The Gift of Life Interrupted
How my pregnancy loss continues to teach me about being alive…
When that little heart stopped beating at ten weeks, I was unprepared for how deeply devastated I would feel. I didn’t think my drained soul could reach any lower. After years of my husband and I trying to become pregnant, I was already pretty despondent.
It had been years of doctors and their predictions, blood draws, changing numbers, tests, and calculations.
It was all so painful and provoking, utterly exhausting.
When we finally were able to become pregnant through IVF, I could barely exhale without feeling the precariousness of it all. And when that heart stopped, time froze, and color vanished. My heartbeat slowed, and I just withdrew from the world.
I had come undone, deposited on the shore after treading water endlessly. My weary body carried in by the persistent waves.
For the first time, I came into contact with sorrow from an unexpected place. I realized then that I had so many unnamed expectations of my body. I expected my body to give me what I wanted. To perform its function and deliver my desires no matter the cost. I felt so betrayed by this body that wouldn’t just comply. I felt so failed at the meaning I had attached to womanhood. I felt so angry at life for not choosing to grow in me. I became convinced I was broken, unable to nourish or sustain. I became aware of how convinced I had been that life was mine to create or control.
This life-arresting event led to my slow germination. I would begin the passage by surrendering all I had been collecting in me about being ME.
I would begin to see all the ways I was not truly inhabiting my being.
I would begin to acknowledge the adversarial relationship I had with my body. To notice the anger I had towards this physical vessel and relate to the hurt, the many layers of protection, and the endless knots of pain.
With soul-wrenching awareness, I would begin to recognize how I was making demands of my body as if it was a machine I could program to deliver optimal results.
My grief, anger, and deep despair brought me back into my body; I could no longer pretend she didn’t exist. I was required to attend to her from her pain, the pain of loss, and being forgotten.
I was invited to live in it, listen to it, and learn to return to it with love.
There can be so many moments that break us open; often, it is in these moments that we truly awaken. Through the ache, we find the path to growing into a relationship with our whole self.
The path of wanting to mother taught me to mother myself. I was given a chance to be newly born when that heartbeat stopped weeks later. That little life inspired me to stop, feel, grieve, re-form, re-conceive, and remember myself.
I continue to learn from this little life, so much so that in my present evolution, while working with Ms. Ginny Nadler, author of Spiritual Anatomy: Realigning Body and Soul, I wrote, read, and recorded the following poem.
I share it here with you as a reminder that love asks us to show up with all our missed-formed, missed-carried, missed-tuned, and missed-aligned parts so that she can wrap us in light and carry us back to the very beginning before anything was missed, before we got lost.
That Heart
I lay down
and already I feel the unevenness of it all
I’ve been feeling a center parting ache
that requests attention
a midline of energy caught in a webbing that binds and does not breathe
I am gathering the feathers of my fledgling self and feeling the way her wings are reshaping
I feel the point from which they emerge
right behind my heart
Oh the heart beat
the first one I heard that day
the one I saw on the screen
in a white room with no colors
That heart beat was everything in one pulse
Bah boom bah boom
I lit up with light at that sound
for the heart IS this light
the divine’s voice
speaking of infinite possibilities
It is the first physical functional collection of tissues announcing potential and possibility
Everything can be here all at once
in the echoes of those opening and closing valves is a gateway that we can travel through
In the space between bah and boom
that pulse, that life, was a gift
She reminded me that the story of impossibility was nulled in the moment
that the heart was birthed from the light
and when that pulse stopped
my story picked up where it had left off
the next chapter began to write itself
from this point of view
the choice to close the door to the infinite
was a choice I needed then
But it hurts too much to shrink now
to chose the same old story
To warp my growing wings
or punish my boundless unfolding
For when I give way for this light to fill me everything tastes better and smells riper
I see colors between the colors and weave tapestries from discarded threads
I won’t war with my being ness anymore
for I know now there is no other to destroy here - we don’t have to divide me down the center anymore for we are and always were on the same side
