Another round of moving into the new year in the aftermath of miscarriage. On Christmas Eve, I experienced my fourth pregnancy loss. I was farther along, so I actually saw it this time. The little baby form, wrapped inside its little placenta. Everything my body had been working on building so perfectly, so miraculously, cradled for weeks by our hope… was suddenly just there. Outside my body.
Your soul cracks open when you deliver a child – calling out, roaring out, your voice harmonizing with creation itself. Your endowment of power and ancient instinct kicking in so strongly you hardly recognize yourself. This is nothing like that. Except for the part where your soul cracks open and utters a sounds that is so unrecognizable, you scare yourself.
I couldn’t bear just throwing them away, so we started a fire in the back of our lot and burned them with a prayer that my husband had to speak because I was furious. We watched the fire while it snowed, and then went inside and set up the presents and packed stockings around the tree, writing a note in red flourished “Santa handwriting” and leaving a believable amount of crumbs behind on Santa’s plate. It was the strangest thing to do.
And now a week later, despite it all collapsing again, somehow it’s a new year. I also turn 33 today. I have loved my birthday – there was always something magical and renewing about starting my own year in sync with the rest of the world. But I’m just so solidly uninterested in fresh starts and new beginnings. I’m deeply confused, clinging to a shred of faith, trying to catch my breath, and praying that I can find the resolve to seek answers of many varieties.
There’s no pretty bow to wrap up this post. Not a ton of hope yet. I know it will come. I will choose it. But for now I will just move through one day at a time. I will drop the notion that my life and its timing needs to be anything other than what it is, right now:
A devastating Christmas.
A birthday of lovingly orchestrated numbing agents.
A less than Happy New Year.
And absolutely zero resolutions because I couldn’t give a
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In the meantime, Mary Oliver has the words.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver
