What it Means to Live
Holding Multitudes, as Mothers
***TW: For newer readers, this essay may seem like a departure from my usual offerings. But my published works got their start talking about miscarriage, pregnancy loss, infertility, and early motherhood, and the weight that society forces mothers to carry, mainly, alone. If any of those topics may bring you harm or disrupt the work you’ve done in your own healing, please do not read.
For the rest- I have begged on my knees for a way to be the kind of writer who doesn’t expose such personal keyholes into moments of my own life, but I’ve finally just thrown in the towel. This is also who I am.
What does it mean to live, truly?
Who gets the right to do it?
“How many pregnancies have you had?” She asked as she tucked a towel into the waistband of my linen skirt.
“Five,” I answered, but not first without pause. It had been a decade since anyone ever asked me that question.
“And how many of those pregnancies produced children?” She continued, turning on the monitor, the bleeping of the ultrasound machine echoing in my chest.
All of them.
“Two.”
We didn’t look each other in the eye, her hand gripping tightly the wand pressed into my belly, trying to locate the source of the pain. My eyes were trained on the poorly painted orange octopus attempting an escape into the heating grate. It took ten minutes. It put me back two years of therapy.
The night before, I could barely crawl out of the shower, water running down into the bathmat, trying to catch my breath. Pain radiated throughout my lower abdomen causing me to hobble, hunched over to grab a towel. My husband was already in bed when I staggered into the room.
“If I am pregnant, I do not want to carry it,” I said simply, as though women in every state were granted this decision freely, without risk. As if every woman didn’t mourn the weight of the fertility pendulum. As if it were a one-dimensional, flat-Stanley decision and not an origami of the soul.
He nodded in understanding.
The prospect was extreme and more than very unlikely, but one that my doctor had asked about the day before. I sat on the edge of my bed and wrestled with my own definitions of living while a woman a few states away was kept alive on machines to incubate the fetus inside of her belly.
What does it mean to live, truly?
Who gets the right to do it?
R and I married young, as evangelicals often do. I knew enough about raising babies from being in a blended family to know that I didn’t want to follow the traditional Christian wife pattern of having children while still a child. We waited 6 years before trying to become parents ourselves. I lost our first on the bathroom floor of our craftsman home, my wet face lit up by the 4th of July fireworks.
His name was Hosea Thomas.
Our firstborn should have felt like a miracle, but I navigated Hyperemesis gravidarum while teaching full time in a high school classroom. My students grew so accustomed to me vomiting mid-sentence, they lined their desks with garbage cans like frontline soldiers. I couldn’t keep down water. At week 27 my ankles began swelling to twice their size. I couldn’t catch my breath. I had headaches all the time. My chest ached like an elephant was crushing my lungs. I wept on the same bathroom floor I lost her sibling on- praying God would take me. I was far enough along for the baby to survive without me.
I didn’t know words like pre- and postpartum depression. I didn’t know what pre-eclampsia, eclampsia, or HELLP syndrome was. When I went for a routine check-up at my OB-GYN, I only knew I would probably die before delivering. Something was terribly wrong. I sat down on the table, not sure I could ever get up again. My blood pressure was 210/140. I don’t remember anything after that.
She was born after a 2-day, induced labor during a failed epidural, while I was pumped full of magnesium to prevent seizures. At hour 30, I lost my sight. I didn’t regain it for weeks after. (Did you know this is an effect of eclampsia AND of the magnesium drip they put you on to prevent you from dying?) I heard she was beautiful- like a snow angel baby- fair and round and perfect. I never saw what she looked like, all 6.1 lbs of her, on the day she was born. I still have nightmares about a newborn without a face. At times, when we are distant or arguing, I’m afraid it is because I couldn’t hold her the moment she entered the world. I can’t hold her enough, even now. I see you, I whisper. -through her closed bedroom door, I can see you now.
I lost two more after that. One loss was devastating. One, indifferent. I knew my bones remembered our narrow escape. My stretched skin still felt the tremors. I no longer trusted my body to do what I believed its purpose was. Defective was scrawled on my uterine lining.
That’s why my lastborn was such a shock. A rose in the desert of my adult life, where nothing good was growing; an unlikely womb, an unlikely baby. My pregnancy was much the same physically-at least I knew the signs this time. But the bone-weary loneliness and fear that permeated the season was unmatched. I was committed to survival this time because hers depended on mine. It was a sanctioned co-dependency. My body still feels the bonded pull with the youngest. My health anxiety the highest when she is ill- her wellness was so tightly wound around my own for so long, extraction feels like amputation.
May you be brave, I whispered over her as she turned in my belly over and over. I whispered the same to myself. And I was.
What does it mean to live, truly?
Who gets the right to do it?
When I limped into my own bedroom, eyes bright with pain, I carried with me every moment of motherhood- and the years that came after. The sweet ones where I am learning how to rest, how to love with wildness, how to be free. The tender and tiny hands in mine, the tears soothed, the giggles. My daughters are the very breath in my lungs. They are magic and beauty and everything good. They have taught me to love and to be loved. There are no words for how lucky I feel that they are on loan to me to bear witness to their rising.
I almost died twice to have them.
I will not risk losing them-or myself- again.
What does it mean to live, truly?
Who gets the right to do it?
My kidneys and liver never quite recovered after such high-risk pregnancies and losses. My risk for heart disease and stroke is elevated (heart disease is the leading cause of death for women, did you know?) The trauma I carry from delivering my first pregnancy at home alone, the losses after, the high-risk pregnancies, and birth trauma is something that keeps my bones awake.
I will never, truly recover. My cells are still floating in their living, breathing bodies. My heart stretched in others’ skins. They are a walking reminder of wonder, of magic, of miracle.
So am I.
What does it mean to live, truly?
To know the gift(s) I have. To stand in awe. To choose the ways I show up in the world.
To choose. To choose. To choose.
Who gets the right to do it?
We do.