Alive on (Bereaved) Mother’s Day

After spending months looking for a way to memorialize the daughter we lost in March last year, I finally found a small gold bracelet linked together by six aquamarine stones. It arrived this week, along with another item: a small gray and white blanket with rabbits printed on it.

I was eager to show the bracelet to my husband, but the blanket made me pause.

I was ashamed to admit that I needed something to hold closely when I’m missing both my girls: the one we lost in March and the other we lost in December. When I miss them, my chest tightens and sometimes I cry with a groaning sound that—I’m embarrassed to admit—sounds like a whale coming up from my stomach.

These days things aren’t quite so consistently difficult, but they were for so very long. 

When you’re a stranger to yourself 

For the last year I have felt nothing like myself. It’s not enough to have to heal physically after losing a child, but I was also followed by debilitating messages from grief and depression.

When we got pregnant the first time, I had negotiated my life to a place where I could sustain work as a freelancer writer and marketer, prepare for our new baby and transition to working mom status. This alone took a lot of work on my part; initially the idea of getting pregnant was enough to send me into a body trauma tailspin followed by eight months of EMDR.

Then once we got pregnant, it was really tough; I was physically and mentally volcanic. I sought help from my therapist and my doctor and held onto hope that there was nothing to be too worried about, even though I had been bleeding since week 9 of my pregnancy.

Everything was beyond our control, and when I was told I’d need emergency surgery at week 20 of the pregnancy—two weeks before viability—everything went quiet inside me.

It felt like the tide rolled over on itself a hundred times, never to return to the shore.

I leaned on my husband, our families, our friends and concepts about transformation: that nothing is really ever lost, but rather, it is transformed into something new. I imagined our girl had now completed her 20-week mission with me and was now flying somewhere new, perhaps as a butterfly or a bird or a cloud. And I, her mother on planet Earth in a mere human body, began to sleep. 

I slept all day in between walking the dogs and feeding them. I remembered to feed myself most of the time, too. I tried sitting outside in my backyard, and this helped some. But mostly I stayed in bed. I cried “the whale cry” every day for two weeks.

Eventually the crying let up, but the heaviness kept pushing down on me. I searched in my mind for a soft place to land—some place that would let me feel “like my old self” again: an idea, a project, a story, anything. But it all fell flat.

I felt angry at the idea of going back to my old work in marketing. I was inflamed that I had been ghostwriting for others while letting my words sulk in some imaginary corner for chickenshit authors.

This was a level of self-alienation I didn’t know could ever exist, which says a lot for someone who has a decades-long history with anxiety, depression and trauma.

Empty-handed and designed to nurture

When we got pregnant and lost another baby, everything became like ice in my veins. Silent, frigid—"I’m gone,” I thought.

“How do I ever come back after this? How do I endure this much sorrow and ache? How much can one woman handle?”

What hurt most was thinking back on a conversation Lee and I had in the car on our way to a routine checkup.

“If I look back at my own life,” I said, “I can see that I was made to nurture. I am really good at seeing and intuiting other people’s needs and meeting them right where they are. I think this is one of the reasons I’m really looking forward to being a mom. This is what I was made for.”

Those words haunted me and gutted me over and over again. I spoke them out into the world, for everyone to hear, and an hour later I was told my baby had died again. 

What kind of cruel joke was this? 

Why show me this? 

Why give me this gift of insight and appreciation for nurturing while I’m on the way to find out that my baby is already gone?

We said goodbye to her on December 24, 2019, and I expected the pain and grief to rise up once again just like before. But this time it was different. I didn’t cry for a month, which made me nervous.

“I’m gonna explode one day without warning,” I thought. Which eventually I did, but for the most part it felt like walking with one foot in front of the other, through a wide open, barren dessert. No relief in sight. No work or project to distract me. So I began reliving my whole life in my mind, trying to remember how I had come through hard times before.

Happiness can find me like it did before

I remembered how happiness had found its way to me over the years: it wasn’t through religious doctrine that said, “Well, one day when you die and go to heaven everything will be better.” And it wasn’t through dismissive emotional or mental tricks that pushed everything deeper inside me (only to show up in an incomprehensible explosion six months later).

No … Happiness danced its persistent little self into my life through the tangible. I found happiness when I learned how to ask my friends to hug me. The soft fur on my dog was a balm to me in my loneliest times; her warmth and heartbeat have comforted me through more panic attacks than I care to count.

Happiness showed up when I learned to savor a good meal without calculating how “bad” I was.

Happiness was knowing I deserved help and receiving that help from countless talented doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists.

Looking back, I could see that the pursuit of happiness in my life was a holy prison break—and it felt as though Joan of Arc was leading me in the charge to be as alive as humanly possible.

So, here I was, a mother with empty arms, and I decided to pray the holiest of prayers.

I said, “Yes.”

I followed this by a tangible request: “Please just help me wash my face every day.”

It sounded so silly, but it was a mile marker for me. I figured if I could keep foraging through the muck of heartbreak, my first sign of light at the end of the tunnel would be washing my face on a regular basis.

And that was where I started.

I began re-engaging with my senses and gave myself unconditional permission to find happiness.

Sea mineral face spritz? Done.

 A new serum? Done.

Want to create giant birthday boxes for everyone? Done.

Body scrubs, bath bombs, face scrubs, perfume samples? Done.

At first it started quite slowly, but day after day, I kept listening to my intuition and my instincts and my experience. And somehow it all pushed me back toward the place where I can feel and see and hope again.

Mother’s Day and every day

I don’t take today for granted. It is Bereaved Mother’s Day, which is a day that will always feel strange to me, I think. But it’s not unlike most others where I still need a nap while clutching that gray and white blanket against my chest. These days, though, I’m learning to celebrate this nurturing sleep along with the energetic and creative days.

When I thought about writing this piece looking back on happiness and re-emerging from the dark fog of the last year, at first I felt like it might not be a good idea. I struggle to embrace the idea that I can be in grief and depression and still contribute to the world.

And since I launched a program last month called Happy Packs, my first instinct was to reflect positively on the program by being “more put together” (whatever the hell that means). But the more I thought about it, I realized that pretending or withholding would only cause me more harm. This is me: I’m messy, thoughtful and creative; I need naps, and I make care packs for essential workers.

One month and 67 packs in, Happy Packs has turned into a real-life, ongoing lesson where I’m experiencing and absorbing a new truth firsthand: that I have deep abiding value while also having days of “whale” crying, mid-day naps and early bedtimes.

It turns out that maybe I can offer something meaningful to the world. At the very least, I can be the person who keeps sending bath products to essential workers, as well as the person whose grief and ache can swallow her up without warning.

So here I am: alive, rested, happy. And it’s Mother’s Day.