More than 4 years ago I wrote about what it was like trying to rebuild my life after a devastating miscarriage knocked me off my feet. I’ve revisited that idea here to give an update on what feels like a continual rebuilding and readjusting to a new life. You can listen to me read the essay here. It was inspired by Omid Safi’s poem “Other Worlds Await You.”

I’m not sure where I am any more. The landscape is familiar, but I feel slightly out of place. Am I wearing different lenses? Can I see more clearly now, or are things still out of focus? Sometimes I feel pulled sideways, as if I’m a child trying to walk a straight line after being spun around and around and around. The balance I felt a few years ago nags at me, taunts me. I wonder if it was an illusion. If I was deluded. I was on top of things back then. Or I thought I was. I felt fulfilled as a mother and as a writer. I was finding confidence in myself and my relationships. And I was pregnant with my 4th baby, aglow with anticipation and the hope of growing my family and my talents.

And then, both suddenly and slowly, that world ended.

Wipe your tears child

It’s not the end of the world.

It’s the end of a world.

I miscarried for the 4th time in mid-November. Some of my previous losses had been disappointing, some of them a bit of a relief as I had suspected from the beginning that things were not going well. But this one was different. This one was real, planned for, prayed for. I’d already held tight through weeks of nausea and exhaustion. I’d imagined our family of six walking, playing, jumping, skipping through the park together.

But I had also bit my tongue about the pregnancy just weeks before when my sister moved away from me and my family to a new life across the country. I hadn’t mentioned it to my best friend when she’d come to visit a week before that. So it was real, but not public. Real to me: a whole world I had created—was creating—me and the baby working together to make it happen.

Until one of us dropped out and left the other in a lurch. I begged off a writing assignment I had previously accepted, unable to think of anything but my emptiness. I lost the many trains of thought I was trying to follow into interesting and thoughtful essays. I would sit in front of a blank page and realize it was reflecting my mind and heart back at me. There was nothing there. Nothing to share. I had been a creator, I was creating, and then I wasn’t. Didn’t. Couldn’t. My body wasn’t growing and my mind shut down. Darkness.

It’s the end of the world 

you’ve known.

Other worlds await you.

Worlds you’ll inhabit.

Worlds you’ll create.

In the blank space, in the darkness, I searched for light and meaning. For something solid to hold onto—something I could grasp and grow from. At first the things I found were so small. I almost ignored them.  Like: washing the dishes is actually not part of a mom’s job description.

At first, leaving the dishes felt like an act of omission, of depression, neglectful. I was too tired to do them and I wanted to be by myself. But doing dishes also gave me too much time by myself, in my cavernous empty head. I would end up sobbing into the suds. Over time, the neglect in that small corner of the garden made way for new blooms. A full sink opened me up MarioKart races and extended story times, to lounging on the bean bag chairs with a book or watching a 2-year-old jump off a box for the 8th time in a row. Full sink, full heart.

More importantly, I found silence in the darkness and heard in it an invitation. That first morning after the loss, when I woke up in the world where I would not have a baby in June, I sobbed while I made breakfast, while I got my boys ready for school, while I said goodbye to them and sent them to their day. They didn’t ask what was wrong. They looked concerned, confused, unsure. I thought at first they didn’t care, but realized they just didn’t know, didn’t have the words or the permission to ask. And I realized I had to give them that. So we talked. We talked a lot over the year about these things. About hard things. About babies and miscarriage and birth and death. It is not always comfortable. It is not always easy. I still struggle to find the words to give them, I don’t always invite them to ask. But we try and we keep at it.

I hope that this lets my kids see me as a person who knows things and feels things. More importantly, I hope that when they are in the darkness and the silence is overwhelming, they can hear my voice and we can find each other there, and talk to fill the silence and find the light.

Mourn now,

my child

Mourn this world

coming to an end.

Grieve the dreams 

that will never come to be.

The world I had in my head, the one that was flourishing when my baby was growing and was flushed out with so much blood and tissue, still haunts me. It is the ghost ship I see sailing by when I talk about the spacing between my kids— the larger gap between my 3rd and 4th, where that baby would have been. Or when I think about my adolescent dreams for a family—the dreams that were so young and naive, and yet stamped so deeply into my soul.

I have worried about my kids, about their emotional closeness as much as I have the months that separate their birthdays. I have worried about divisions in the family, about us and them, boys versus girls. I grieve and hope. I look for the love, for the ways they help each other, for the growing together. I try to notice, and what I notice I try to nurture. They will be okay, I say. They didn’t have the picture I had, they didn’t see the world I had created in my mind. They don’t know this isn’t how it was supposed to be.

How I thought it was supposed to be.

And if what I thought was supposed to be never is? What if the person I thought I was isn’t me?

My perceptions have shifted and sometimes I see things reflected and refracted back at me in odd ways. Did you have any losses before this baby? I thought you might be the one to talk to about this . . . . I know you understand this better than anyone. 

Am I that person? Who knows and hears and understands? About pregnancy and infertility and loss and the deep disappointments that haunt so many women? Am I? I guess I must be. I guess that is me. I guess I know why they are saying that. But that isn’t who I wanted to be, who I thought I was. I’m not used to being who I am. I supposed I will grow into it. I will learn to be the one who knows and understands. Who says the right things and knows which turn to take and that you should be careful with that curve because it is a bit rough sometimes.

I thought I would move past it and that I would be who I was before. Everyone would forget that little stumble I took and I would be the same old me I always was. Not the one who fell apart, because I am back together again.

But I am not back together again. Not the same old me. I may not still be falling apart but I am still being rebuilt. I hope stronger this time. Always stronger.

After every apocalypse 

you will rise again, 

my child. 

One world ends, 

another begins.

Perhaps I am a little too anxious for the rebuilding. For getting back “on track.” I continue to look for growth, for change, for an opportunity to slip back into the place I used to be. To correct the shift and resume that comfortable balance. But I can’t unseen what I have seen and I can’t go back where I was. I don’t fit in that track any more and even I must admit it hurts a little to try. This new world is much bigger than the other one. There are more possibilities, it seems, more terrain to cover. Or that is the way it seems. Maybe it is simply that I see more. I feel more. I know more.

It is beautiful, this new world. Unfamiliar and a little uncomfortable, but beautiful. It moves at a different pace. I see things differently, with colors I am still learning the names of. I feel stronger in some places, more sure of myself.

In other places I’m. . . weaker. Or maybe it’s more sensitive. More open—willing to be taught and to learn. More willing to be wrong. It feels a little risky, just to be and to not have a plan, but that is a part of me I am trying to get to know better. The part that doesn’t know.

After this year of sadness

there’ll be an ascension,

the joy tomorrow

is already inside

the grief today.

There is a new balance to strive for. The knowing and the not knowing. The being the one who knows and understands, while also being open to not understanding. Who wants to create, but wants, also, to let things grow. In their own way, in their own time. I will see and live and love. I will rest and I will work. I will balance and I will fall. I will talk and I will listen. And then, I will write.

Other worlds await. 

Worlds that you’ll make

with your hands.

Dreams of seeds 

watered with the now tears.