Trusting This Body

When I found out I was going to lose the baby, I doubled over and howled. No. When I found out I was going to lose the embryo, the fetus, the little cluster of cells the size of a raspberry (according to the pregnancy app), my throat clenched and I whispered into the phone, For sure? Yes, for sure, said the midwife. There was nothing I could do. No herbs to take, no foods to eliminate, no bed rest or kegels or acupuncture would make the little being stay. The little being was not even alive anymore. A tiny heartbeat never heard, two weeks ceased. Deceased.

I trust my body, I trust my body, I trust my body, I’d gone to bed whispering the night before, hand over my womb, hand over my heart. I trust this little soul. I trust them to do what they need to do. But why are you abandoning ship? 

Trusting is not the same as understanding. 

They had been so quiet. Not like my daughter whose presence was felt so soon after conception. She was vibrant and strong, hormones coursing through my body making me tired and ill. No meat (now her favorite), no broth, nothing but crackers and cheese and rice would my body tolerate. 

I did not feel this one. I wanted to. I tried to. The prenatal vitamins made me nauseous enough to think I had morning sickness. I was tired, but of course I was tired- I have a 21-month-old who'd been cycling through various community illnesses for a month. I wanted to feel something and didn’t. Or barely. I felt guilty for feeling good. I felt anxious about the silence. Did I already know?

Subconscious knowing or not, I still wasn't ready to hear what I heard. My hormone levels were dropping. They were incompatible with sustaining a viable pregnancy. Clunky words could not express what was happening inside my body. Non-viable fetus. Miscarriage. Pregnancy loss. Spontaneous abortion. Due date canceled. Life gone gone gone.

Tears. Gasping for breath. Wet chin and splotchy cheeks and puffy eyes against my husband’s shoulder. His face mirroring mine, standing in the kitchen clinging to one another with our sleeping daughter in the carrier on his chest. Does she dream of salty ocean water and howling wind? 

We cry for days. We dig a hole and wait for the blood. We care for our child sick with the flu. I meet with the midwife for what would have been our first prenatal visit and she says there is nothing wrong with me as far as she can tell and we should start trying again as soon as possible if we are emotionally ready and there was nothing I could do, really, nothing I had done to cause this to happen. This happens. This happens to so many women. Yes, I know. I cry. Wipe my tears. We can try again. My heart lifts as I drive home. Let’s try again. I could be pregnant in two weeks. Or not. But the possibility is there.

The next day the bleeding increases. The cramps ramp up. From what the midwife said, I expect to be doubled over in pain again, this time physical pain. I prepare. I go for a walk to the store with my daughter bundled under blankets in the stroller, an apple in her hand. I can feel the muscles working in my pelvis and I walk and stop and breathe in with the sharp pains. My pelvis is softly set jelly, I tell myself and laugh, thinking of my husband teasing me about my mantra during my 68 hour labor with my daughter. Relaaaaax, I say dramatically to myself, still laughing, cervix softening, opening, releasing, just like in labor. My body knows what to do and it feels good to allow it to contract and release. I surrender. Just as I did in labor, just as I did with the grief, just as I do with hope bubbling through the disappointment. 

I trust my body, I trust my body, I trust my body.

Back at home I do farm chores, back aching. After I’ve carried five gallon buckets of water to the goats and sheep, fed the chickens and ducks and barncats, I tell my husband I am going to the hole we dug so we could plant a tree for the little departing one. I want to bleed into the hole, let my animal body take over, let the earth absorb the remnants of this womb nest.

Walking toward the hole, I howl.

The moon pushes through me.

I stop, start walking again, howl again.

The stars fall from me.

Sounds I have never made before, not even labor, startle my husband. And me.

Are you OK? He asks.

Yes? I say. I just... I think they just came out! 

I walk to the hole, pull down my pants, squat to the earth.

A perfect pale orb of ocean threaded to a crescent constellation of nourishment.

The midwife said not to expect to see anything. That not seeing anything but blood clots was normal. This was not the case. This was a whole universe of possibility fallen from my body. Complete and magical and delivered with such ease. 

The universe falls from my hand onto the soft dirt. Words and prayers and compost follow.

We bury the possibility of that particular world under a dogwood tree. 
We water the roots, surround the trunk with soft woolen mulch, gingerly touch tightly furled buds.

Together we tend our farm, our family, our bodies and wait (wonder) for the bloom of another (possibility).

Clarity →

Baby no longer in my arms, I step closer to the hole. I cannot see the ground below. I hold the hem of my skirt and put a flip-flopped foot onto a cinderblock jutting out of the concrete wall and start to descend. The smell of damp earth and rotting wood grows stronger with each step down. 

One two three four five six. 

I can hear my baby babbling in my cousin-in-law’s arms in the room I just lowered myself from. I whimper.

I do not want to bring her down here.

I won’t bring her down here.

A week ago I would have brought her down here.

A week ago when all the phones in the vacation rental started blaring I’d assumed it was an Amber Alert. Child abduction on Kauai? Where are they going to go on this two-lane highway?

I picked up my phone and stared at the screen. The message was not about an old Chevy pickup with a child inside. It was about a missile heading for Hawaii. Seek shelter immediately. This is not a drill.

Was this a joke? 

Baby in my arms, the rest of the family out on the deck watching the enormous waves crash against the lava rock shore, I didn’t want to wait to find out. I walked past the wall of floor to ceiling windows and onto the deck, face pale, baby nestled in my arms. I interrupted sips of coffee and sighs about the beauty of clear blue sky to tell them about the alert. I looked up at the sky wondering if we would see it coming. If somehow a missile would create a contrail in reverse to warn us of its path.

Everyone got up to check phones, check TVs, disbelief the initial response. I wanted to be comforted by this disbelief but I wasn’t. Even if it was most likely untrue there was a chance it was true, especially in the current political (insane) climate.

I went back inside to get ready. Get ready? How does one get ready for a ballistic missile attack? Baby in my arms, baby in my arms, baby in my arms. Holding her close and I whispered I love you in her tiny ear over and over. 

In our guest room our luggage vomited its contents onto the floor: clothes, bathing suits, baby books. I fished my wallet out of my bag and put my ID in my pocket. I pulled the comforter off the bed and wrapped my baby in the downy warmth. She wasn’t cold; it was 70 degrees outside but somehow it seemed like a good thing to do. I had to protect her (from shrapnel? Radiation? Sonic boom?) and it was the only way I could think of how to do it.

I tried to get everyone into the windowless garage. My sister-in-law told everyone to put their shoes on. My husband shuffled bottles of water,

a bunch of bananas

and boxes of food, into the garage.

I wondered if I should move the ping-pong table or move away from the rack of snorkeling gear? What happens when a ballistic missile hits a place? Do we simply evaporate or is it like a big earthquake? 

I’d let my daughter out of the blanket to crawl on the garage floor but scooped her up again with these thoughts. How long do we have? My sister-in-law said she wasn’t ready, she was too young to die and wanted more time. I texted my mom and sisters in California about what was going on. I hope its not true, I wrote. I love you, I wrote.

What do you think about when you may be blown up? About all the other people in the world that go through this daily? About what you will leave behind? About what matters most? I stopped my husband from his stocking up and said, “If this is it, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. I love you so much.” We held our baby between us and kissed gently and smiled one of those not quite joyous but not quite defeated smiles. 

Such a mix of gratitude and fear. Love and sadness. Disbelief and knowing. 

I sat down and held my baby close as realizations flashed across my brain. My catering business doesn’t matter. Publishing my book doesn’t matter. Leaving a legacy doesn’t matter, whatever the hell that means. Not that those things are bad, they just don’t matter as much as I once thought. What matters? Love. Family. Community. If we didn’t blow up, I wanted to work on our farm, become more self-sufficient and interdependent with our community. Be with my husband and my child. Learn from her about love and curiosity, teach her about empathy and opening our hearts instead of shutting them down to the point where missiles are even a choice.

My husband, baby, and sister-in-law sat in the garage and waited as minutes ticked by. My other in-laws searched Fox news and CNN in the house. Nothing. My husband searched for news on his phone. He found a twitter post saying it was a fluke. My sister texted me updates about her search. False alarm, she said.

False alarm.

Exhale.

Inhale the dankness of this hole in the ground a week later. This is where my new extended family huddled under their house when they got the alert. Underground. Baby in arms and a nine year old sobbing that all the things she loved were OUT THERE, above ground, in the world.

I do not want to bring my baby down here. I will not bring my baby down here or a place like here.

Not this time. Hopefully never. 

I climb out after a few minutes of sweeping a flashlight from corner to corner and shivering at the thought. I hold my baby in my arms again and don’t have to think about what is important. I know what is important as her heart still beats against mine and the birds still sing outside in the world.

The Farm is Quiet

We didn’t always get along. He’d lash out at me and I’d lash back, words against spurs, pleading, screaming, questioning. I wanted him to understand me, wanted him to listen to reason. We didn’t speak the same language, hold the same context. We shared a home but had very different perspectives. I was annoyed by his actions and often cursed his life, a flood of angry shadow work bubbling up from my depths. But that didn’t mean that I wanted him dead.

The sun burrowed out of the clouds of this long winter and painted the hillside green grass green. Tall firs and hemlock punctuated the misty skyline. The old growth wood of the barn almost glowed in the golden light. Spring! I was so ready for a change.

I fed hay to the goats and grain to the pigs with their little dirt covered faces. I collected eggs from the nesting boxes in the darkening coop and laid out swaths of grain for the chickens which they instantly attacked. The yard was quiet in that roadside farm sort of way- birds chirping, goats bleating, pigs snuffling, hens clucking, trucks rumbling by.

Yet something was missing. That shrill call of a dominant male lording over his ladies, a familiar and constant refrain that echoed through our days. I thought perhaps he was up the hill under the scotch broom and fir boughs. Or across the street at the Foodbank jousting for scraps. But his ladies were all here…

I wandered over the land in the beauty of the evening and felt myself being drawn towards the pond. I wasn’t necessarily looking, but in the lower field I found piles of feathers. Soft, tufty gray ones and rigid jet black ones, a tangle of long curved feathers, black and white and iridescent green.

Rooster feathers.

No no no.

But yes, the land was quiet and rooster was not simply hiding in the plum trees ready to attack me for coming too close to his harem. He had been attacked, was gone. Coyote or eagle? Maybe a stray dog? More questions than answers in a pile of plucked and ripped feathers, no body near by.

A flash of green in my palm, I held his mangled feathers in my fist and wandered back into the house with a bucket of eggs in my other hand. His torn up beauty and potential offspring balancing on either side of my body. We will bury his weightless remains under our new lavender plants, fingers in the soil, burying roots that will slither down through iridescence. We will eat the (fertilized) eggs and digest the reality that there will not be brilliant black and green offspring this year. We will feed the hens in our quiet(er) yard. I’ll still be on guard for a while when I hear a flap of wings and rustle of feathers running towards me, but the memories will dissipate with the decomposition of feathers underground.

RIP Rooster Midnight