Please Excuse Annie
Please excuse Annie.
Please excuse Annie for death.
Please excuse Annie for a death in the family.
Please excuse Annie for a death of her family.
Please excuse Annie for a death of the family within her.
Please excuse Annie for the death of her husband and herself
and all the babies they made together.
They all died.
Within her
She is gone now so
please excuse Annie
from rehearsal
from set
from the office
from the board of directors
from the film society fundraiser
Please excuse Annie
…until further notice
I have not written publicly about my experiences with miscarriage. This is the first time I’ve allowed myself to “go there.” I’ve spoken with friends and family, of course, and shared some of my story during a series on “Joy,” oddly enough, at my former church. In that “testimony” I spoke of losing my joy, or feeling as if I had. After losing my third pregnancy in 2015, I experienced a deep depression and felt for a very long time that I might never again find true joy. Gratitude, yes, I had so much gratitude for all the good that remained in my life. Contentment, perhaps…again, I had so much to be thankful for and could recognize how very lucky I am, despite the losses, to have a wonderfully supportive group of friends and family, as well as colleagues and community members.
But, for the life of me, I struggled to find joy in anything, even that which had brought me much joy over the years. I was not motivated to do much of anything. It became a struggle just to function, to go through the motions of daily life. Everything seemed pointless to me, especially after my husband and I “stopped trying.” When we stopped trying to get pregnant, and particularly after we stopped discussing the possibilities for fostering and adoption, I kind of stopped trying at everything, even some of the basics, like self-care. It wasn’t conscious, necessarily, but I fell into a “fuck-it-all” mentality. I gave zero fucks…everything had lost meaning for me. And, without realizing it, I began to descend into self-destructive patterns and habits. It’s not that I didn’t want to find joy again, not that I didn’t want to be with my friends and family and colleagues and be able to fully enjoy our time together. But I wanted even more to be with my babies and with my own mother and grandmothers and aunts and others who had nurtured me as a child and had already “transitioned” to the other side of this life.
I was buried so deep in my own grief, grieving the family-that-could-have-been, that I could not see how I was serving any meaningful purpose in the here and now. I had radically changed my “singleton” life to forge a new one as a stay-at-home mom, who worked part-time, mostly from home, or who taught a few yoga classes a week. When I had to let go of the “mom” part of my work-from-home plan, I almost let go of everything, and not in a healthy way.
Yoga teaches me to let go in a good way: let go of expectations, let go of fear, let go of anxiety, let go of the need to control. But after I had to let go of the dream I’d dreamed to create a family with my husband, I almost let go of myself. That is the opposite of yogic. Yoga is about union: the yoking together of body-mind-spirit, the yoking together of the One with the All.
But, for a time, I lost touch with my part in the All. I was not ever consciously suicidal, but I had many moments when I just wanted to be with those I was missing so very much and I thought my friends and family would be fine without me. Since this was not my first experience with depression, I knew immediately that such thinking was a bright red flag, warning that I should seek help. And I did. I talked to my doctor, who prescribed an anti-depressant. I sought counseling and was lucky to connect with a practice that focuses on serving women and couples who’ve experienced miscarriage and early loss. I with met a group of remarkable women during a 6-week perinatal loss support and education group. All of these actions were helpful in their own way.
Yet, I could not shake my grief and my depression, which were profound and enduring. Then came COVID-19…
Don’t get me wrong, this awful pandemic is not what finally shook me out of my funk. But seeing such widespread loss and devastation certainly drove home the message that I needed to start caring for myself better, if only to be able to keep others safe. My fears and anxieties shifted focus: will my family and friends and colleagues and students be okay? What if I become unwell and bring harm to others? I could not forgive myself that.
I knew that if I wanted others to be well, I had to start giving a fuck about my own wellness again. I must “tend my own garden” if I want my nephew and nieces and all my GLOW girls and extended family and friends’ children to inherit a fruitful and fulfilling life, a peaceful and prosperous planet.
In April I committed to an Ayurvedic cleanse to help me “reset” my lifestyle and reestablish healthier patterns for the very basics of life: eating, sleeping, exercising, working, studying, home maintenance, and simple self-care. It was not a “magic bullet” by any means. But I emerged from this “Spring Clean” so much closer to a healthier balance. I feel much more energized and motivated to connect with my family and friends and with life in general. I feel much closer to my “joy.” I went from taking so many medications (4 different allergy meds, 2 meds to help balance hormones, and an anti-depressant) to just a probiotic and a single antihistamine. Don’t get me wrong: I am not anti-medicine! We should always listen to our medical providers and faithfully take what we know supports our well being. But I had not been feeling well on all those meds. I was still suffering.
Turns out medications can’t do it all. I could not medicate myself to wellness. The best I could do was numb the pain. To truly recover, I had to do my own work. I had to start caring for myself as well as I would care for my own child, as well as I did when I was pregnant. It was so much easier for me to make good choices then because I was taking care of the babies-on-board. But ALL of us deserve such conscious care-giving. It shouldn’t take a pregnancy or a pandemic to remind me that I matter. If YOU matter to me—and you do!—then I have to matter to me, too. My mother and grandmothers did not sacrifice so much to care for me, just to see me piss it all away; we all need to give a fuck, about ourselves and about each other.
So I’ve gone from zero fucks to all the fucks, ha! Happy fucking Mother’s Day!! My mother and grandmothers would surely be appalled that I am using such language, and you may be, too. Please accept my apologies, if so. But, truly. HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY to all you mamas out there! To those whose children are alive and well, and to those who have lost children as well. To all who have mothered and nurtured others in any way, YOU MATTER!
When we lose someone we love, it can be easy to feel lost along with them. Yet, we are never without those we’ve loved. They remain a part of us, forever. In the case of biological mothers and children, we share DNA. Mothers share their DNA with us, yes, but children also share with their mothers. Fetal michrochimerism has shown that fetal cells within mothers can end up becoming “beating heart cells.” When I learned my babies’ hearts had stopped beating, I felt mine surely would, too. It brings some strange sense of comfort to think that it is perhaps the opposite; perhaps their cells have kept my broken heart beating. While I was so busy beating myself up and beating myself down, perhaps my babies actually loaned me their strength, and helped my heart begin to heal. I find it fascinating that, while some fetal cells may disappear in later years, “sometimes, the cells settle in for a lifetime.” Though I only got to be a biological mother briefly, I will carry my babies within my heart and mind for the rest of my life. Whether or not their cells remain detectable within my physical body, they are forever a part of who I have become, of who I am becoming.
Whether a biological mother or not, for me this affirms how all those we love become a part of us.
On Mother’s Day, like everyday, I miss my mom and I miss my children. But I know they are always with me. Always. I have a couple of friends, in particular, who I know must be missing their mother terribly today. She was a wonderful woman and friend to my mom. At her memorial service earlier this year, her family invited those in attendance to take home a book from her extensive library. I chose Thich Nat Hanh’s Peace Is Every Step. I’ll close this post with a bit from “Like a Leaf, We Have Many Stems,” from Part Three of his book on The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. In this particular passage Nat Hanh describes being in a park on an autumn day and coming upon a leaf about to fall from its branch.
“Usually we think that the tree is the mother and the leaves are just children, but as I looked at the leaf I saw that the leaf is also a mother to the tree. The sap that the roots take up is only water and minerals, not sufficient to nourish the tree. So the tree distributes that sap to the leaves, and the leaves transform the rough sap into elaborated sap and, with the help of the sun…send it back to the tree for nourishment. Since the leaf is linked to the tree by a stem, the communication between them is easy to see.
We do not have a stem linking us to our mother anymore, but when we were in her womb, we had a very long stem, an umbilical cord. The oxygen and the nourishment we needed came to us through that stem.”
Nat Hanh points out that, once we become physically independent from our mothers and grow into adulthood, we may perceive a sense of separation. Yet he asserts this is an illusion and also affirms that we have many others who mother us, in various ways throughout our lives, including our “Mother Earth.” We all depend on the sun, the rain, the earth for our very life. We are all connected by this human experience on this one planet we all call home. If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that we are all connected. This Spring my husband and I planted three new trees at our home, in remembrance of the three babies we lost. As he worked hard to select just the right spots, dig the holes, and prepare the soil, I was reminded of the Lucy Larcom quote, “He who plants a tree, plants a hope.”
I still struggle with bouts of anxiety and depression, with the fear that those I love may be harmed by this terrible virus that has wreaked so much havoc around the globe or by some unforeseen accident. But I am trying to stay rooted in hope. And I have begun to rediscover joy in my everyday life. I am learning to feel my grief when I need to, but not allow it to bury me, to keep me from being present in the here and now.
As Nat Hanh concludes his “conversation with the leaf,” he asks the leaf if it is afraid of falling, like the other Autumn leaves, and the leaf responds, “No. During the whole spring and summer I was completely alive. I worked hard to help nourish the tree, and now much of me is in the tree. I am not limited by this form. I am also the whole tree, and when I go back to the soil, I will continue to nourish the tree. So I don’t worry at all. As I leave this branch and float to the ground, I will wave to the tree and tell her, ‘I will see you again very soon.’”
As the wind blows, this master of mindfulness observes the “leaf leave the branch and float down to the soil, dancing joyfully, because as it floated it saw itself already there in the tree. It was so happy.” He bows his head knowing, “I have a lot to learn from that leaf.”
So do I. So do we all.