Wounds like These

CW: pregnancy & pregnancy loss. Miscarriage. Trauma. Blood. Depression.  Please, read at your own risk, it is not my intention to deliberately make anyone uncomfortable.  

With the bedroom window open, in the space that exists between lamplight and an overcast sunrise, the air smells of rain; damp, earthy, and grey. There is a breeding pair of ducks on the pond, and the high croaking of small frogs along the bank gushes a springtime overture, but beneath all, my heart aches with a loss I have never felt before. By the time I was able to sit and write, it was afternoon. I have closed the window and am sipping black coffee, which has turned cold. My head feels heavy, begging me to rest, even when I have already overslept. The sky continues to threaten a rainstorm, dappled the color of oyster shells and placid. Even the trees are stock still, waiting to turn their leaves up at the rain. Everything is patient and quiet, wrapped neatly, as if waiting for something that will not come.

On the window sill, I have left a french press which is now only half filled with black coffee. In moments when no words come to me, my eyes drift to the forest beyond the glass window stained with fingerprints. Sometimes I think about vanishing. I am too good at putting everyone before myself, too good at holding my breath to make sure others can breathe, and too good at burying my emotions until I am alone, at which time I allow them to overtake me.

I don’t know if trying at all was a good idea. It’s so hard to be sure.

You demanded this morning before work, as you still lay in bed, your upper back mottled by what little light there is, that the doctors should be able to tell us why I miscarried. I said that I didn’t think it was quite as simple as you wished it to be. Nothing is simple, in a universe that is so complicated. The stars hung against a dark blue sky, a kingdom reflected on water, the growth, and death of time, the swirling multitude of possibilities, the scars placed upon the body even as healing takes place, the calm which proceeds a rainstorm or that follows a nor’easter, as feet of snow absorbs all the noise in the world. An ouroboros that is the color of the earth itself, refuses to rest in its frantic attempt to swallow itself whole. Memories like old paintings, barely still able to be visualized, map a lifetime of experiences, which, unfortunately, includes grief.

Grief as we lose pieces of ourselves & and the grief that comes with the loss of people we love.

I close my eyes for a moment, trying to imagine the mellow soundtrack of a rainstorm. The sound of thunder, the creaking of an old forest, the wind which rattles a canopy of crown-shy trees, and the sound of the shower of rain against the low underbrush. I try not to think about my grief for a moment, but I have begun to realize that it is something I cannot part with. It is not unlike the trauma that has come before, smelling of blood, feeling like a racing heart, looking like the tears of someone else, and sounding of footsteps that do not belong to me, the rasping of old floorboards, the haunting of a house, the ghostly reflection of my own body against broken glass.

Again, I bury my emotions, placing others before myself, promising myself that I will process this just as soon as I know everyone else has. Just as soon as I know others are safe. I might then examine these feelings, and dredge them to the surface of my mind, dusty and broken like the spine of a book I have read one hundred times. Why can I not allow myself to cradle my own heart when it hurts? Am I afraid of my own pain? Is it the knowledge that I have to handle the pain of others so that I might feel safe enough to handle my own? How can I unearth the taproot that I have allowed to grow deep, and how do I unlearn the art of never truly caring for myself?

It is hard not to include this experience as another reason that I hate my body. For a long time, I have lived with pain, existing constantly in a state of feeling, at best, uncomfortable, at worst doubled over, wide awake, and watching the hours of the night drift by, my skin even paler by the moonlight, you sleeping beside me. My spine where it connects to my pelvis transected by scar tissue, and pain radiates down my legs, and across the bottoms of my feet. Surgeries never quite fixed the problem. My skin alone sometimes hurts to touch, and often migraines the color of lightning wrack my skull with a pain that synchronizes with my heartbeat. And still, I manage a mental illness that hounds the edge of my perception with lies that require a great deal of energy to decode regularly. Of course, not the least of which is the weight gain that has come with antipsychotic treatment, and a body that does not feel like my own. Some days, it feels like too much. Some days vanishing sounds rather nice.

One day at a time. One hour at a time. Some days it’s walking myself through just one breath at a time. When we decided to start trying for a baby, I did so with the knowledge that the process would be quite uncomfortable for me and that it would not be kind. I put precautions into place so that I would have a safety net to fall back on if it became too much for me to handle. Of course, we did not even get that far, and I will never know why. At somewhere between eight and nine weeks the egg sac had begun to shrink, had no heartbeat, and I had already been bleeding for two weeks.

Death in springtime is surreal. It’s like stumbling across an animal’s skeleton, exposed bone beneath vestiges of snow, lacking tissue and missing teeth; a rib cage, a spine, a form half buried in the underbrush, outside the limitations of consciousness, gleaming and white. When it is your own womb, you begin to feel poisoned, or perhaps poisonous. Incapable of creating life, even after being assured that your body was designed to grow a baby. But when it does not, where does that leave you in your relationship with yourself, and with those around you?

I wrote on the fourteenth of March, in my pregnancy journal:

  “…a process that began on its own, and by a stroke of absurd luck, a process that will continue on its own. Before long you will form a spinal cord, waxy and fragile, and the rudiments of a brain, eventually capable of thought. You are now barely formed, tiny and smooth, just barely more than a suggestion against the tissue of my womb, and you continue to grow even as I write this record…”

At the last ultrasound appointment, the one where they did not find a heartbeat, the technician returned from a consultation call with Portland, saying that “there should be a heartbeat by now,” and that she was “very, very sorry,” gone even was the glimpse of cardiac activity we had seen two weeks prior. They gave us a box to take home, with some odds and ends that might have helped us to process our grief. Of everything contained inside the cardboard box, a small quartz heart, not much larger than our baby should have been, was the only thing to provide me comfort. We carried our “Empty Arms” box out of the clinic with us and both called out of work.

Only on the rarest of occasions have I heard you say you were happy in a way that was true, hounded not unlike myself by the heaviness of depression. Some things cannot be undone, memories of trauma hover a candle flame in the darkness, years of the same neural connections creating pathways in the brain, a familiar sense of dread, and the intimate embrace of darkness, the collision, the crash, the shattering of your heart against the inside of your chest. We were both raised on the taste of trauma. And so rarely have I heard you speak to your happiness, not until this pregnancy. And so, how vicious for that to be taken from you. I can’t help but feel guilty, even when I know it is not my fault.

To say that anything was taken is to presume something, someone, somewhere had done the taking. Knowing otherwise is a gift. I know that the same gift is not one which you have. You look for meaning in everything, while I often grappled to accept the lack of exactly that. It is hard to accept the universe for what it is, harder still to accept its indifference to us. Yet, somehow…it is its disordered nature which seeks to nurse my tender soul. Especially for wounds like these and for all the pain that time cannot heal.

Trauma haunts us in mysterious ways. Coffee stains, rainstorms, sunlight, pain. I take my morning meds. The haze of summer. The mouthfeel of red wine. The smell of oranges. Afternoon arrives. I take my meds. Memories of poverty. Hunger. The wallop of an unexpected sound. The engine refuses to start. The smell of antiseptic. The taste of blood. Nighttime blooms, the undertow of heartache, I take my nighttime meds. But sometimes I still hear voices. Memories of wanting to die. Memories of learning to live after. I pay my respects to the person I used to be and embrace who I have become.

It has been one week.

My body, as I have often been forced to recognize, does not do what it is supposed to. This is no different, as my body does not process what tissue is left of the shrinking egg sac. My body makes no attempt to rid itself of the miscarriage. Even though I have been spotting for weeks, nothing of significance passes. The days depart, they run together, and spring arrives full of life and without the spectral ache of winter. Still, nothing leaves my body. Somehow my body can’t even fuck up properly. It is as if my body has entered denial, refusing to grieve, though it is no problem for my brain. The Women’s Health office calls me and gives me two choices. I do not like either of them. However, the left-over tissue threatens at becoming infected. In that way, the choices they offer me are an illusion only.

When I wake from the outpatient surgery I am sobbing, blood runs free between my legs, it is the tissue that my body had forsaken. I am disorientated and confused from being under anesthesia. My brain grasps at fleeting moments which later feel like a dream. The antibiotic takes a little over an hour, and at first, it burns my hand so badly that they place a new IV in my arm. I lay in the hospital bed, you hold my hand, and at some point, I called my mom from my phone, though I do not remember the conversation. I spill ginger ale all over myself in an attempt to drink from a straw so you lift it to my mouth for me. In the pit of my belly, there is a burgeoning loss. After an hour I am allowed to stand and asked to dress. I bleed from the hospital bed to the bathroom. You help me. And, although you do not say it right away, I know that the experience is traumatizing you.

You said later that you are glad that everything happened here & now, at this point in our lives, that you are grateful that all this had happened in spring, as opposed to winter, which would’ve stretched everything so very thin. I know what you mean to say is that we probably could not have handled this even two years ago. I know that you are right. We are both grateful that this happened so early in our pregnancy. Neither of us say it, but what thoughts used to be huge and grotesque, are nothing more than fragile and intrusive these days. How far the wheel has turned. Scar tissue finally heals, no longer so pink, the skin grows pale again, the imperfection becoming more like a memory or a dream, one that I can barely recall.

Then, last night, as I stood in the bathroom brushing my hair, pulling pathetically at the little knots that often gather at the back of my head, you entered the bathroom and we cried together. I refused to look at myself in the mirror, unhappy with the way my naked body looked, and not yet ready to forgive myself. A small trickle of blood slipped down the inside of my leg. Your skin against mine was likely the only thing that warded off a panic attack, that and the conscious effort I made to regulate my breathing.

You apologized. I told you that you had nothing to apologize for.

Today it is beautiful outside, whereas last weekend was accompanied by rain. I spent the morning cleaning the house, giving myself something to feel in control of. I lit incense until smoke hovered, looking like oil, contained below sunlight. I burned a bit of sage in the doorway. I took deep breaths and squatted down low to peer at the new seedlings which had sprouted overnight. Life. We are both processing our pain differently. You are asking yourself what you had done wrong. I am reminding myself that bad things happen for no reason. I am reminding myself that God doesn’t exist, at least not for me. Knowing that if I believed in God, I would be overcome with anger. It is the chaotic nature of the universe which provides me comfort. Knowing that my existence means little outside the scope of my own experiences. The stars don’t care about me, the rising moon, the setting sun, and the settling darkness, all are peaceful and indifferent. And thank goodness.

As I write I occasionally gaze outside, through the big living room window, at the sun dancing along tree bark, watching the pine bristles moving gently in the wind, at the purple flowers bathed in light, and at daffodils opening at the taste of sunlight. Birdsong. Chamomile tea. Muddy boots. Moving on will be hard, better to accept my grief.  If I have learned nothing else, it is that feelings fought will fight back. Feel them, experience them, and carry them if you must, but don’t fight them. Above everything else, I will cry if I have to. I’m crying now, even in the sunlight, even in the warmth, even when my pelvis still aches, twisting with loss.

To constantly ask what you have done to deserve something? What a horrible way to haunt your soul. 

Bad things happen for no reason. That is what I know for sure.