CW: Pregnancy loss.
Note: I wrapped up the writing of this thing literally the afternoon of the evening I went into labor—March 31st; Jamie would arrive midday April 1st. Twelve weeks later I’d scraped together the time to give it a rough editorial read-over and was ready to mark the official conclusion of the “fourth trimester” by at last posting this roving kitchen-sinky pre-baby time-capsule of thought. And on that day—June 24th—Roe was overturned and I really just couldn’t with my own bullshit. Still very much in the disgusted rageful grief muck of the overturn, but figured I’d finally get this up today at cuatro meses. Regarding Roe, I will say that these last four months with Jamie have only and exponentially deepened my strong belief in the absolute sacredness of choice—of if and how and with whom (if anyone) and when. Taking away any potentially child-carrying person’s power to decide these things—insofar as one precariously may in these wild and holy and humbling realms—is so simply and completely wrong I cannot find other language sufficient to express my sense of the wrongness.
At the beginning of 2019 Rama and I entered an in-between. Mid-February we uprooted from the Oakland pad, leaving behind newly wed Madz and Jeff, and in their exclusive care the ladies (with the idea of a future “custody split” sitch when Rama and I had at some unknown future date settled ourselves into a yet-undetermined place). The extremely crudely sketched plan was this: to spend some months with my folks and bro in Huntington Beach tackling projects and hanging out, then to bop up to Nevada City for more of the same with Ram’s pops. Then to perhaps “honeymoon” at last—romantical pretext for a roving multi-week (or couple-month) international gallivant. And upon our return to seek a more permanent spot to plant ourselves.
That was a strange time. We were raw and reeling at the terrible gone-ness of Poundo, his terrible last day just weeks past, and were razed by the harrowing months of degenerating illness that had preceded it. Our packing and goodbyes, done in the fallout, felt so thornily tangled up with temporality, so enmeshed with death, our dingle-times-era’s ending pierced through also with the knowing that we were leaving Poundo’s last house, emptying ourselves from rooms that already echoed with the absence of him.
O the haunting of that place. One year later, in excruciating recurrence, Maddy and Jeff would themselves move out amidst and in the immediate aftermath of the loss of the cats. There’s such a booming tomb-door finality in my mind to their ultimate exit, the late-afternoon front door lock turned on those slant-lit scrubbed and gutted spaces. That house held so much; I know its walls ring with us. Our time there was a sumptuous years-long banquet, all the frivolity and all the meat—the big talks, big tears, the momentous break-ups and true loves found, defining choices made and enacted—the feathery fluttering vine-y tentacle-ing unfurling gorgeous dingle dailiness—the chatter and cackle and creature-worship and show-bingeing and scullery and belly-laughs and bullshitting and shit-talking and eating and drinking and singing and dancing. A feast. An unutterable gift.
February 2019: cut loose, floaty with grief, I was freer than I’d ever been, a strange balloon. Ram and I camped our way down the coast in our gills-teemed wagon (topped with a loaded pod Ram had found for a song on Craigslist). We’d packed the bulk of our stuff (that Madz didn’t want kept in circulation in the Oakland casa) in R’s cavernous storage unit, but an indefinite absence plus my fashion maximalism made for a very full vehicle. Our drive down was dogged by storminess, the encroaching atmospheric river making for less-than-primo surf conditions. Many lengthy checks, zero resultant paddle-outs. Still it was a trip to meander our way down under the loom of no hard dates or deadlines, “like free bloody birds.” I saw some beaches I never had before—like Jalama for one, its drizzly bluffs aglow with abounding mounds of buttery coreopsis gigantea.
The stretch between Morro Bay and Long Beach is for me a mostly unknown gray zone, and it felt very much in the terra ignota spirit of the moment to make some forays. R’s granny had invoked us to check out Leo Carrillo in Malibu, but alas the state park had burned badly in the preceding fall’s fires and was closed. Our PCH drive-by saw it bald and bleakly blackened, and so we fore-went a final stop and muscled through the actually extremely un-fun-to-drive Malibu to HB coastal route.
We arrived at my folks’ (understandably, after the long months of P’s sickness and his loss, the “move,” and the drawn-out journey down) weary to the bone. Our first week I was an absolute log bump; it was essentially all I could do to exist as a lolling molassesed couch blob, playing as I recall an extraordinary amount of phone as well physical-deck solitaire. Not long though Richard was herself again, and my default restless busy-ness resurrected.
Not customer-service-working was (and continues to be) an utter game-changer. I don’t want to get too into it because the PTSD is real, but native energetic porousness combo-ed with a few years’ stone-bleeding corporate retail plus a decade of restaurant work (iykyk) made for a true spirit purgatory/soul crucible situation. (Not for a second victim-ing: I had every privilege of education and ability and one hundred percent chose my choice to wage-work to subsist while I slowly meandered my own semblantly aimless meaning-seeking/making paths—which are today ongoingly unwinding and intuitive and obscure.)
Emerging so abruptly and absolutely from life under the ever-countdowning shadow loom of a next-work-shift dreadline (excessive, yes; hyperbolic, no) was dazzling and disorienting, and as I soon realized an almost agoraphobic shock. The blazing white freedom, the shimmering blank expanse of our unhorizoned calendar had me spinning: heady, thrilled, at a bit of a loss.
About a week after our So-Cal arrival we had a very windy night. Ram and I tend to sleep with a window cracked if we’re anywhere not-too-cold, and our wee hours bedroom was cacophonous with chime clang and branch clamor. Deeply asleep beside me, Ram snoozed on undisturbed by the ringing and roaring, and by my own brain-raced wakeful limb-tumult. To my other side Heidi (my parents’ wind-jittery Swiss shepherd mix) kept vigil on the floor, and looking down at her pricked ears and a ready-to-bolt posture, I was hit with a jolt of kinship; our shared vibration was that of a taut cord plucked. It sounds silly, but it felt like a significant aha!-type moment.
It had never really occurred to me before that I was in any way high-strung, I think because as is the way with most any human trait I am and I’m not (really I feel like I’m nothing if not the pull the of opposites, and suspect most people are like this?). I was perfectly positioned to nary-a-care, utterly unbound, released for the first time in life (since infancy) from all forms of external commitment and set schedule: no school, no work, left completely to my/our own devices. And instead of basking I was laid awake with frantic thinking (a drastic state of affairs: “one of God’s favorites,” next to nothing messes with my sleep).
The next morning I set about establishing some apparently needful structure and hit Tar-zhay for supplies: a compact dry-erase calendar board and a brand-spankin’ 7.5 x 10 inch blank-page Moleskine. I’ve had a version of this notebook since, and I employ it daily.
Writing this I looked back at that first tabula-rasa-times notebook, and I’d sunk myself right into it, the introspective works: value words, desire-identification exercises, “perfect day” visualizations, jotted tweaks of my ever-evolving routines, dream-life brain-dumps, long-term goals and monthly objectives break-downs. Reflections on many tarot spreads and loads of astrology notes.
Our freshman year of college my friend Ilona correctly guessed the sun signs of all my family members and closest from-home friends—just from what she’d gleaned of them from anecdotes. That remarkable demonstration was enough to get me splashing around in the discipline for the next decade plus. 2019 onward my interest kicked into a higher gear—cover-to-cover book-learning, raiding my parents’ Important Docs filing cabinet for birth certificates to dig into full-blown natal charts—and for the last year and some I’ve sprung for a subscription to the CHANI app, which is one of my favorite things. It’s got a lot—including what has been for me the hands-down uncanniest and most insight-enriching reading of my birth chart I’ve yet encountered—and every Sunday they release a general and also a paid subscriber rising-sign-specific reading of the upcoming semana’s astrology. Emma, who is also an acolyte, has said it’s like her weekly church, and I feel just the same. (As ever) I digress, but I’ve found it to be a super meaningful and effective tool for intuition-sifting, the establishment of a practice, and for anchoring within time—and I suppose by nature within space as well (seeing as it’s a whole stars thang).
Incidentally “practice” and “anchoring” have been keyword concepts for me in these last few unscheduled years—the aim for dailiness is one function of the the big Moleskine (referred to by me to me as “the Green Book”—where it was previously “the Black Book” because I couldn’t resist the cover color change-up). I make monthly lists (beginning with the new moon because I’m woo like that) of the things I want to try to do in a regular (everydayish) way, and when I do I tick them off on a weird little hand-drawn calendar.
What’s kind of cool about it, revisiting, is there are some things I had on monthly lists at the very beginning that have become so habitual they no longer bear noting (unless I want a gimme)—like starting every morning with hot lemon water. Twist my arm—I love lemons (to a degree that is problematic when I’m making food for other people; Rama’s in charge of its culinary applications now because I cannot be trusted), but at the Black Book’s beginning it was something I wanted to do that I wasn’t. (Ram also morningly partakes, and my folks got into it, and I think Ram’s mom too maybe? It’s really so pleasant to sip while you’re waiting on your brewing coffee, and it’s all health-beneficial and Goopy af.)
So yeah the Black-cum-Green Book isn’t all that deep all the time—like I use it to keep track of if I took my vitamins—but it has helped facilitate growth in some personally compelling realms. Like I somewhat regularly meditate now! And it doesn’t enrage me! In fact I low-key love it—rather than agitating it is a means by which I may readily enter a state of spun-thrummed rainbow-hued equanimity. Not to make it sound too glam or too serious—I’m intensely dabbly—but it is a thing I really enjoy I had previously believed was definitively not for me. And it was back in the Black Book’s genesis that I set the intention to explore it, and in the book where I took notes on my research and where I check-marked the routine doing of it.
Yoga too was previously “not-for-me” and is ahora a decidedly liked activity—beyond how freaking good it feels in/on the body, I furthermore value the balancing equal-and-opposite push-and-pull duality-vibes essence of it. It’s another discipline the Book helped me identify a curiosity to explore, and it was in the Book where I held myself accountable to actually on-the-reg practice.
Beyond its calendar/note-taking/intention-setting/check-marking functions, the self-work catch-all Moleskine has served too as my go-to soul-searching journaling space, not just a place to work on things, but also the place where I can decide what it is I want to work on. Have you ever done that exercise for clearing the mind where you ask: what am I thinking? Poof. No thought. I get that a little bit when I try to think about wished-for things. I’ll often prod my consciousness with the Rumi admonition: “You must ask for what you really want.” The Book’s been a great medium for trying to scry the inscrutability of true desire.
I think that lack of clarity is/has partly been a gendered/conditioning/women-as-nurturers thing (socialized not to solicit but to supply), and also a by-nature thing—I’m excessively energetically spongy and adept at reading the needs of the people around me, which can at times drown out my own. That’s something I worked on a lot in mid-to-late twenties therapy, and it’s a much less encompassing struggle for me now. I’m better at pulling back to let people do their own thing and trusting that they’re on their own course and whatever suffering they may encounter functions for learning and growth. (Big huge progress tbh.)
The instinct to protect my own person has been another block for me around the experience and identification of desire—there’s been an impulse to shield myself from the disappointment of not “getting what I want.” Yet throughout life so far I’ve many times been struck with the “thank god I didn’t get that thing I thought I wanted” realization—where the not-getting made space for or altered the course toward the unimagined-and-actually-much-better reality (“you get what you need”).
It’s more than that though. It’s also about power, and the (at least perceived) relinquishment of it. To supplicate “whatever gods may be,” to admit a want for an outcome over which one doesn’t have even the figment of control, is to surrender. To receive also feels like an act of surrender.
Grief I think—that never-desired rite—has initiated for me some substantive shifts over the last few years around surrender. Losing Poundo, and then (still very far from “healed”) one year later Nina and Lola about a week apart—what else could I do but bow? I’m yet leveled by it, probably at least daily I lie down under it. What can I do but let it be what it is—which is Love—and allow it to thunder over me?
The girls died in the very early days of Covid, during those first surreal global lockdowns. So much was unknown, and the news felt apocalyptic—reading stories of “mobile morgues” in NYC, an ICU doctor staging a drive to collect old iPads so in extremis patients could say good bye to their loved ones. Harrowing. And alongside such suffering I—quarantined in Huntington—was myself sitting hours and hours of FaceTime vigil with Maddy and the ladies (so many screenshots I felt compelled to take I’ll probably never ever look at; the thought of them makes my stomach drop out).
To disclaim: I don’t want to offend talking about pet death parallel to the dying of people, or to in any way diminish the scale of human suffering that was (and is) occurring. For me in that time, being by circumstance separated from the cats and losing them in the context of unprecedented worldwide isolation and such an extensive scope of loss, it was very much a “catch[ing] the thread of all sorrows” and seeing the “size of the cloth” experience. Yielding to and sitting with, releasing resistance against what was, letting go of fight in the helpless realms, knowing myself humbled, softening rather than hardening, holding fast to powerful gratitude for the good that had been and also the good that remained, allowing myself to be engulfed in the love that is the true core of grief—these were the lessons I kept learning, first with Poundo and then with Nina and Lola, and through all the concurrent pandemic affliction exterior to my own circumstances but running through me also.
I read a piece in Covid’s incipience Arundhati Roy had written (for the Financial Times of all pubs) that has resonated with me greatly throughout corona’s protracted unfolding. In it she invokes us not to long for a “return to ‘normality,’” to not “tr[y] to stitch our future to our past and refus[e] to acknowledge the rupture,” but to instead view the breakdown as a “gateway between one world and the next,” a “chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.” So powerful, this concept of pain as “portal,” both in the context of Covid and beyond.
The potency of that energy was certainly seen in June of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, at least temporarily. It made me hopeful—aside from my concern for the safety of protestors in terms of the still-unknown outdoor transmissibility of the coronavirus—but I also felt braced for the potential play-out that people (many of whose “this whole pervasive and systemic racism and cops murdering Black people thing is new news I’m going to proceed to scoldingly whitesplain to you” attitude had me baffled) would burn through the # and then abandon their activism. And not to be cynical but it was hard not to notice how (online at least) the Great White Awokening had largely petered out by August.
I have to think though that consciousness expanded at least a little…I really don’t know, and I don’t feel qualified to assess. I do think that the concept of privilege—and the hopeful practice of trying to personally identify it by those who possess it—has perhaps more definitively entered the discourse. So many aspects of this pandemic—really most any I can think of—have cast into starkest relief the deep inequalities in our country (and our world—the quarantine15 hashtag coinciding with headlines about the drastic worsening of global hunger was one concise instance of the brain-breaking dissonance)—and so much of that inequality is indelibly racist in origin and in the innumerable sufferings through which it manifests.
Recognition of one’s privilege is such a double-sided thing: an aspect of it is the acknowledgement of one’s own causes for gratitude, a generally affirming exercise. (It’s extremely helpful for me to find the often copious blessings contained within any hardship-situation I personally encounter.) The other half of privilege though is to look to where others do not enjoy the same positives, and to interrogate the roots of the discrepancies. It’s endless and necessary work, a perpetually evolving balancing act. I often feel overwhelmed by it; the scope and grossness of disparity and injustice engulfs.
Reflecting in 2020 on my own cush experience of Covid versus that of others left me feeling so humbled. Rama and I had ping-ponged back from Nor-Cal to begin another Huntington Beach stint with my folks and Franz when stuff started shutting down. The beginning was acutely stressful for me in the sense that I was very concerned particularly for the safety of my dad—our surreal fearful grocery trips in those first weeks wrecked my nervous system. Then we started using instacart (privilege upon privilege), and it all started as to feel very personally manageable. We didn’t go anywhere—not even the beach—save masked neighborhood dog walks where we’d literally cross the street if we came upon another person (like I said there wasn’t yet data on contagiousness outdoors). I loved those walks, and also derived profound nourishment from hours in the garden, both working on and marinating in my mom’s lush compact Eden. My response to flowers in that time—always tending toward the ecstatic—took a turn toward the downright mystical.
As far as what I was doing, it felt like more—and moreso—of the same things I’d been doing since that early 2019 switch-up. While those extremely privileged to “shelter-in-place” and “socially-distance” understandably grappled with the adjustment, I hoped they’d find the external slow-down to be as inwardly enriching as I had been/was continuing to find it to be. There definitely seemed to be a bump in the meditation/yoga/journaling inwardnessossity vibe of the zeitgeist. Even the bread-baking craze (again, keyword: privilege) felt so similar in energy to the spirit of culinary enthusiasm and experimentation that had marked my preceding year of dining-in fam-time homes-bodying (I had the bratty audacity to feel frustrated by the sudden flour shortage stymieing my own ongoing cake-baking tear).
When the weather started warming up and some people, bored of #shelteringinplace, began to without acknowledgement blow off Covid restrictions to essentially do as they pleased, I struggled with it. I have continued to grapple with finding understanding for behavior and choices over the last two years. It’s very hard for me to comprehend the lack of care some people seem to be willing to demonstrate for other people (and even more confusingly for themselves in some situations). And I do mean some people—there are also vast numbers who have performed unflagging service and sacrifice, plus so many who have continued to consider others even in the small choices that they daily make (I really really really do not get the majority of the mask drama—it’s such a small thing that could possibly make the largest difference in even one other life). I know that the inclination to disregard the needs of the collective if something is going to interfere with one’s own wants or preferences is somewhat hard-baked into the “independent” American mentality. I even kind of get it—at least I understand the importance of “freedom,” the frustration of perceiving constraint. (I’d actually say a need to feel “free” is one of my own deepest drives.) I also though think we have to be able to contain at the same time the knowledge that our individual actions can affect other people, and that part of being a decent human requires a willingness to consider the well-being of others. That doesn’t have to make us feel less free, knowing that we’ve chosen to contribute to spreading the free-feeling around more evenly. (And if you don’t feel safe you sure as shit don’t feel free.)
But back again to privilege. And back again to 2020. My Covid scenario was chill. I had every need met, and furthermore every comfort. I really missed nature time, but like I said the walks and garden sustained me. I’m also a confirmed introvert—I recharge solo—and so sinking into “hermitage” didn’t feel like a huge hardship, was in ways downright enjoyable. And furthermore I wasn’t actually at all alone—was ensconced with a beloved partner (being single during Covid sounds potentially poignant af) and fam. Late July Maddy and Jeff after a testing-bookended two-week quarantine came down to join the crew. After a decade and a half of living apart, having my immediate family all together again for those couple late-summer months was one of the greater gifts of my life so far, and the fact that it was only made possible by a pandemic that brought with it also so much death, destruction, and suffering is a jarring simultaneous knowledge to hold.
There were—and are—also so many people we didn’t get to see, times with loved ones irretrievably lost in the interest of keeping those same loved ones safe. In September 2020 when Ram and I re-relocated up to NC we were still seeing Bay Area fam only outside/masked because we didn’t want to get Ram’s pops—or Granny or Mom or D—sick. Obviously the vaccines changed the game so profoundly, but even now (and before I was pregnant and myself higher risk) Rama and I have prioritized the health of older at-risk family members over socializing more broadly—indoors. I’m inexpressibly thankful for the apparent low risk of (uncrowded) outdoor transmission, and for the blessing of living in a place where hanging outside is feasibly comfortable(ish) year-round. I’ve been so unutterably thankful for this last year’s hikes and “bitchy little strolls” with soul-pals; it’s made the godawful ongoingness of it all more bearable. (Though I miss my non-Cali friends.) Really my only breakdown about it so far was probably early December 2021 when Omicron was beginning to make headlines. Trying to balance the safety considerations of an apparently wildly contagious variant with the charged obligations of the holidays verily strained-to-tearing my threadbare capacity. For a few days there I was obsessively imagining running screaming into the woods, never to return (at least until after New Year’s).
The loss of in-person time with loved ones (thank god for facetime etc.) is by far my biggest personal Covid grief. I do also viscerally miss the carefree lightness of being able to move wantonly and unrestrainedly through space, but that feels like a relatively small and selfish concern, as well as a temporary state of affairs. Regarding travel though corona did as it turns out kind of permanently shitcan our “honeymoon” (at least in the just-the-two-of-us sense), but even that was/is a “would you like some privilege with your privilege?” sort of thing. The timing was (as it so often is) interesting: Ram and I had been on the cusp of booking some plane travel early 2020 when concerns about a new virus started coming down the pipe. We’d jotted down a preliminary itinerary—even skyscanned some flight times and prices: the idea was to stick around for the late-March Moms’ birthdays, then on March 30th to head to Oz (by way of Hawaii), where we’d ring in Ram’s own coomplay. Some campy country-hopping (all places por supuesto feat. surf), and by the time my birthday rolled around mid-May we’d be in Tahiti. I mean. Anyway yeah, we made the call to remove fingers from triggers while we watched how the Wuhan situation played out, and the rest is all-too-familiar history.
We had another layer of consideration running under travel plans—also privileged bigly—the question of a possible commencement of attempting to baby-make. The (all tradish and shit) notion was for me to have my IUD removed pre-departure, then to “see what happened” on the ‘moon. I was myself a honeymoon baby (though my folks were actually newly wed when I was conceived), and the idea had some charm as well as practicality. Post-travel we were envisioning a shifting-of-gears, planning to begin home-hunting in concerted earnest as opposed to zillowly dabbling, and were well aware that both those processes could be both unpredictable and prolonged. It felt sensible to get the potential baby ball rolling.
I was feeling very thankful as the gnarl of Covid became evident that we’d held off on both the flights and the IUD. We—along with the rest of the world—kept wondering when things would become more “normal” again. Surely by the fall? (Which fall?) Should we book some flights for the spring while they were still cheap? We kept kicking the can down the road.
The procreation q was also a dangler. I was hardly chomping at the bit to risk even the one non-essential medical visit to yank ye olde Paragard, to say nothing of all the prenatal doctor’s visits that would be necessary if we did indeed conceive. Living on our own those levels of exposure would have been nerve-racking—residing with older family members it sounded unthinkably reckless. Plus Rama was freaked out at the idea that being pregnant would reclassify me as “high risk” to serious illness from Covid—it didn’t sound great to me either. Time as it does kept moving on along, and it was beginning to land that the pandemic would likely continue to be A Thing into the foreseeable. Also foreseeable though was the availability of vaccines.
November 2020 we made the call and I scheduled an appointment with a very lovely Grass Valley OBGYN to have my IUD removed. Rama (who is in some ways such an impulsive Aries type, but who in more more preponderating domains really cannot be rushed—I blame his Taurus moon heh heh) needed a minute to absorb the magnitude of the possibility of up-knocking. My next cycle though we gave it a go, and I got pregnant.
I didn’t expect it to be so fast—I was well aware how circuitous and how fraught the process could be. When the morning before my dad’s birthday—January 21st—I got a very faint line on a cheapie test, and then that evening a definitive one on a more sensitive stick—I was very aware of the possibility that the pregnancy might not remain. Besides the stats I knew more than a few people who’d lost pregnancies. What I was not aware of though were the different ways one could miscarry.
We told my folks right away—we were still in Huntington post-Christmas, in the process of closing on the New Casa (January 25, 2021 would be the official date—I’m still pinch-me status—unutterably thankful), and not telling them something so huge in that intimate context didn’t seem possible. I endlessly cautioned them that it was far from certain I would stay pregnant, but they were super excited—as were Ram and I. With my mom’s invaluable help I found a potential spot up north to establish medical care and scheduled my first appointment—for the morning of February 25th—when I’d theoretically be at nine weeks. I ordered some books and started reading—I knew nothing, truly. My ignorance was almost absolute. There are certain areas where I don’t want to get my rat-brain chewing until their time has arrived. I didn’t read a thing about conception until it was time to try. I didn’t dip a toe into maternity until I got the two pink lines. In the books I consistently skipped over the miscarriage sections; it just felt jinxy, like trouble-borrowing, and my period was staying gone. Valentine’s Day I took another pregnancy test to “make sure,” and we told Ram’s fam (they too were over the moon).
It took us the month after closing on the house to wrap up Huntington Beach projects, with my Sonoma County birth center appointment as our hard deadline to make our way up north. True to form we came right up against it, pulling up to the new pad at sunset on the 24th. So memorable, those last wending country road miles at the end of the long south-to-north trek, the blush-skied waxing-gibbous moon rising over the undulating green sheep-cottoned hills that would constitute our new home zone. And arriving, the little old house pretty as a picture, the twilit flicker of bats, the towering exquisite dusk-purpled eucalyptus silhouetted with a few roosting (as it turned out resident) vultures. And that night, hearing for the first time the wind roar through those same yukes, with grilled cheese and tomato soup by candlelight and fire.
Bright and early the next morning we were bumping down our new backroad to the birth center. We did the paperwork, toured the facility, went through the folder of handouts and the rest of the introductory spiel. I pulled out my earnest list of questions for the midwife: were my skin products safe? (Yes.) How about “surfing”? (More like “falling”—answer: best not.) Would it be okay for me to lift heavy stuff and to—with masking and ventilation—use cleaning products and paint (moving/new house things)? It would. At the end of the questions the midwife said it was time for the fun part—checking out the baby! I climbed aboard the table and got jellied up, and the midwife started swirling the ultrasound wand around my stomach. I literally did not even know to be nervous. I hadn’t bled (in books and shows and movies miscarriages invariably involve blood). I’d even taken that precautionary pregnancy test mid-February and had been extra reassured with a strong positive. It became clear however from the midwife’s change in energy that all was not necessarily well. She said that she was having trouble finding the baby, but that the birth center’s equipment wasn’t the most powerful, and also maybe the timing wasn’t right (I doubted that, as my cycles have always been pretty clockwork-like). She was going to try to get us in at the hospital where they had a much better machine and we could clear things up. She wasn’t sure when they’d have availability, it could be a couple days….
It wasn’t, thank god. She was able to get us an appointment for a few hours later. Those were not enjoyable hours. We pulled into a nearby park parking lot and I began to grimly google. Turns out there was a thing called “silent miscarriage.” No blood did not in fact equal no problem. I was supposed to drink 32 oz. of water an hour before the hospital ultrasound. Pre-vaccine possibly-pregnant Covid-times I was not as a rule going into public bathrooms, but I felt like I needed to risk it before the pre-scan hydration. Unfortunately every bathroom we tried was closed…because Covid. It reached the point of dark farce, driving around and around Santa Rosa, me desperately needing to pee, striking out over and over until we hit the hour mark and I decided it was too late per the directions I’d received—definitely a multitudinous hell-circle experience. Then at the hospital we were informed at the front desk that—also because of Covid—I’d be going it alone.
Rama headed back to the car, and I, my gloom absolute, made my solitary way down labyrinthine corridors toward Radiology and Imaging. As soon as the tech lubed me up she informed me that my bladder was too full to see anything (YUP) and sent me to empty it. When she could see what she did was ultimately still not anything. For a while she silently moved the implement around, occasionally taking pictures and marking measurements. After a bit she took pity and asked tentatively if I had any idea about what was happening. I said that they hadn’t been able to find anything at the birth center, that they had sent me to the hospital where they had the better machine…that it might be a miscarriage? She paused, then seemed to decide to off-the-books put me out of my misery, and confirmed that what she was seeing looked like a “blighted ovum,” showing me on the screen the black blob of empty gestational sac. No pregnancy therein.
I moved my stiff body back to the parking lot and tearlessly told Rama. One of my first feelings was hot regret at every person (a thankful very few) with whom we’d prematurely shared our “happy news.” The idea of having to update with the shitty follow-up made me sick, and I was anxious to get it over with so I could have the psychic space for my own feelings. I vehemently pledged that if we got pregnant again we’d keep it mega-under-wraps until we’d received multiple assurances and confirmations and progressed weeks and weeks further down the timeline. And so we sent the requisite texts and email, then drove back to our very new (to us) home.
I don’t remember a whole lot about that night. I think I only cried once, when Rama gave me a hug from behind and told me I was tough, and it was a few quick violent sobs. I felt more than anything angry, at my brain for the hopes I’d apparently gotten up despite myself, and at my stupid body for not realizing it wasn’t pregnant anymore and continuing on as if it were otherwise. A blighted ovum is basically where a non-viable pregnancy is resorbed but its empty sac remains and carries on making pregnancy hormones—which is why you’ll still get a positive on at-home tests even if the pregnancy itself has already terminated. The body will eventually catch on and physically miscarry, but it can take weeks. Languishing like that sounded horrible—I was to keen to get it over with—and so I opted to expedite with misoprostol two days later.
(Squeamish readers—I am one—please skip ahead.) I didn’t expect there to be so much blood and matter. It felt like at least twenty periods in one, and interestingly it totally erased any anger I was feeling toward my own slow-on-the-uptake body, or really any anger in general. I was filled with tender compassion, comprehending that “o, that was actually not nothing; that was a lot.” And when my poor body a couple weeks later—right on time down to the day—put out the frailest attempt at a “period,” I experienced such a profound appreciation—for its mysterious wisdom, its resilience, and its strength.
In general the whole thing wasn’t too bad. It sucked, but I really had been aware of the tenuousness of early pregnancy—if not the actual mechanics of blood versus no blood—and beyond that aspect did not feel blindsided. And it may sound very strange, but in a way I felt thankful…to have my faith flexed I suppose? It’s all too easy to pontificate that “everything happens for a reason” when everything is happening exactly the way one could wish it to be. It felt punchably lucky, a little insipid, the perfectly lined up timing of it all. Dreamy new home to be shared with my true love (just having found Rama still every day feels to me like the most piggish gift, the most excessive blessing), and bibbidi bobbidi boo first-time-trying pregnant to boot? A bit much, a little too easy. Not to be all “real gods require blood” (though looking down the barrel of childbirth as I write this and deeply feeling the “everything costs” seriousness of the transaction that occurs when a new life comes in—all the evil eyes, all the wood knocks), but it hadn’t felt balanced.
Also—and I’m not going to put any of this shit on a kid, and pls not to detach eyeballs from rolling—but I wasn’t totally feeling the potentially doormatty people-pleaser vibe of a Libra sun in the context of Ram’s and my bigly stubborn and strong-willed immediate families and own persons. Not shitting on Libras—some of my favorite people etc.—but as Franz—who is Libra sun/moon/rising(!)—can probably attest, it’s a bit fraught being the go-along-to-get-along kid navigating the pigheadery of an Aquarius/Aries/Taurus/Leo-sunned familia. (Ram’s fam’s also an array of intense suns: Aquarius/Aries/Aries/Capricorn/Scorpio.) But also I can’t wait to be totally surprised by the utterly unimaginable being we’ll soon be meeting, and have zero urge to delimit that human’s numinous selfhood with astrology or any other thing. Astrology is (complex, compelling, and often existence-enriching) play, and it—like other intuitive tools—should only ever facilitate expansion.
From the offset the concept of tying to have a kid—and even more so the much longer thought of parenthood itself—felt contingent for me on striving to maintain that energy of radical openness, of lightness as part and parcel alongside the obvious gravity, and I suppose of trust. Being pregnant and then not did take away some of my chill. I felt a little less like the dandelion of possibility had been cast into the breeze, became more cognizant of a bonafide want, the fulfillment of which was neither in my control nor at all certain. Back again to that recurrent lesson of surrender, and the acute vulnerability of conceding a desire. Those few post-miscarriage months of “trying” before again becoming pregnant taxed me more than I wished them to. It felt like such a rare raw thing to admit to a true want and to place myself “at-the-mercy.” (And I do know that pregnancy accomplished is just the blippiest beginning of the at-the-mercy-ness of having kids.)
We did end up conceiving again reasonably promptly and without much muss or fuss—and have been in this pregnancy so far very fortunate (and it is far—it’s my due date as I write this sentence), but I’ve felt very humble in this in-between. My mom, after our looking-good 20-week anatomy scan admonished me to try to stop worrying and to “start enjoying” this singular and limited time. And I really deeply have—and am—appreciating. But my hubris is zero—I’m taking nothing for granted.
I want to express the massive compassion I feel for anyone who has gone through or is experiencing any form of struggle or suffering or hurtful uncertainty or ambivalence in these areas. This shit runs deep and we have very limited control—even if it’s over finding the partner with whom it feels right enough to embark upon an attempt at the procreation path (if the desire is to do it partnered). The bio-clock aspect—though I do think grossly exaggerated as an extremely effective patriarchal fear-mongering tool—fraughtens it up even further. To-baby-or-no felt for me like it became a pressing and pervasive question rather suddenly, and judging by the number of infants recently born or soon-to-be to several of my circles’ same-age friends, not just for me. It’s a bit of a double existential whammy: a) in case you weren’t aware, your time in this body is finite, and you might be running out of it when it comes to trying to do this huge life-exploding thing (if you indeed want to blow everything up—that query alone has copious chew) and b) this enormous question is eminently concerned with existence—to attempt to bring about or not a new being, the hostage-to-fortune extremity if you do—and the inevitable envisioning into the future the (hopefully lengthy) extension of your own lifeline, picturing it forking forward definitively with or without kids. It’s life and death stuff, and like any other mortality contemplation it can get real claustrophobic real quick.
I think it can be useful, if one is feeling constrained by baby?!-brain, to as a practice step out of that thought chamber and remember that space is big and time is relative, existence is myriad and often the wildest ineffable magic is what comes in when you manage to chill out, open up, and let it. And regardless of what does or doesn’t happen, it’s bottom line a lot more enjoyable to exist in possibility—and expansiveness—than it is to get cramped or panicky, to envision limits or to get stuck in thought-ruts of regret. I don’t mean any of this to come off as preachy or smug, feel (evil eyes abounding) unspeakably humbled by what’s been so far my own good luck (makes me a little queasy to reflect, though I know that’s my own ongoing work around the supplicatory “control”-ceding of asking and receiving, and my compulsive fear-rooted construction of “limitations”). I guess bottom line I’m saying I hope for everyone to be feeling more well-being/peace/joy/love for what is, less fear/grief/helplessness/lack. And also just that I want to acknowledge these spheres can contain a great deal of deep-cutting gnarl.
On expansiveness, and back to that early 2019 Huntington Beach windstorm and my insomniac lightning-struck awareness of my own weight-of-the-world constriction contrary to the reality of my by-all-means carefree situation: I think that night set me down a track. (In my mind it is the glowy white inside of an inexorably curving conch, spiraling me closer and closer to myself.) It indicated a dissonance, one I’ve worked on pretty perpetually since. Self Work 101 and basic af, but I’ve thought a lot about my own thought, and about the energy out of which I’m thinking. Once you start watching yourself think you don’t stop, and bad feelings can really lose their teeth, or at the very least not sink them in as deep. I’d already experienced some big moments in twenties therapy where an open-eyed reframe could in one session defang an old monster, re-route a years-canyoned cognition gulch. That gusting So-Cal night was one of those done solo: the simple recognition that my wide-awake worrying was objectively causeless—that I had perhaps become a person who lived in dread by default—got me well on my way to moving out of that mode. Enter the Black/Green Book and what might’ve been(?) my first concerted Personal-Growth Effort—certainly the first where I had the time and energetic space to really get into it.
At some point during the ensuing “self-development” tear I listened to Liz Gilbert’s book Big Magic, which I’d checked out on a somewhat whim. (If you don’t know about the Libby app—FREE audiobooks linked up with your library card, subject to any library’s holds etc., but still!—know abut the Libby app. Be warned though it might steal your boredom, and “boredom” I’ve come to realize can alchemize into imaginative yield.) Years back I’d given Eat, Pray, Love a shot and was so annoyed by Gilbert’s pick-me humble-braggadocio (Julia Roberts was perfectly cast in the unwatchably stanky film adaptation, though Andie MacDowell or dear god Anne Hathaway also would’ve done nicely) I abandoned the book at Love (and I’ve muscled through to finish a lot of irritating books). So, not previously a Liz fan, but a freebie libro about creativity—why not.
Big Magic was a nice book, sincere. Overall it rocked my world not at all, but I do believe it was written in the spirit of service. And I took from it one significant nugget: Gilbert talks about what she terms “trickster” energy, in opposition to what she calls “martyr” energy. Martyr energy is “dark, solemn, macho, hierarchical, fundamentalist, austere, unforgiving, and profoundly rigid,” whereas the trickster is “light, sly, transgender, transgressive, animus, seditious, primal, and endlessly shape-shifting.”
Reader, I electrified. That right there was it, the tension at the heart of the anxiety. A piece at least of the long-wrestled-with heaviness. I’d felt so long beleaguered by the martyr, in my obedient “good student” perfectionism, that aforementioned “weight of the world,” the requisite (or was it?) gravity of existence. But I am at core a trickster. Even at my most solemn and en-burdened times there’s been the burn-it-all-down undercurrent, the just-try/can’t-catch-me/fuck-all-y’all bent. It’s felt so good the last few years—following these realizations—to more deliberately inhabit those parts of self. I’ve always turd-stirred and laughed when I “shouldn’t” and relished light evil and chaos and mischief and wickedness and gossip and mess, but I don’t think I’d totally owned these inclinations, much less cultivated them. Part of my recent work had been the active development of my innate mercurial nimbleness, the delight in my own swift shifts and about-facing changeability, and by extension the cultivation of the ability “to hold two opposed truths in the mind at the same time,” to consciously live in duality. I can’t now not think a thing without reflecting on the validity of its opposite thought. When I feel a thought constricting it’s a great relief to hold it but also to simultaneously leap my consciousness away into an airier space.
And to recognize that this “tricksterishness” is not opposed to reverence or the holding of space for the sacred. It’s in fact I think fundamental.
Gilbert’s Big Magic ends with a section about Balinese dance. Basically Bali has an ancient tradition of sacred dance, with “vigilantly protected” choreography that was for centuries ritually performed in temples “under the purview of priests.” When tourism came to Bali in the 1960s dancers began performing these dances outside the temples, entertaining Westerners in their beach resorts. Some of the more “high-minded” Westerners, according to Gilbert, were “appalled” by this “desecration of…sublime” “holy art.” This “spiritual, artistic, and cultural prostitution” was “sacrilege.” The priests, though they weren’t themselves so preoccupied with “distinctions between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane,’” came up with an easy solution. They returned the traditional dances exclusively to the temples, and for the tourists created new “gibberish” “divinity-free” dances. And yet these new dances “became increasingly refined.” The “freedom and innovation” of the new form fostered a fresh transcendence. They became in effect more sacred. The priests wanted a piece of that, and basically a sacred-profane star-belly-sneetch situation ensued.
[T]he meaningless dances became holy dances, because the holy dances had become meaningless.…It had all bled together. The lines had blurred between high and low, between light and heavy, between right and wrong…between God and earth.
A little heavy-handed, but a tidy little fable about the sacredness of play, the divinity of irreverence. Laughter as a channel, joy as the essence of god.
It was funny to me too, the dance motif, because it had come up for me previously in my philosophizing dilettantery (I’ve actually shared a part of this quote here before; the brain-refrain-nessossity is real). I’d gone down some wikipedia mysticism wormhole, and came upon a succinct sum-up of “the nature of existence” that resonated with me as much and as lastingly as any has. The first time I read it I conflated its author’s name with that of Thomas Merton—whom I’d no doubt encountered during Catholic schooling—and had thought it was his gringo recapitulation. Turns out totally different white boy, and one I actually tangentially knew: I took Christopher Wallis’s Introduction to Meditation De-Cal (De-Cals were what UCB called its Pd.D.-taught for-fun fewer-unit classes) my senior year of college. Not sure I was at that point as much enriched by the class as I would be at this far woo-er stage, but I definitely took home a little treasure (a Tibetan love meditation, a low-key shamanic drumming exercise where I in my mind became a wolf running/playing with wolves—one of the most magical experiences of my life so far). The quote, which I’m going to now post in full because that’s the way I always read it:
All that exists, throughout all time and beyond, is one infinite divine Consciousness, free and blissful, which projects within the field of its awareness a vast multiplicity of apparently differentiated subjects and objects: each object an actualization of a timeless potentiality inherent in the Light of Consciousness, and each subject the same plus a contracted locus of self-awareness. This creation, a divine play, is the result of the natural impulse within Consciousness to express the totality of its self-knowledge in action, an impulse arising from love. The unbounded Light of Consciousness contracts into finite embodied loci of awareness out of its own free will. When those finite subjects then identify with the limited and circumscribed cognitions and circumstances that make up this phase of their existence, instead of identifying with the transindividual overarching pulsation of pure Awareness that is their true nature, they experience what they call “suffering.” To rectify this, some feel an inner urge to take up the path of spiritual gnosis and yogic practice, the purpose of which is to undermine their misidentification and directly reveal within the immediacy of awareness the fact that the divine powers of Consciousness, Bliss, Willing, Knowing, and Acting comprise the totality of individual experience as well—thereby triggering a recognition that one’s real identity is that of the highest Divinity, the Whole in every part. This experiential gnosis is repeated and reinforced through various means until it becomes the nonconceptual ground of every moment of experience, and one’s contracted sense of self and separation from the Whole is finally annihilated in the incandescent radiance of the complete expansion into perfect wholeness. Then one’s perception fully encompasses the reality of a universe dancing ecstatically in the animation of its completely perfect divinity.
The “reality of a universe dancing ecstatically in the animation of its completely perfect divinity”—I return often to this thought, and I guess to the image of dancing Shiva.
A rather transcendent anchor, one that both allows for and indeed revels in the intricate complexity of experience, that affirms my sense that we are god, god is love, and all the symmetric-and-transitive-property variations thereof. And that leaves unlimited space for play, like that of this bit of writing’s joyful indulgence in thought-sprawl, this drifting swimabout in what has been the particular nebulousness of my brainspace these recent both personally and perhaps collectively strange and blobbish years. It’s been a mind dump I’m feeling pressed to wrap up, because I am now (writing takes time—and I’m the snailiest) 40 weeks and four days pregnant and cognizant of the borrowedness of this pre-bb time. I also am extremely thankful for it; getting to complete this thing—however sloppily—was a big wish. It really is quite the life limen I’m finishing this on, my so-far profoundest threshold, the “doorsill where the two worlds touch” (“the door is round and open”…or getting to be—I’m the worst don’t hate me and pls god not to smite with an extra extra dose of pain for the repugnant cervix pun).
Because whimsy, because mercurial, because play, I’ll end with another agile dance, one of the places the enduring Nataraja takes my ever-associating brain, and very much in the trickster spirit. The last impenetrable and vibe-y lines of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian:
And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.