, before a 3 a.m. call for an ambulance had me on the way to the hospital. The pain and the bleeding had ripped through me, from side to side, like the slash of a sword.
I remember I felt all at once devastated and matter of fact, as though I’d been holding my breath and waiting for this to happen.
I lost my baby. I was just under 8 weeks along, and there were odd complications so I was put on 7-10 days of bedrest, determined by pain and bleeding. Ultrasounds were less frequent, I guess, because once it was confirmed that I was miscarrying, the hospital didn’t feel one was needed.
We passed the days reading cheesy romance novels allowed, in bed. (well, Chw still went to work, but when he wasn’t working…) Somewhere along the 6th day, I received a registered letter (which I had to get up from bed to answer the door for, which felt like the icing on the cake of that situation) that I’d been fired from my job. While it wasn’t a loss to the caliber our baby had been, we needed the money and panic set in.
I never did like pulling up to that production plant, after that, which was something we’ve had to do fairly regularly as my mother-in-law still works there.
The ambulance ride had ushered us into the era that felt so much like a numbed out version of shampooing. Scrub, rinse, repeat… Scrub, rinse, repeat…
My fourth pregnancy, sometime later, had me miscarrying at 7 weeks, only to learn three weeks later that I’d been pregnant with twins and one had survived. This sweet little survivor became known as our miracle. It was hard not to feel a shift in the universe with this plot twist. I was put on bedrest and I was determined to make “this one stick”, but at 15 weeks, I was once again in the hospital saying goodbye.
Throughout the duration of both of my following pregnancy losses, I remember very little. It seemed I’d grown so skilled at the art of miscarriage that I went about it completely blank. I remember settling for a deli job close to home, and a lot of tension because my husband’s employer threatened his job often due to the missed time he’d had, from ER visits and my hospitalizations. He took that frustration out on me, which is valid. We were young. By the time we lost our seventh baby (6th actual pregnancy), he was done. His biggest reason was grief at work. I was not done. My biggest reason was my achingly empty arms.
Some people mean well, with the words they give the grieving. Some people don’t stop and think about what comes out of their mouths at all. In the five years that felt literally defined by struggle and loss, I had a lot of such words.
One time, flipping through the channels, late at night, I caught a seen from a horror movie. The face of a character morphed into this terrifying demonic being. I knew nothing about the context. I wasn’t even one to stay away from scary movies. Even so, decades later, that face will still randomly pop into my vision, and I hate it. This is similar to the ways those words stitch themselves into our souls. I hate them. I don’t cling to them, but forever they are there, reminding me.
Reminding me of my failure as a woman…
Questioning if I’m even a woman, since I can’t do the one thing women were made to do.
Highlighting my flaws, and how God, or even those precious little babies, chose to leave me.
I’m older now. I know better. I know just what to do with those words (and frankly, their speakers) but this doesn’t take away the instant power to knock me down, that the wordy memories have…
This week, on the Rainy Day Collective Podcast, guest Ashley Cherie is here sharing her story with loss and how she has used that pain in incredible ways, to restore rightness to the world around her. Her story is so inspiring and brave, and I hope you’ll check it out!
~~~
October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. Miscarriage and pregnancy loss is something seen as unacceptable to talk about, by more people than not. The silence translates a disregard and implies that we should know how to deal with this trauma… Cliche’ sentiments tell us that this loss of life was meant to be.
It is imperative for women’s emotional health and well being, that we share our stories and normalize our experiences with loss. It doesn’t matter if the mother was a teenager, or forty-two, loss is LOSS. There is grief and trauma and so many things that are so misunderstood and, tragically, so many things that women are encouraged to bury and ignore.
This month I will be sharing my stories here, and others via the podcast and social media. I will use my voice and platform to spotlight resources. I will adamantly state, for the record though, that I believe the most powerful resource we have is that of connecting and empathizing with others… Through one of the most isolating and lonely experiences in this life, I want to be a voice that tells others this: YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
When I was seventeen years old, I was unmarried and terrified while wearing only a hospital gown in an early morning emergency room. I had woken up to a pooling of blood, on a friend’s couch, and assured that this was something a pregnant girl did not want to experience.
Prior to that morning, I had learned all sorts of things about being pregnant, and a woman, that I hadn’t known. I hadn’t known that my body needed sleep, or that I shouldn’t lift anything heavy, or that I should be drinking plenty of water… I learned these things from the parents of friends, who spoke them to me as if they were common sense. I don’t blame them really.
I was a child.
A child, growing a child, in my body.
And so, when I awoke, in pain, to bleeding, it was a 21 year old guy who told me that was a bad thing. I hadn’t known.
Terrified and young, in my very first emergency room, where nurses and aides buzzed around, not attempting to hide their disdain at my situation- I was a mess. I suspected the bleeding meant something could be wrong with my baby. I tried asking, but the worker bees simply ignored my questions and my fears. At times they would respond with their own questions like “where is your mother?” and “how will you be paying if you don’t have insurance?”
And my answers only left them judging me more.
The doctor who told me that I was experiencing a spontaneous abortion wore mismatched socks, smelled of stale coffee and reeked of the very awkward history we had, though of course he didn’t remember me. When I tried to use my voice to tell him I did not want an abortion, he and his nurse found me not worth the time an explanation would take.
For fourteen days I had daily trips to ER’s, to ultrasound appointments, to lots of waiting and bleeding, and pain and not being worth the time explanations could take…
For fourteen days I saw dozens of professionals instructing me to “come back” if this happened, or if that happened… And for fourteen days, terrified, confused and alone, I laid on a sofa bed and prayed I would bleed to death.
I had quilted together that I was miscarrying my heartbeatless baby, but that no one knew when the actual event would occur. I had been told by countless people that:
I was too young to be a mother.
I had no business being pregnant.
I was way out of my element.
I had been careless.
God was so disappointed in me.
I deserved what I was going through.
Amidst it all, literally starving and so hopeless about a future beyond that borrowed sofa bed, it took a former high school friend bringing me groceries to understand that kindness could still exist.
On the thirteenth day, my ER trip had a tennis ball clot fall from me as I stood to put on a gown. The nurse was annoyed and quickly pointed out that there was no tissue inside, so I really needed to pass the fetus quickly before things got worse. Despite her frustration at my inability to do such a simple task, the only emotion I saw from her was her annoyance at the boy loudly flirting with the nurse outside of the exam curtain.
That boy was my boyfriend.
On the evening of the fourteenth day, I lay on that sofa bed cramping and clotting and finalizing the horror of miss-carrying my baby. My boyfriend was upstairs with friends watching a movie about a plane crash, where survivors ate people. I prayed like I had never prayed before, that God would end my breathing.
Aside from that gift of a grocery delivery, I saw no kindness. Not from doctors, nurses, social workers, adults in my life or my baby’s dad. There were no phone calls to see how I was doing, and no “I’m so sorry” that my heart had shattered into an uncountable number of pieces…
It was clear that I was shameful.
The voice from the back of my mind told me this was true. It suggested my baby had gotten to know the mess of a mother she’d have, and she’d chosen to die instead. When I dared question the validity of those words aloud, no one really disputed them.
October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. Miscarriage and pregnancy loss is something seen as unacceptable to talk about, by more people than not. The silence translates a disregard and implies that we should know how to deal with this trauma… Cliche’ sentiments tell us that this loss of life was meant to be.
It is imperative for women’s emotional health and well being, that we share our stories and normalize our experiences with loss. It doesn’t matter if the mother was a teenager, or forty-two, loss is LOSS. There is grief and trauma and so many things that are so misunderstood and, tragically, so many things that women are encouraged to bury and ignore.
This month I will be sharing my stories here, and others via the podcast and social media. I will use my voice and platform to spotlight resources. I will adamantly state, for the record though, that I believe the most powerful resource we have is that of connecting and empathizing with others… Through one of the most isolating and lonely experiences in this life, I want to be a voice that tells others this: YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
The afternoon sun poured through the windows. The breeze carried with it the songs of the birds, high in treetops.
Full disclose, though I sat curled up with a book, a notebook and a pen, in the coziest chair my sunporch holds, this is not that porch.
I absolutely adore this image from Arno Smit. I would be in heaven over a room like this, but my husband, ever the engineer, would have none of it. He’d note the plank floor and old everything. It would never fly.
That’s ok, though, because I love this space of ours.
It was this very sunroom that sold us on this cottage, in the first place.
I imagined a napping daybed, for all of those glorious naps that I do not take.
I imagined late nights of cocktails and cards, which this room has proven absolutely perfect for. Beneath its dim ethereal of twinkly globe lights, many a beautiful bottles of wine have been shared over life sustaining conversations. Tears have been shed, cathartically; stories told, life lived.
It is the ghosts of these moments, the ticking away of the seven hundred and thirty-eight days that this room has been our home. We may grumble over the impossibly tiny kitchen, or the minuscule bathroom, but each whine ends in resolution when one or both of us sighs the sunroom…
The jars of tea brewed in this room, the books read, the chapters written… SO MUCH life.
Simply put, it’s a painted concrete slab of floor, surrounded by uninsulated window screens. It isn’t really wired for electricity, as it was a much-later-after thought to the home itself. Even so, realtor photos showed us potential. We looked at the space and knew the life it could live.
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