I DON'T KNOW

just-barely-not-full moon musings

Friends, I woke up with the first few lines of this writing circling my mind, again and again, and when I gave in to the urge to jot it down in my bedside notebook, my pen died, and I had to fully get up, and I was greeted with a blaze of pink orange sunrise, and then the writing just kept going. I wrote this all in a frenzy, letting it flow out onto the tiny pages. Here it is.

TW: blood, pregnancy loss

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When I started bleeding, I was actually relieved. I had been convinced for a day and a half that something was wrong, and finally here the proof was. I was right. My anxiety lifted, and I was calm the whole 40 minute drive to the hospital. I actually was even ready to answer a neighbor’s questions about our driveway gate—they pulled over in their tractor when they saw us at the road and said they had been meaning to get in touch—and it was Rob who said we had to be going, we were having an emergency.

At the hospital, I told the check in nurse that I was 7 weeks pregnant, bleeding, and cramping. As I left the station, another nurse said Good luck, honey. Later on, hours and hours into the middle of the night, an ultrasound tech would tell me that I must have easy periods, since I described this blood as the most I had ever seen come out of me, and that I had mistaken my cramps for indigestion.

Miscarriage I

She was looking for a sac in my womb. She didn’t find it. I knew I had already passed it shortly after they admitted me. I had seen it release into the toilet, a huge clot, purple with deepest darkest blood. It was so unlike anything I had ever seen that immediately I thought, that’s the sac. Months later I would hear a story of a friend who received an abortion at 7 weeks who also saw the biggest clot she’d ever seen pass, and also knew it was the sac. This helped to reassure me that Yes, what happened to me was real, I wasn’t making it up. I struggled with this in the early aftermath, asking if it was real, did it really happen, the pregnancy ended so soon was it even real? I was so totally disoriented that I had to keep asking Rob to reassure me that it did all really happen. And again, another abortion story came around to comfort me: a friend who had kept a positive pregnancy test as a charm to remember that the whole experience was real.

Miscarriage II (passing the sac)

I bled for 10 days. Afterwards my periods returned to normal except for how they became a visceral reminder of the miscarriage. It’s hard to describe the early aftermath. In my notebook from this morning I stopped writing sentences and just wrote a list of words and phrases:

disorientation, emotional overwhelm, mystery, reassurance it’s not my fault, encountering a big challenge to my beliefs (is god punishing me for asking for too much? is there a too much?) grief, separation, isolation, connection, repair

Miscarriage III (empty)

I don’t know why it happened, I’ll never know. My favorite theory comes from my best friend’s mom, who suggested that the energy or life or spirit who came through my womb only needed a short time in this incarnation to complete whatever cycle they were in. I like how this idea touches on my belief that conception and pregnancy are collaborative, that someone on the other side is also choosing to come in (or out).

But during and early after the miscarriage I kept saying that I felt like a soul hadn’t landed in me yet while I was pregnant. At this point, 5.5 months later, I’m not sure what I feel about ensoulment—I trust myself enough to believe that what I said right afterwards was true. But now I’m wondering if I said it because any soul had already left. Maybe I believe it’s possible to have life energy before the soul gets there. But I actually don’t know. The only thing I believe in 100% about any of this is the Mystery. I don’t know and I won’t know. I can have theories that comfort me but when it comes down to it, I don’t know. And I think I’m okay with that.

In this experience I’ve encountered such huge, deep, boundless Mystery, and it’s actually become the most reassuring thing out of it all. I won’t know, and I don’t need to know. What a release.

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full moon from this weekend

Thank you for reading, and another thank you to everyone who has supported me, connected with me, held me, and witnessed me throughout this wild and messy chapter of life. I have been far from alone in this and for that I am so tenderly grateful.

Here’s Lorde wishing she’d kept the pregnancy test too:

With love,

XOXO Katelyn