It’s been seven months since I published a blog post. It’s been four months since I wrote on my thought processes and coping skills I had been working on, two months since I posted a video. For so much of this time, my mind was consumed by inspecting and rewiring all of my previous patterns and mentally cleaning house. I was laser focused on creating a healthy relationship with my new partner and I was over the moon for 90% of it.
I went back and read some of the drafts I wrote during the spring and early summer that I had decided not to post. In the end, joy is just not that interesting to write about. It was more interesting to be out there living it and experiencing everything this new life I found had to offer. The majority of writing I did in this time was personal, private poems and love letters to my partner. I have a notebook that’s filled with them, it would probably make a cynic vomit.
Of course, there were hard times as we both tried to work through our pasts together. There were even harder ones when we took on things outside of our control like mental health and legal issues I was still dealing with from before. We would come back stronger, more iron clad each time. Until we didn’t.
There used to be times I would be driving to work and I would weep because I was so grateful for what we created.
On August 11th, we found out we had created even more. Two lines on the seventh test I took (I had convinced myself I was taking them wrong) confirmed that I was pregnant. My boyfriend was at the track racing and since patience has never been my virtue, I rushed over and said, “So guess who’s going to be a dad?”
Pregnancy is bizarre. The next morning, after the news had set in, it was like a switch had flipped. I felt like an entirely different person, I was consumed by this little thing that had taken up residence in me. My baby. I honestly just couldnt fucking believe it. I was going to be someone’s Mom? Me? Who the fuck decided that? (Me and my boyfriend, but I digress.)
But it was true, and I knew it because I kept taking tests much to my boyfriend’s amusement. We tentatively told my mom, his dad and his sister. My best friend. My aunt. I was nervous at first, I prefaced it with “I know it’s early.. but I just know it’ll be okay. It has to be.” I had decided, if it went wrong, I would rather tell people that I had miscarried than have to tell the people closest to me about how I was pregnant.. but then I wasn’t. I knew myself well enough that I wouldn’t, I would isolate and not tell anyone at all.
There’s so much weird stigma around telling people you’re pregnant early. It’s bizarrely taboo, even though miscarriages are so common. One in four they constantly remind you. I tried not to get too excited because of this. But the second week after I found out, I said to hell with it. I was going to be a Mom! Me! I deserved it, I had worked so hard. I had put so much effort into my healing and to get where I was and there was nobody better suited to be parents than my partner and I.
I downloaded every app, I tracked my little tiny baby’s growth every day. I drew pictures on the dry erase board on our fridge of a ladybug, then a bee. I marveled at the size of blueberries, raspberries. I made a list of baby names, I researched parenting styles, I made a registry. I spent hours trying to decide how we would rearrange our house to make everything fit. I bought a crib. I remember my boyfriend asking, “I hate to say this, but do you think it’s to soon?” And I assured him there was no way it would go that way but even if it did, there was a large return window.
My partner and I were struggling during this time, it seems inauthentic not to mention it. We had been struggling largely with mental health issues right before we found out and that hadn’t magically gone away. But my entire mindset had changed, I was focused on the big picture. I knew we had nine months to process what we needed to and I felt like the universe had front loaded that in the beginning. Events that had happened forced me to confront emotions I had buried deep towards my fathers and their deaths way deeper than I ever had before. It was excruciating but it was necessary. He was forced to confront his mental health issues even deeper. ‘We have time,’ I kept repeating to myself in the harder moments, “We have time.”
I said to my boyfriend on the day of the ultrasound (the day I had been counting down to for four weeks and one day!) ‘I have full confidence that everything happens as it should. We are healing what we need to heal before the baby comes, we have time.’
Before we got out of the car, I took his hand and I said, ‘Let’s go see our baby.’
I remember laying back on the ultrasound table and feeling oddly numb for a moment I was so excited for. I remember the tech saying, “There’s the yolk sac” and then she didn’t say anything else. I remember the screen flashing ‘6 wks 2 days’. I remember thinking, “There should be more than that there.. it should be measuring bigger than that.’ I remember the tech finishing the ultrasound and saying, ‘We didn’t see any cardiac activity, you’ll have to come back next week to recheck.’
We left the doctor’s office in silence. I know we talked about other things, did other things, but I don’t remember what. I remember researching any possible outcome from what he had seen. It all pointed to the same thing, this pregnancy was not viable. I remember waking up that night at two am, the shock finally wearing off, clutching my stomach sobbing and begging the baby to grow, willing it’s heart to beat with all of my energy. I remember begging it to come back, ‘Please, please, don’t leave me.’
’Everything happens as it should,’ I had said that day. Fuck you! I don’t know shit about fuck, obviously! I desperately tried to take it back. This is not how it should happen!
We went for a second opinion at a different office. The baby measured even smaller. I knew then, it was over. I didn’t need the next appointment to know where it was headed. I never started bleeding but I woke up that Thursday and I just didnt feel pregnant anymore. It felt like a fever dream, a cruel trick my brain and hormones had played on me. A mean spirited joke that the universe gave me just to rip it away to prove that I was unworthy of ever truly getting what I desperately wanted.
My boyfriend and I’s relationship deteriorated even further. The loss of the baby ripped us apart at the seams, revealing our ugliest selves. He lashed out and I retreated inward, we had become unrecognizable from the people we started as. We destroyed everything we had worked so hard on in a matter of days. Even so, the night before the surgery, I sat in our garage and I told the baby everything about him, how good and kind he was. How he wrote ‘daddy loves you’ next to every dry erase doodle on our fridge.
I started sobbing as I was wheeled back, I sobbed as they put the oxygen mask on me and told me to take deep breaths, the woman who was with me trying to soothe me with kind eyes and rubbing my arm. Right before I went under I thought to my baby in the last moment it was with me, ‘I am so so sorry.’
I woke up in the dark, alone, curled into myself on my side and my first thought was how the baby, although no longer living or growing, was gone. It was no longer with me and I felt like it had taken everything with it. The life we had built, our dreams and hopes for the future. The shiny new life I had rebuilt out of the ashes of before, it all smoldered again. It was packed up in boxes in the house I had called our home. I left with less than I came with.
I used to feel like my new life was surreal, technicolor and bright. Exciting and healing, the safety I felt in it was invaluable. It had all happened as it should. Now, in a different house and alone, how could I have ever believed that? How could I have let myself fall so far? How could I have been so stupid? How could I have let myself live so big knowing that it could still crash and burn?
I feel like Icarus. I flew too close to the sun.
But why shouldn’t we fly as close to the sun as we can? That’s what I had fought for before, right? Before it all went wrong? A life where I could live as big as I wanted, give and receive love without fear, without withholding. A life where I could laugh and be present in in that moment, not feel separate and foreign. A life where I could trust my partner with my joy and my tears, especially the tears. I had almost gotten there, I had! It just went sideways. But why? How? How do I ever get back up again? I already cataloged my story of getting back up, god damnit! Why the fuck did I have to do it again?
I swear there was a moment I wanted to burn the whole world to the ground and scream, “When the fuck do I get a win, for fucks sake?!”
I returned the crib, the clothes I had bought to accommodate my body that changed overnight. I did it silently without letting any thoughts creep in. I unpacked and hid the books I bought on child development in a cabinet I will never have to open. I hid the little baby shoes my best friend brought me in another. I scrolled my phone endlessly, deleting apps and unsubscribing from promotional baby emails. If I stop moving and am unoccupied, I am back in the operating room with tears streaming down my face.
I loved that baby more than I could have ever imagined and it was gone six weeks later. They tell you not to get too invested, to guard your heart. They borderline shame you for it and I guess this is the reason why.
But you know what, fuck that. Fly too close to the sun. There was no cushioning that grief from the second I saw those two lines. There was no going back, just as there’s no going back now. I am grateful, I suppose, that we got the time we did.
It may not seem real now, but it was. It was real to me as I sat in what was my back yard at the time during the golden hour in the morning and dreamed of sitting in the same spot a year later with a chubby little four month old baby. It was real when I tilted my face up to the warmth, one hand on my belly, and thought, “This is what it was all for.” It was real when I dreamed of seeing my boyfriend become a dad, something I couldn’t imagine loving him more for. It was real when it brought us together and it was real when it tore us apart, choking on our own grief and too far gone to save the other.
I said when I started this blog I would write about my experiences so that someone out there might read them and feel less alone. I will say, not much has made me feel less alone through this and statistically one in four of you has felt the same. I hope that if you are reading this and you have been here or currently are, that you get a second chance, if you want it. I know that the next time will not be as innocent and that there will be an undercurrent of fear. I have faith in you, for what it’s worth. We are always stronger than we think.
In the throes of it all now, I write this simply as a cathartic release. A love letter to a life that was very real to me, to us. I hope that soul I carried for nine weeks, as big and as real as my own, comes back one day. When they are ready and so are we.
I have written most of this blog on love in all forms, mainly on the pain that comes with it. This love was different from anything I’d ever known and losing it was even more so. It’s wild, isn’t it, the spectrum of joy and grief that comes from allowing yourself to love and experience love in all forms?
But as they say, I’d rather have loved and lost than never have loved at all.
I’ll keep flying too close to the sun. We have time.
