I Had a Miscarriage by Jessica Zucker (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

my breath—as I intently listened while she spoke about the version of motherhood she traverses. As I drove home in the rain that evening, I worked to understand what my body was attempting to communicate to me about the feelings that were elicited in that particular session. My mind fiddled as the windshield wipers sloshed to and fro. I was determined to figure this out, but ultimately couldn’t. Stumped, I slept on it. I’d felt that pang of envy in session, but wanted to understand its meaning, its roots, the nuance. Why, of all feelings, was this the one that landed in my lap while face-to-face with Sage?

It wasn’t until the following week, when Sage and I sat together once again, that it finally coalesced. She had access to so many rites and rituals—so many thoughtful, loving ways to honor her daughter’s brief life and the impact she’d made during it. Sage had access to a framework that outwardly legitimized her experience with life and death. She had her faith, her religious community huddled in close, a plot of land that she’ll visit until the end of time. She’d had friends and family surrounding her as her daughter was buried there. Flowers, and prayers, and tangible things. Things to have, and to hold, and to see, and to treasure, to prove that her daughter in fact made her way into this world, even if only without breath. It wasn’t until now that it dawned on me: I needed something more of Olive. For myself, for our family, and for her. Something more to normalize loss and its riotous aftermath. Listening to Sage ignited an untapped desire in me to create, to instate, and to demonstrate out loud that which was brewing inside. To represent in a meaningful way—through rites or rituals—the profundity of these liminal spaces.

The following week, I shared these reflections with Sage and had the chance to express how moved I was by the ways she mothered her daughter, and in so doing, the ways she mothered herself. And how she, perhaps, was mothering other loss parents who have yet to share with her that her acknowledgment of her daughter’s life was a silent acknowledgment of other babies lost to miscarriage or stillbirth too. We talked about the scarcity in our culture of rites of passage surrounding untimely death, and the isolation this begets. We spoke about motherhood in the absence of a baby and how invisible she feels in it, especially amid the countless women who have babbling babies in their arms; who have valid complaints about the utter exhaustion of parenthood—an experience those like Sage wish they could endure.

This version of motherhood goes widely recognized—a motherhood that is celebrated, adored, spoken about ad nauseam, rarely truly supported but nevertheless paid endless lip service—whereas the other version, the kind with no baby to show for it, is not so much. Sage spoke about wanting to feel legitimized in the mothering she does—recognized, acknowledged, appreciated, even. Her motherhood is work, too. Her motherhood is tiring in a whole different way than it is for those with littles running circles around them. And so, memorializing seems vital. Through it, we might not only buoy ourselves in the throes of grief, but these rituals might also invite others into the very essence of what it feels like to be a loss mom, empty arms and all.

Hearing Sage talk about her frequent trips to the cemetery—the hours spent reading nursery rhymes under a tall eucalyptus tree there on the dirt—and witnessing the pride she took in this encouraged me to think harder about grief traditions available to women. Our conversations got me thinking about our current cultural limitations when it comes to memorializing miscarriage, how these acts of mourning and honor may make those untouched by pregnancy and infant loss uncomfortable.

• • •

A couple of weeks after officially naming Olive, my son and I went on an overnight getaway during his spring break, with sand toys and his scooter in tow. We spent hours on the beach talking about how the Earth spins, how the sun rises and sets, how the water moves—the ebb and flow of it all. The mood was playful as we danced in the moist sand and the sun eventually tucked behind the mountains lining the Pacific coast. Listening to Liev’s lines of thinking as we skipped rocks felt like a meditation on the past, beckoning me to reflect on all that had happened since his birth. I knew this boy before my loss. He knew me before it too. And oh, how I’d changed.

Moments in which the previous me emerges leave me wishing I could somehow rewind—to go back to pre–grief laden times. To the mother I was before her demise. Unencumbered. As we readied to head back to our hotel room, he dug one last ditch in search of teeny sand crabs while I wrote Olive’s name in the sand. Fingers enlivened by etching each letter, I realized it was my first time writing her name. Olive. Within a moment, the tide washed her name away and off it went into the sea.

Woven into the fabric of our newly shaped family, Olive came and went instantly. But the length of one’s life does not dictate their impact. Brief stays can surely make themselves deeply felt, can’t they? A profound and mighty impression they do make. Writing her name there, in the Santa Barbara sand, felt significant. It felt weighty. In a way, it felt like she was there with us on that beach, the letters of her name standing in for the footprints that should have been.

I wanted more. Setting her name in the light-brown granules on the Pacific Coast made an impact. It shored me up. But the tides would wash them away, and it was then that it became clear: I wanted to memorialize and signify our loss in more ways than this.

• • •

Soon, I turned my sights on Japan. I’d read