Six years ago I miscarried my 4th pregnancy. It was equal parts mercy and gore and only 10 months on the heels of deciding not to continue with my 3rd for fear that it would sever my already tender connection to my family. But whether loss comes by choice or chance, losing is still losing, and what you are left with in both instances is everything that you had before, just no baby, which was perhaps the only pure and easy part to begin with.
What my 4th pregnancy was teaching me was that I could follow my heart even when it clashed with its surroundings. I learned that my trust in love was bigger than my fear of rejection. I learned everything that I wasn’t strong enough to hold during my third when I was so scared of not being trusted by others that I forgot how to trust myself.
Miscarriage is different for everyone, so I have heard once I began to ask. Before asking there was really only silence. If you have lost a baby this way, you know. No one talks about the secret pain of a lonely mini labor that leads to a mini birth that is really a mini death. Small in stature alone. I had heard that sometimes it was just a blip, something that happened on the toilet before even being sure that there was something to lose. And that other times it was a bloody emergency that left unsupported was full of peril and risk. How odd in a way, because unsupported nonetheless.
I was the latter. So relieved to finally be moving through the motions of releasing what I already knew had stopped its living. I was ready to not hold on and also to find out what letting go could mean to me now. It was slow. So slow. Spotting for days. Followed by cramps on a crescendo of intensity over the course of a day and into the night until it was gone. Pushed from me in one big heave of rough and rugged longing. Except that it wasn’t gone. Not the blood anyway. My blood grew and grew and grew until I was dropping big grapefruit-sized blobs on the bathroom floor and my head was swimming and spinning and I was shaking Chris awake to tell him that I think we needed to go.
The kids were at gran’s which was a gift we hadn’t understood the magnitude of when we had asked for a few days at home alone, but the hospital was still almost an hour away and Chris was so scared the whole drive squeezing my leg and asking me to stay awake. I sat still as stone, slightly reclined and trying to keep all of the blood inside of me that for hours I had been trying to press loose.
The hospital was fine. Cold, so cold, yet with the care and comfort that we both needed. When it was all over and the d+c had cleared out the little tiny pieces of placenta that my uterus was so tired of squeezing and the anesthesiologist had treated me just right, we lay in a hospital bed trading off the calf massagers squeeze of our legs and feeling peace and peace and peace and so very empty.
It was a bright sunny spring morning, Cinco De Mayo. We left and I sat in the car parked next to the lake while Chris ran to get us creamy coffees and I called my mom to ask her to bring the kids home. They were 9 and 6. Little and not little. And once they were home, we got on with it I suppose. Imperfectly. Whole in a way that carries its own scars.
I worked on those scars for years in the care of a friend and acupuncturist who shared her plant wisdom to help me rid my tissues of the issues. It was hard. And it was also so regular. I flip-flopped over the years to every extreme and all points in between always considering and reconsidering what the marriage of satisfaction and gratitude and loss and longing could be inside of me. And obviously, there is never a fixed point for feelings like this to land and I am learning that that may be the function of forgiveness.
My blood came back quick on the heels of both of my losses. Within 3 weeks, I was bleeding again and trying to understand how I could have possibly ovulated between then and now. How could that even be a possibility? But my blood came back, as if to say: keep going. life keeps going and you are so much stronger than you know. and there is more in store for you yet.
I am lucky because my baby arrived in spite of my regret and my betrayal and my grief. After years of full-court negotiations between my ears, but still, eventually he came. Which is an easy and obvious resolution that lessens the grip of so much of what came before. Sometimes I try to superimpose Wilfred’s face and being in my mind’s eye memory of the feeling of my other two. Initially, it works and everything is abated but if I loosen my hold in any way the image slips and he is not them at all and they are not him. Never were and never could be which is its own kind of rightness now.
So every Spring now is marked by this memory of a long Season of Loss and Longing. And each spring I am remembering to make space in my heart for that which I cannot hold in my arms and reminding myself that I have never been and will never be any One Way. Never clean, never neat, never easily understandable. And yet something that I can love. And forgive again.