Ursula

Seven years ago today after 24 hours of labor in the darkest hours of morning I miscarried a baby. My sons were 3 and 4 years old, I had just returned to college that semester, and their father and I had been separated for a year. It was not an ideal time to have another baby. Furthermore, the man by whom I was pregnant was a raging drug addict whom I loved very much, but who had no capacity to love me and didn’t want me, or anyone ever, to be pregnant with his child.

And yet, I was happy. Hell, I was downright courageous. I was going to have that baby, and I was going to make a good life for all three of my kids, and even if we were poor, we would have had a lot more love than some people ever know. Of this I was sure. So I loved that little bundle of cells growing in my belly fiercely. I invoked all the bear mama energy I could. No one or nothing, no negative thoughts or nay saying would keep me from my mothering of another child, for that is the thing I do best.

I sang to my tiny baby, sang songs of love and devotion, sang Sinead O’Connor’s “Three Babies” over and over again. I wrote to her, I prayed to her. But this pregnancy felt different. I had a hard time connecting with this baby. With each of my other pregnancies I could feel my baby, not just as a physical presence in my body, but as a spiritual identity, as another personality interacting in my psychic space. This baby seemed lost.

I understood why a spirit approaching this reality could have felt daunted. With all of the challenges I faced with this pregnancy the idea of it had not been well embraced by all of my community, and this approaching child was not being made to feel particularly welcome by her father and his community either. So I pleaded with her. My journal from that time period is full of entries in which I ask, “Where are you? Why can’t I feel you? Are you really coming?” and in which I say, “ I love you. I want you. I’ll do anything for you. I will make your life good, I promise you.”

She heard me. But she had to go.

But oh! She went dragging my heartstrings behind. I thought I would die. I wanted to die. I wanted to lie in my bed and slowly let every last bit of my life force bleed from between my legs. The only things that kept me tethered to this reality were the sweet little boys of mine who made it. I knew I could never leave them behind for a phantom child who had only ever lived in the ethers. I also knew that my pain over the loss of this baby was more acute, more devastating because the little boys staring at their sad mommy in confusion and sympathy were what made the lost baby so real to me. In their warm, soft bodies I could feel tangibly what was lost to me. I was in agony.

In the months following my miscarriage I processed my experience in the way that makes the most sense to me. I studied it. I analyzed it. I researched it. I found that I was not alone. Millions of women miscarry babies. It is not an uncommon occurrence. But even more importantly, millions of women also grieve for their lost babies. In a culture in which death and dying are things we do on TV or that happen in far away lands, but not things we acknowledge or embrace, nobody wants to hear a woman mourn a child that was never even born. No one wants to feel your pain, so instead they greet you with nonsense, cliché sayings. “It was meant to be. At least you have healthy children. You can try again. It wasn’t good timing anyhow. There must have been something wrong with it. All things happen for a reason.”

I didn’t need any of that. I needed only for people to recognize that I hurt. Whether they could understand it or not, I had experienced a loss. I needed the space to grieve and the time to heal, which I have done.

In the ensuing years I have been able to look at my loss more objectively. I know other women who have lost babies. My dear friend just lost her 6th baby two months ago. I have known women whose babies died much later in their pregnancies or were stillborn. Another friend lost her only son just before his 7th birthday (and she didn’t make it, she took her own life within 6 months of the accident). During my midwifery internship in Jamaica I lived in a world in which women lose pregnancies, lose babies, lose children as a matter of fact in the course of their lives. Witnessing these losses made me question whether it was valid for me to have mourned so hard for a baby lost in the first trimester, whether it made sense that I would have experienced so much pain upon losing just one baby who was with me so briefly. I cannot say how I would handle a similar loss today. I think the gift of that lost baby was the catharsis of my grief process. I had been hurting and sad for many reasons for many years prior to that loss, and once I made it through the worst of my sorrow and depression following that miscarriage, I have never experienced that level of despair again. Gratefully.

Today in honoring the anniversary of the loss of this child I am more wistful, more wishing than sad. I have never been pregnant again and I still deeply long to carry a child in my belly and to bring that baby forth into my loving community and into the fold with my now more grown sons. I wonder who this person would have been. I have no way of knowing whether that baby was a girl, but we all felt she was. I guess I hoped she was, blessed as I am with only boys. When the fierce mama bear rose up inside of me to protect this little spirit I knew then that she was my little bear cub. My Ursula, my little bear. I had played with her name while she still lived in my belly and thought perhaps she would be Ursula Twilight, but instead she came just as night was breaking into morning, and so she is instead Ursula Dawn. I have a tattoo of a red bear in the sunrise on my left shoulder commemorating her. Now I permanently wear my heart on my sleeve.

Today in honoring the loss of this child I am thinking of her father whom many years later did come to love me. We are so close now, love each other so deeply, and I believe that closeness truly began to develop while I lay in my bed bleeding, fearing the inevitable loss before me when he came to sit by my side and rest his hand for the first and only time on my belly, and later when we walked together to the cemetery and laid to rest in the sacred ground the tiny unformed body and placenta and birth blood of our child, and earlier when our genetic coding and our DNA combined in one entity however short lived. And today he is no longer a drug addict. With 13 months clean behind him he still faces every day the challenges of learning to live his life fully present, fully willing. But he is still so scared to bring forth another life on the planet, is still so unsure that he will ever have the skills to commit himself to partnership with me or anyone, let alone to fatherhood.

Today I hope that he will give birth to himself and find the love he needs for us to bring our love to fruition and perhaps together to give birth to our love in another body.

Three Babies
(Sinead O'Connor)

Each of these
My three babies
I will carry with me
For myself
I ask no one else will be
Mother to these three
And of course
I'm like a wild horse
But there's no other way I could be
Water and feed
Are not tools that I need
For the thing that I've chosen to be

In my soul
My blood and my bones
I have wrapped your cold bodies around me
The face on you
The smell of you
Will always be with me

Each of these
My three babies
I am not willing to leave
Though I tried
I blasphemed and denied
I know they will be returned to me
Each of these
My babies
Have brought you closer to me
No longer mad like a horse
I'm still wild but not lost
From the thing that I've chosen to be

And it's `cause you've thrilled me
Silenced me
Stilled me
Proved things I never believed
The face on you
The smell of you
Will always be with me

Each of these
My three babies
I will carry with me
For myself
I ask no one else will be
Mother to these three