Oh boy, what are we doing here?

I have had a flicker of a hankering to write lately, and I keep coming back to this space (which I have kept locked up off an on for the past few months) and wondering what we are going to do with this blog, which is nearly 20 years old.

TWENTY YEARS OLD.

I’m sitting in a Mt. Juliet coffee shop right now writing a post for a blog that is older than the person one table over. He just looked over at my screen. I feel more than a little ancient right now. Does he even know what it is that I’m doing? Should I ask him what “blog” is short for? Let me make my display smaller. Okay, I think we’re safe now.

Things have been increasingly quiet here for a while for many reasons. I think I’ve written before about having my blog used against me in court during the custody trial to show that I am a bad mother. The chilling effect from having my writing weaponized against me has lasted a lot longer than I ever thought it would. It’s been hard to be too candid, you know? So I sort of started microblogging on Instagram and TikTok like everyone else. And we all know how that turned out. It sucks and we hate it.

Recently I’ve been keeping my posts here behind a password login, but I recently took that down and decided to give myself the space back — if I want it — to write and share any- and everything. Why had I password protected everything? Honestly, I started to get self-conscious about all the stupid shit on this blog. My drunken, idiot 25-year-old brain spewed a lot of nonsense on here back in the day and every time I go back and read, I find something that makes me cringe down deep in my soul. I knew that was a risk when I started blogging, but I feel extra tender about it lately.

That and I have certain family members who like to check up on me, and I would rather just not deal with that, honestly. But I have to deal with that.

Anyway, I have so much to catch you up on. I hope to come back here again soon.

Taking Eyedot Creative full time

It’s been quite a while since I posted here but I have been busy, very busy.

In fact, I am doing something very big.

Check it out.

From the mouths of babes: January 2021

Holden

Without any prompting, ask your child these questions and write down EXACTLY what they say.

Holden, 9 years old:

1. What is something mom always says to you? I love you.

2. What makes mom happy?  Being kind and respectful.

3. What makes mom sad? Her child getting injured.

4. How does your mom make you laugh? When she says “bonk.”

5. What was your mom like as a child? Cautious.

6. How old is your mom? 39.

7. How tall is your mom? 5 foot 4. I mean, that’s my guess. [I tell him I’m 5’6″] I just wanna say you’re as tall as Calisto.

8. What is her favorite thing to do? Snuggle with the dogs.

9. What does your mom do when you’re not around? Plays World of Warcraft.

10. If your mom becomes famous, what will it be for? An artist

11. What is your mom really good at? Painting. Or drawing! Drawing.

12. What is your mom not very good at? Doing cartwheels. A lot of stuff she’s not good at.

13. What does your mom do for a job? Are you a co-worker? You work on Hands On Nashville.

14. What is your mom’s favorite food? Chicken nuggets

15. What makes you proud of your mom? Being kind. Or being funny! Or I’m proud of you because you know how to combine the lifestyle with the workstyle. Know what I mean?

16. If your mom were a character, who would she be? I guess Dorothy?

17. What do you and your mom do together? We play, snuggle, watch TV, and kiss each other on the lips. [laughs] Kiss on the cheeks!

18. How are you and your mom the same? We both are white people.

19. How are you and your mom different? We have a different gender. We have different sexes. Gender is a kind of music you play.

20. How do you know your mom loves you? Because she says so!

21. What does your mom like most about your step-dad? That he’s handsome.

22. Where is your mom’s favorite place to go? I guess the Adventure Science Center?

23. How old was your Mom when you were born?  I think it was like 27 or something? Or was it 29? I was close!

Past answers: 202020192018

Random thoughts on miscarriage

• The algorithms don’t know what to think. It takes them a while to catch on when you’re newly pregnant and start serving you ads for maternity clothes, but then when your web searches turn darker and more desperate, the algorithms get confused and serve you ads for baby stuff and period panties at the same time. Your feed gets really weird for a few days as the bots try to suss out what you can best be sold.

• Is this underwear stain period blood or miscarriage blood?

• I googled a lot of things about miscarriages as the event was happening, and one thing I saw over and over in people’s personal accounts is that they were surprised by the people who never acknowledged their miscarriage or said anything to them about it. I thought to myself, I won’t care about that — people have their own lives and aren’t worried about mine. But it turns out there are people who know who have not said anything about it to me, and it feels so strange. On the other hand, I have been overwhelmed with love and support from other people, so it balances out. The whole exercise has led me to wonder whether there were times in my life when I missed the opportunity to reach out to someone in my orbit who was going through this very thing, and I was just oblivious.

• We had picked out a girl name (we were still spitballing boy names) and every now and again the name in its entirety wafts into my head and I think about how lovely and meaningful it would be to give our child this name. That name will have to wait. That name may never be, at least not because of us.

Head for the hills

The view from Snoopers Rock.

I’m writing this from the top of a ridge near Soddy-Daisy, where I am seeking refuge for a few days in an apartment atop a family’s carport. (Say what you will about AirBnb, but it may have saved my sanity this weekend.)

I’ve been in the shit lately, with the miscarriage and the pain stuff and the surgery, of course, but also with just normal life in a pandemic — the working remotely and the virtual school and the never leaving the house and the boredom with eating the same garbage over and over and the mundanity of living life in pajamas and house shoes with no boundaries between work and not work. The dread and worry about the decisions other people are making, and trying to withhold judgment about literally everything everyone else is doing while ALSO worrying that other people think about me the same way. There’s so much guilt and worry tangled up in every decision I make for my family to keep us safe or to keep us sane.

I don’t have the bandwidth to do better than I’m doing right now. I am in survival mode and have been for months. I try to give myself grace but it’s taking a massive toll. I feel like I’ve aged ten years in eight months.

It’s just been a slog, this repeating sequence of chores and work and school and homework and grocery delivery of the same boring shit we’ve been having delivered for months, the same meals, the same everything. I stare at my phone because I have nothing left to give. I can’t create. I feel only fatigue. Not inspiration, or curiosity, or joy.

It’s exhausting and it’s all happening in the space that used to be my respite, my escape. I’m depleted, cashed out, and feeling completely demoralized that we have many months left of this because people can’t just WEAR A MASK, PAUSE THEIR PARTYING and not act like selfish idiots.

I started to crack up. But I caught myself. And I realized I had to have a change of scenery, if I could do it safely.

So on a whim I booked a little apartment for myself for a few days. I found one up on a ridge in close proximity to outdoor places of interest where I can just wander and observe. There is no one here to ask me to do anything for them. I don’t have to worry about anyone else but myself. I have been driving around and seeing what I can see, staying away from other people, and putting new sights into my brain so my brain can feel better. I have just left myself open to whatever the world wanted to show me and for two days I have stumbled on beautiful thing after beautiful thing. I offer my gratitude, again and again, to whatever cosmic force is pulling those strings for me. You’ve done me a solid, cosmic force.

I didn’t know that my hardware would malfunction if it went too long without new input and information. I now realize, clearer than ever before, that I am an observer, a collector. I need to see the things and smell the things and hear the things. But I also need solitude. That part I knew. I need to think about the things I have seen and consider what they mean — quietly, at my own pace. I use the things I collect in my brain, eventually, for stories, for descriptions, for inspiration. I take photos not just as a record of where I have been, but so I can use them some day in some project I don’t even know about yet.

I’ve always thought of travel as being something I liked to do but I didn’t realize how not going anywhere ever would make me really, really sad, because it was depriving my little collector brain of new information. I also didn’t expect how, at the moment I saw some new and interesting things, my brain would be extremely pleased and grateful. Just picture me driving through a little mountain town, sobbing at how cute and new to me it is. Because that happened. More than once.

I needed this break. It has been a balm for my frayed nerves. I believe all parents deserve a break like this. I’m grateful I have the means to just get out of dodge for a few days; I realize that’s an immense privilege and I don’t take that lightly. I’m happy to have seen the things I’ve seen this weekend. In spite of all the horrors we visit on each other, this world we inherited really is beautiful and we would be wise to drink up the sight of it before it’s gone.

Operation: Take Out the Trash is underway

I scheduled surgery for Election Day partly to be funny (“wake me up when it’s over, haw haw”) but mostly because it was the earliest they could see me to remove the 7-centimeter endometrioma that had invaded my one remaining ovary.

The surgery went well (as far as I know) and the doctor was able to preserve the ovary, which is very good news. He reported back to Richard (while I was still conked out) that I have “extensive” endometriosis, but I am curious (and will find out on Monday at my post-op checkup) if that means active endo or endo damage/scar tissue or both. I have lots of questions to ask, of course.

I’ve been doddering around the house since Tuesday, working through the pain and soreness by napping and lounging and watching lots of television. Like the last time I had laparoscopic surgery for an endometrioma, it has felt a bit like I got hit by a truck. I have multiple incisions this time, which I think hurts more. Running in the background of all this has been the election. The race was too close to call on Tuesday night so for three days I’ve been glued to my phone, refreshing Twitter, trying to extract some news, any news, to allay my fear that the orange man might not go away.

This morning they finally called it — the orange man is behind and can’t catch up. It took days of ballot counting in battleground states but it’s undeniable now (even if he and his cultists are denying it). I am so relieved. I am so proud (a woman vice president!!!). I am so tired. There is so much more work to be done but the first step is the removal of the bad thing itself.

Tuesday mercifully delivered a twofer on that front. This year has been brutal but not without bright spots.

The pain monster

If I were to give the Universe’s writers’ room a note on this season of the show called My Life, it might say, simply: This feels like a bit much. Why force her to go through the emotional roller coaster of a miscarriage in order to discover the cyst? Seems overly cruel and unrealistic. Maybe save the miscarriage for another season. Don’t burn all your plot points at once.

But the writers are the pros, not me.

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The past two weeks have been something.

Where to start? I’m fighting exhaustion, brain fog, frustration, etc., to even write this.

I suppose the story starts with the miscarriage, which I wrote about here.

On Tuesday evening (Oct. 13) I started feeling some abdominal pain — what felt to me like an endo flare-up. I took ibuprofen and made friends with the heating pad and tried to knock it back like I always do. I called my gynecologist’s office and told the nurse about the miscarriage and the pain, and asked if I needed to come in to confirm that it was progressing normally. She told me just go to the ER if I bled through a pad an hour or if I had sharp pain (the latter of which could indicate an ectopic pregnancy). Otherwise my doctor was out of town and they couldn’t do anything (but she was sorry for my loss). I asked her if it was possible that a miscarriage and the subsequent hormone shift could cause an endo flare-up, and she said it could, sure. So I thought, OK, that’s what’s I’m dealing with, I guess.

But the pain didn’t budge. It got worse. I started thinking maybe it could be ectopic, and that maybe I just wasn’t identifying “sharp” pains correctly. I had gotten a couple of localized pains in my pelvic region, including one that shot up from one point clear to my shoulder. So maybe I was just, again, not sure what exactly I was feeling, or maybe not describing it in a way that matched the supposed symptoms?

Wednesday night around midnight, I got out of bed after a couple of hours of trying to sleep but being unable to because of the pain. I woke Richard up and told him I thought something was more wrong than before, and that I didn’t know what to do. I was panting to control the pain, which would not let up and felt both localized and sharp and like it covered my entire abdomen.

Richard’s mom came to stay with Holden (who was asleep) and Richard dropped me off at St. Thomas — they wouldn’t let him come inside because of COVID — and after a few minutes they led me back to my room. I told them all about the miscarriage, the normal cramping during the miscarriage, and then the onset of the pelvic/abdominal pain that would not quit a couple of days after the onset of the miscarriage. They gave me a hit of morphine for the pain and scheduled me for an abdominal ultrasound and a transvaginal ultrasound. Both were uncomfortable, especially the transvaginal, as having a wand poke your cervix while you’re having pelvic pain is 100 percent not what you want. The doctor came back to do a quick check of my cervix, and in order to get a good look, he turned a plastic bed pan upside down and had me hoist my rear up on that, since the bed wouldn’t adjust. It was uncomfortable and stupid.

I laid in bed for an hour or more, trying to rest, as I waited on the results of the scans. I was hooked up to an IV and an oxygen monitor and I had to pee so insanely badly, very suddenly, but I didn’t know how to call a nurse and I couldn’t move. In desperation, I inched my machinery over toward the door and managed to open it just enough to see a security guard passing by. I got his attention and asked him to please get a nurse, who came and unhooked me and showed me where the call button had been hidden behind the headboard. I realized then that some form of onboarding when you come to the ER would be nice for those of us who are lucky enough not to be regulars.

The doctor finally came in and told me the ultrasound revealed a 7-centimeter mass on my right ovary — presumably an endometrioma (too large to be an ectopic mass). This was a gutting surprise. The last time an ultrasound found a 7-centimeter endometrioma on my ovary, that thing grew to 10 centimeters within a couple of months and I was fast tracked for surgery to get the cyst and the ovary out. As I put on my clothes and went through the discharge process, I realized that this discovery likely meant the same outcome, which would mean instant menopause and a tectonic shift in my life I did not feel ready for.

At 4 a.m. I left the hospital with a prescription for pain pills and instructions to get into the gyno office ASAP to game plan what to do next. My gynecologist (Dr. Morgan) was out of town so I scheduled a Friday morning appointment with Dr. Draughn — the doctor who’d been on call during my ER stay. I slept all day Thursday.

Friday morning Dr. Draughn palpated my abdomen and it was tender and sensitive. I could feel pain but it was dull due to the painkillers. He advised that I get with Dr. Morgan as soon as she was back in town, but that it could be any number of things causing the pain. I asked if the hormone bounce from the miscarriage could feed an endometriosis flare-up but he said not really, at least not for a few months. (The nurse a few days prior had said yes, that could happen.) I asked him what I should do if the pain came back over the weekend and he told me I’d have to go back to the ER because his office “can’t do anything about that.” I had saved three pain pills just in case; the last one I had taken was at 4 a.m. Friday, a few hours before the appointment.

I coasted for most of Friday but started to feel chills and muscle aches that evening. Richard and I halfway figured it was an effect of coming off the pain pills, which I had been taking every six hours. I went to bed and woke up around midnight, blazing hot. I took my temperature and it was 100.7. I took some ibuprofen and laid down on the couch to try and cool down.

A few moments after I laid down, I was hit with abdominal pain that had me panting, writhing, and on all fours on the floor, trying to find a position to lessen the pain. It was this horrific ripping sensation from my ribs to my groin, throbbing, pulsing, taking my breath and my energy. I tried to call out to Richard, who was asleep in bed, but got Sarge’s attention instead. He came into the living room and saw me on the floor crying and started barking at me, alarmed. I was finally able to raise my voice enough to get Richard’s attention and he came out to check on me. It was unrelenting. I’m pretty sure I wailed, “I want to DIE” more than once and threatened to haunt every motherfucker involved in sending me home with no solutions and no pain medication to get me through the weekend. Richard gave me two of my remaining three pills and sat with me as we waited for them to kick in. They finally did, and I felt the pain decrescendo enough that I could lie down and go to sleep.

Saturday morning I woke up and took the last pill so as to not tempt fate. But I could tell all day that something was not right, and the pain was just waiting to break through again. I thought maybe constipation was contributing to the pain so I drank some mag citrate and waited for it to kick in while we debated whether to go back to the ER. The pain finally did break through and just hummed as loudly as it could through my entire gut. I had to take shallow breaths; every breath drove my lungs down into a painful, tender place. Movements hurt. I started thinking maybe I was having some other non-reproductive issue: Appendicitis, maybe. Something that could be masked by painkillers and ibuprofen keeping my fever down.

Richard called my gyno office to talk to the on-call doctor, who said there was nothing they could do and we should go to the ER. He also called the office of the surgeon who had removed my left ovary a few years ago, to see if we could get some help from them. He talked to the resident, who said they could only see me with a referral from my gyno, but that she would definitely go to the ER because my pain level did not sound right and indicated something else might be going on.

Around 2 p.m. we decided enough was enough and went back to the ER for more scans to make sure something else wasn’t causing the pain. I was there for about seven hours, sitting quietly in my room alone while the ER buzzed with chaos around me. The doctor and nurse miscommunicated, apparently, and I sat for about an hour without any pain relief. (It is very hard to advocate for yourself in the ER alone when you are in bad pain.) The finally dosed me — this time with dilaudid — which made me feel very loopy but briefly knocked back the pain.

They sent me for a CT scan, and came back and cleared me of problems with my appendix and gall bladder. They also said the endometrioma looked stable — no leaks, ruptures, or torsion. They gave me a shot of toradol — an anti-inflammatory — and a prescription for seven 5 mg doses of hydrocodone. Why seven? Who can know?

Monday morning I went to see Dr. Morgan, my regular gynecologist, to fill her in on all that had happened since she’d been out. She said my falling HCG levels indicated that I wasn’t dealing with remnant tissue (that would require a D&C) or an ectopic pregnancy (which I more or less already knew from the scans), but that they would want to draw blood again to ensure the levels fell to zero. She said the miscarriage was likely because of my age. And she said the pain likely was an inflammatory response at work, so she prescribed me a course of oral toradol. I asked for a referral to Dr. Stany, the surgeon.

We got home Monday afternoon and I ate a chicken breast and a handful of almonds and went to lie down. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I got walloped by pain again — this time in waves like contractions every two minutes or so, stabbing down into my pelvis and across my abdomen. A couple of times radiating backward and spiraling around my kidneys. More screaming, writhing, crying, trying to find a way to carry my body that would provide relief. All fours, on my knees, sitting on my haunches. Another pain pill (I had just had one three hours prior), more cussing. This time we tried to use a sheet to bind my stomach to provide counter pressure, but that didn’t really work and just made me feel claustrophobic. Half an hour later, the pain had dulled and I was able to rest.

We were able — after harassing my gyno office for a day and a half to actually complete the referral — to get in with Dr. Stany, the surgeon, on Wednesday (Oct. 21). He said it was possible that the endometrioma was twisting intermittently and causing pain, but that it wasn’t doing so during the scans. Either way, it needs to come out, and he can zap other endo lesions while he’s in there. But then he told us that he was fairly confident he could remove the cyst and save the ovary, which was a happy surprise — both because I do not want to move into menopause if I don’t have to, and because that means we could keep trying to conceive. (He did inform us that we are not a candidate for egg freezing because the ovary is already compromised. So we would not be able to freeze eggs and have the ovary removed and still try to get pregnant using my eggs.)

So I’ve scheduled surgery for a little more than a week from now, and am managing the pain in the meantime by saving my last four painkillers and feeling paranoid and on edge that every twinge and cramp is going to blossom into a pain monster. I am finishing my course of toradol, so I can’t take any other NSAIDs like ibuprofen.

All of this has been exhausting and demoralizing. Time after time we go into an office to describe what’s going on and the provider says, “I’m sorry for your loss,” which is kind, but my immediate problem is not the miscarriage. I picture two boxes and the miscarriage is in one and this pain monster is in the other. This miscarriage box is taped and labeled and the pain monster box is teeming, tentacles bursting from the corners, blood pouring out. I’m glad I had the chance to write about the miscarriage last week, before the pain set in.

My insides periodically feel like they are trying to rip and stab their way out of me, and I don’t seem to have any control over or understanding of when that’s going to happen. I can’t suss out the triggers and I’m having to double dose narcotics to put a dent in the pain. I don’t like that and I don’t want that. I have seen what opioid addiction does to people and that is not the life I choose. I know my issues are run of the mill, everyday occurrences for medical professionals, but I want to sense some urgency from even one of them to help me. I was clearly not OK and they just kept sending me home, telling me to go see someone else.

I hope the surgery will solve the pain issues, but I know it’s inevitable if I don’t have a full hysterectomy this time that I will need to have more surgery in the coming years — to mitigate endo pain, to remove another inevitable endometrioma, to remove my uterus. In fact, there is a chance that when I wake up from surgery, I will learn that the surgeon could not save the ovary and that I will be entering menopause and doing hormone replacement therapy and the whole deal. There’s so much I don’t know about menopause and frankly it’s all scary. I want to be rational and not fearful. I need to read more and get educated about it.

It just feels so soon. I’m not ready. But I suppose I have never been ready for anything and yet I’m still here.

From the inside out

A blurry hand against a dark backdrop

Content warning: Graphic descriptions of pregnancy loss

We’re looking at a scabby, reddened wound on our dog Sarge’s side — a bite mark from some other moody dog at the park. It’s held together by two small silver staples. Richard looks at it under the light of his cell phone and pronounces that it is healing acceptably. “Injuries heal from the inside out,” he says. “Not from the outside in.” The dog seems fine, as long as he can keep from scratching at it.

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It’s Friday. I am 9 weeks, 3 days pregnant when I indulge in a 2 a.m. bathroom break. I wipe and there’s red-pink discharge on the toilet paper. Sort of mucus-y. Spotting in early pregnancy is either fine or it’s not. At the time of spotting, you don’t know which path you’ve been assigned. You can choose to assume the worst or be hopeful. You can decide that it’s possible to both assume the worst and be hopeful. Pregnancy is the closest thing to Schrödinger’s cat that real life offers.  

I pee again at 7 a.m. and there’s more blood on the toilet paper. There are two pinhead-sized bright red clots in the toilet. A few wipes and the blood disappears.

I go about my day without any more spotting. I talk to my midwife and tell her I figure it’s nothing but that I thought she should know. She says it’s good that it stopped and that I’m not feeling any pain or cramping. I go about my day, working like any other day. I’m glad it’s Friday. I pick Holden up from his dad’s house and bring him home to show him all the Halloween decorations I put up while he was away.

At 9 p.m. I pee again, and there is bright red blood when I wipe, and bright red drops in the water. I think about how I feel in my gut — the physical sensation — and it’s pressure, not pain. It doesn’t seem all that different from how it has been feeling all along since I learned I was pregnant. Is it cramping? How is it that I’m 38 and I’ve been dealing with period cramping for decades and I’m not even sure whether what I feel can be described as cramping? Is this because endometriosis has numbed me to menstrual pain that isn’t excruciating? What’s happening inside of me, really?

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We tried to conceive for about a year, maybe two, and maybe “tried” is not exactly accurate. Some months we tried, some months it tried us. It’s a demanding thing to “try.” I’m working with one ovary and endo scarring and fibroids, and I’m nearly 40. So after a while, we just sort of figured it wasn’t meant to be. We quit trying and just decided whatever would be would be.

In August I felt fully crazy for a few days. Screaming, crying, out-of-body experience crazy. I felt unable to cope and got a prescription for Lexapro to help pull me out of the pit and then a few days later I missed my period.

Suddenly it all made sense. We were really happy. And relieved. My equipment wasn’t busted after all!

We talked about names. We talked about moving into a bigger house. We told just a few friends and family, always with a caveat: It’s still really early. Anything can happen.

Did we really believe that?

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We were a week away from our first prenatal visit. I would have had blood drawn and we would have tried to hear the heartbeat. I can’t decide what’s worse: Having never gotten the chance to try to hear it, or trying to hear it and being informed that it can’t be found.

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On Saturday morning I wake up and I’m for real bleeding, and passing small clots of dark red tissue. It is just like day one or two of my period. My gut aches, a low hum of a cramp getting warmed up. This is different. This is bad. “I think something bad is happening,” I tell Richard, and he hugs me while I cry into his neck. I talk to my midwife again and she tries to walk that tricky tightrope of positive and realistic. But I know the longer this goes on, the more obvious the outcome. She tells me if I bleed heavily — soak through a pad in an hour — for two hours, that I’ll need to go to the ER. (I chuckle to myself that maybe I should go to the ER every month because my period is just that nuts.) We agree that if things stay as they are, we will aim for an ultrasound early in the week.

I go to bed early and wake up around midnight to a gush of fluid and tissue. I run to the bathroom. It feels neverending, but it lasts only seconds. I want to see but I don’t want to look. I cry not because it hurts but because it feels insulting somehow, humiliating. I feel weak and lightheaded. I wonder if this will be the first time I ever faint. I think about how I am going to get back to the bedroom to get a new pair of underwear (the previous pair is a bloody casualty) without passing out or waking Holden up and traumatizing him. There is blood on the toilet seat and probably the floor. Definitely in the laundry hamper. I clean as much as I can, grab a towel, and steady myself enough to make it to the bed to sit down. I ask Richard to get me a new pair of underwear and realize he doesn’t know which drawer is my underwear drawer. In my exhaustion I find this mildly funny. I get my bearings and take the new underwear into the half bath so I can try to clean myself up and construct a makeshift diaper out of jumbo pads. I pass more tissue. I think back to a few days ago when I took a bunch of pads out of my purse, bidding them a fond farewell for the next seven months. I decide that foreshadowing in real life is much less satisfying than in fiction.

I lie back down but can’t sleep because I fear the next gush taking me by surprise. My belly is humming with cramps. I also can’t stop thinking about how I skipped dinner and felt so faint after losing all that blood at once, and that can’t be good. I think about my midwife’s ER comment. I realize I am hungry and nothing will do except a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a grilled cheese. So I get up and make exactly that. I pour a glass of orange juice, which tastes delicious, like nectar. I place my meal on the table and prepare to sit down when I feel another onslaught. I rush to the bathroom and don’t quite make it to the toilet before an enormous clot is out and halfway on the toilet seat, halfway on my underwear. I am crying again but this time I’m pissed off, convinced the universe is trying to kill me and give my husband an unholy mess to clean up. You’re not going to take me too, motherfucker, is the thought that flits through my head. At the same time, “Moose on the Loose” by Farmer Jason is playing on repeat somewhere in my brain, and I am convinced Sarge has his head craned up on the table so he can eat my sandwich while I’m otherwise indisposed. It is an absurd moment, proof that the long arc of the universe bends toward comedy — not justice — at the expense of everything else.

I clean the blood off of everything and myself again. I return to the table and I eat my sandwich and canned soup, and flip through Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list. I nod approvingly and try to commit some names to memory. These people seem busy and important and they are living their lives in spite of it all. I drink more orange juice. I decide I’m finally ready to sleep.

I pop a few ibuprofen — which I had sorely missed — and head back to bed. My dreams are full of stressful scenarios involving miscarrying on my wedding day. My brain can work quickly when it wants to, I guess.

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The thing you don’t expect when you miscarry at home is all the time you have to think about what’s happening because it takes so very long. This gives you lots of time to ponder thoughts like, How long has the baby been dead inside of me? Why didn’t I know that when it happened? Was there even a baby in there at all? Why does it feel weird to call it a baby? Is it because it was the size of a grape and completely dependent on me for survival? Why does the word “fetus” have to sound so off-putting, though? Is it because it rhymes with “Cletus”? Which one of my transgressions real or imagined can be blamed for this? How are we going to tell people? How are we going to tell people who didn’t even know yet? Which glob(s) of tissue that slid out of me should I save to mail to Mike Pence, so he can arrange for burial?

And it gives you lots of time to read everything on the internet, even the things you know you shouldn’t read, like British message boards.

It would be nice if there was some kind of receipt — a little ticket or digital readout to tell you what went wrong when your pregnancy cashes out. I respect that the universe needs to stay mysterious to keep its essential appeal, but this one small improvement would be nice. Consider this my attempt to add it to the suggestion box.

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Sunday morning I wake at 6 when Holden and the dogs come bounding into the bed — my customary disorienting wake-up call. The cramping has paused, although I am still bleeding, I can tell. Holden lies beside me and asks when the baby is coming. We hadn’t been planning to tell him about the pregnancy until further along, but I caved a couple of weeks ago mostly so I could get him to quit trying to wrestle me and gut punch me all the time. (Boys.) He had been excited at the news.

I tell him I don’t think the baby will be coming after all. That maybe it was sick or something was wrong, but we won’t be welcoming a new baby in May. He is upset. He says he’s never going to have a little brother or sister. I employ the flower seed metaphor and tell him how glad I am that he grew into a flower, but that not every seed gets to do that. I tell him it’s OK to be frustrated, sad, or mad. He doesn’t dwell on it too long. One small mercy of having a kid with attention issues, I guess.

When I get up, I notice Richard has taken out the trash in the bathroom. I am flooded with such love I can barely stand it.

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In 2016 I had a medical abortion — a scripted version of a spontaneous abortion. In some small way, it has been a comfort to at least know what to expect, once the miscarriage really got going. It removed the doubt and fear of what my body could and would do. The main difference seems to be the length of time it takes to pass “the products of conception.” With the abortion I remember it feeling like one big emptying of everything inside me. With this miscarriage it feels like incremental expulsions spread out over several days. It is like a period but a period on steroids. A big, muscle-bound period that will kick your ass.

There is a mean voice inside of me (that sounds a lot like my sister) that won’t stop telling me this is what I get for the thing I did then. That I had it coming.

I don’t believe it, of course. But the voice is in there nonetheless.

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We spend Sunday playing video games between my trips to the bathroom. I am tired and sad, of course, and both those things seem to come and go in waves. Your body works hard to build the infrastructure to support a growing baby, but it also has to work hard to break that infrastructure down and evict it before it comes toxic.

I send an email to the handful of friends with whom we had shared the initial happy news. We had only just started the process of letting people know. I didn’t get to everyone I intended to. We’d made the gamble that it would be better to have people know if something went wrong than to have to suffer in silence. And as hard as it has been to write those emails and texts, I can’t imagine how this would feel if it was just a big throbbing secret that had torn a hole in our lives but no one knew. In response, we get loving responses, flowers, offers of food and childcare and hugs. The village provides.

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“Seek support” is the advice on every webpage associated with defining miscarriage. Feeling curious about what others felt supported by, I dip one toe in the water of the miscarriage and pregnancy loss online community and feel like I have entered another dimension. Funeral and burial services for your dead baby (or fetus), asking your friends to gather to memorialize the person no one ever got to meet, angel baby gifs, photos of tiny backyard gravestones. I don’t recognize myself or my needs in any of those things. I am experiencing sadness, but some folks are living chasms of longing. It is here, peeking into the reality of those who are haunted by loss, that I taste a strange flavor of gratitude I hadn’t expected. How acceptably and neatly proportional this, my one loss, feels in comparison to the losses endured by so many others. What luck.

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It’s Tuesday. I’m still bleeding and passing large clots of tissue — a truly uncomfortable thing to do — but it’s mostly like a regular heavy period (complete, I will learn in the evening, with the excruciating pain of an extended endo flareup). I took a shower this morning and conditioned my hair. It smells nice. I feel clean. I’m not ready to go back to work yet, even remotely. It’s only been two days. I don’t know how to concentrate on anything, how to be productive. I wonder if I will log this as sick time or bereavement time. I guess it doesn’t really matter. It’s just sand; who cares what we label each grain?

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When it’s quiet and I’m alone, my thoughts worm their way into the soft core of my grief, where I’m mourning not just the loss of a child, but the loss of the chance to have a child with a man who loves me. My primary childbearing and -rearing experience has been with a man whose feelings toward me ranged somewhere between tolerance and all-out loathing, and please believe me when I tell you that this experience does very bad things to your heart and your self-esteem. I’ve been working on repairing those wounds but they are old and deep.

Richard has been the best possible partner for me. He is a kind and decent man who loves me and all my silliness without reservation or self-consciousness. He has been an outstanding step-father and I have been looking forward to experiencing having a baby with this decent human, this nice man who loves me and my son with all his heart, this man who has empathy and never makes me feel shitty about myself. This man who gives me hope. I want to see him hold his newborn, smiling as he rocks a little bundle he swaddled himself (because he is a self-professed A-plus swaddler thanks to his time working in the pediatric ER). I want him to have the transformative experience of holding his child for the first time. I want to give him that. I had imagined that experience would be healing for me. Even the few weeks we had together with our little secret, where Richard got to put his head on my tummy and transmit his love directly into me, through me, were something special. Something I’ve never had before.

I wanted more of that. Maybe that’s selfish, but it’s how I feel.

Now I’m not sure it will ever happen. We’re hopeful, of course. There might still be time. But it seemed so unlikely before. It feels even less likely now. And I have to do the work to be okay with that, should that be the final outcome.

Because injuries heal from the inside out, not the outside in.

The big, dumb pit

It wasn’t temporary; it drags on and on; it may never end; oh godddd.

How could we have known in March that America wouldn’t have the capacity to put its big-kid britches on and end this shit? (Okay, yeah, now that I’ve typed it out, I see it. We were doomed from the start.)

It’s been a dark summer. The novelty of being stuck at home wore off in June but at least it was still summer for the kiddo. I could work and he could play video games and watch movies and run around outside. It was fine inside. The world beyond our yard was burning and I spent hours and hours doomscrolling and sobbing (still do, but I’m trying to limit myself). I put a mask on and marched with thousands and screamed names — George, Breonna, Ahmaud. It felt like something. I thought a lot about the toxic sludge I was weaned on and how the first time my dad met his newborn grandson, he laid a confederate flag down next to his tiny body in the crib and took a photo. I allowed it. I didn’t want to make a fuss. I want to throw up now. I want to throw up forever at what I was raised to believe. How can I ever make it right?

Something broke in me at the beginning of the summer. The depression I’m always flirting with moved in and crashed on my couch. Suddenly I was unable to do anything but despair. I couldn’t make anything anymore. I couldn’t draw. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t read a book. I couldn’t take a walk. I could just worry and demolish my nails and then my cuticles and then the skin up to my knuckles.

I finally worked up the courage to go on a walk yesterday morning. And again this evening. Depression really is a long, slow climb out of a big, dumb pit.

The virus’ body count grows. We’re north of 180,000 now and a great deal of people give zero fucks. I go to Rutherford County every other week and there’s no pandemic there. I saw a lady in scrub pants and a NICU top in a crowded public place with no mask on. I’ll never wrap my mind around this. I’ll never forgive the people who politicized being thoughtful and trying to take care of each other.

When school started, all hell broke loose. It’s 100% virtual so the boy and I have dueling Teams meetings every hour on the hour and from 8 to noon I work while keeping an ear tuned to what his teacher is saying so that I can make a note when she says he needs to do something. Because he is often oblivious. To him, he’s watching really boring TV in Spanish. No — literally in Spanish (it’s a Spanish immersion school).

This experience has affirmed what I already knew: Teachers should be paid a million dollars — A MILLION DOLLARS.

And parents can’t work and teach at the same time. Anyone who says you can is lying or leaving something out or their work isn’t very good or their child is extraordinarily on top of their shit. Or they’re a witch. The point is it’s hard and it drains every ounce of energy and patience from me and I’ve had some very bad days when I have not been a good mother or a good employee and I just gave up and went back to bed. I try to give myself grace but I’ve always felt like I have a limited supply and I’d rather not waste it on myself.

We’re barreling into fall now. It feels like we’re on an old wooden rollercoaster that hasn’t been inspected in a while and definitely is going to get the park shut down once they fish the bodies out of the decorative lake below. I feel lucky that the virus has stayed largely away from us (as far as we know). I am grateful that I’ve still got a (very busy) job and that we are able to do virtual school at home, even if it is a frustrating experience. I miss the little things — eating in restaurants, wandering aimlessly around a store, carefree roadtrips where peeing in a rural gas station didn’t feel like a life-risking endeavor.

I don’t know what any of this looks like on the other side but I’m ready to get there. There has to be another side, doesn’t there?

The homebodies will inherit the earth

Every spring the Bradford pear explodes in celebration of the season, raining white petals like confetti. Walking the greenway, seeing the confetti in the mud, this year’s celebration feels a little melancholy, like a birthday party no one came to.

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To slow the creeping infection of COVID-19, we’ve been asked to keep to ourselves, a kind of radical version of my own natural inclinations. Stay in your house as much as possible, and if you have to venture into the world, stay away from places where people congregate, keep six feet between yourselves and other humans, wave from afar, mind your own business.

Don’t mind if I do.

I find it delicious to kick around my house all day every day. To be surrounded by the creature comforts I’ve collected and brought back to the nest for decades. To rise at the same time as always but instead of the two-hour rush to make breakfast, get dressed, wrangle the boy, get into the car, and get to our destinations on time, there’s an eight-pace commute awaiting me from shower to office chair. I can take that first call of the morning with wet hair piled up in a clip, coffee and banana at the ready. All day I watch the way the light moves through the house, how the plants stretch for it. I let the dogs out and sit in the sun with them.

It feels perverse to take pleasure in even this one aspect of the complete upheaval of Life As We Know It, when so many find themselves dropped from payrolls or working in situations where being on the front lines and possibly exposed to the virus is part of their job requirement. When so many are sick. When so many will die.

It’s not lost on me what an immense privilege it is that I can work remotely with relative ease. I have a home, for one — a thing many just up the road from us lost not so long ago. My job allows me to work from that home, as does my internet connection. I have my health, my husband, my son — all healthy so far. I think that’s part of why instead of feeling trapped, I feel a strange and grateful version of freedom.

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The hope is that this is all temporary, that we collectively will take enough extreme measures to flatten the curve, as the saying goes, so that our healthcare system can manage the inevitable wave of illness that will come as a result of this new virus and we can go back to whatever new normal waits for us on the other side.

Everything in daily life has become an exercise in calculating risk and responsibility. Is it better to stay away from the grocery store and have things delivered to us instead? Who is it better for? Am I helping a gig worker make ends meet by ordering through Shipt? Or am I potentially exposing people to the virus who are already more vulnerable because they have to be out and about? Is it irresponsible to order things online because the warehouse workers are still having to come in to fulfill the orders?

It’s the trolley quandary and it’s hard to feel like any choice is the right choice.

I am carrying a not small amount of guilt over how easily I ignored these same ethical quandaries just a month ago.

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Things are mostly fine here in our little corner of the world. Some days there are tears of anxiety, tears of survivors’ guilt, tense moments of listening as my husband — a man who radiates self-aware positivity more than anyone I’ve ever known — downloads his existential fears and frustrations to me so that they don’t overwhelm him with their weight. There is worry about the future, about what happens if the center doesn’t hold, about what we do if it all goes south. The beans-and-rice-in-the-basement plan.

We are a team, we repeat to one another. What matters now more than ever is kindness and teamwork. This was our job from the moment we said our vows, but this will test our mettle in ways we can barely predict. Things change quickly and inexplicably and everyone everywhere has emotions that are raw in new ways. We have no idea how we will be, much less how the rest of the world will be, in a week, a month, two months, six months.

I think about all the time I’ve spent in my life watching and reading zombie, apocalyptic, dystopian fiction. How the thought of an uncontrollable viral outbreak sweeping the globe and obliterating our humanity is probably my most sincere mortal fear. I’ve been trying to tame that fear with ongoing exposure therapy for most of my life, now that I think about it. Funny to think that this time last year I was getting my jollies by listening to an exercise podcast called Zombies Run. Yes, funny. (I really should finish it but I’m not sure now’s the time. Or maybe now’s the best time.) All that macabre research has made the narrative arc of our potential reality feel a little less far-fetched, at least. Not easier. Just easier to believe.

“If the hospital calls me to come back,” Richard tells me earnestly, “I’ll go.”

I want to forbid him, to tell him he has more to think about than just himself, but I hear myself think it and I realize he’s right, and he wants to do right, and that’s why I love him so goddamned much.

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For now, we’re still allowed walks. The dog parks and playgrounds have been closed to discourage people from congregating, but the greenways and open-air parks are still open. My fingers are perma-crossed in the hopes that people will maintain distances and not congregate in these areas either, or else they will be closed down and inaccessible too.

In many ways it’s madness to be stuck inside and away from other people during this time of year, when all of nature is screaming its desire for closeness, community, propagation. But then I think about how different and difficult it would be to weather this crisis in the winter, watching in horror as the sun disappears before five o’clock each day, before the last conference call or reply-all email. I remember the sinking feeling I had every evening as the mother of a winter newborn, as the light escaped round the curve of the globe and we were stuck in the house, with the drafts and the uncertainty. The loneliness.

But for now there’s light bookending the day, and not the blazing light of the summer that just wants to crisp up your skin and suck out your fluids and give you a headache. Right now, we have light light. This single random kindness of circumstance might be what keeps me from taking a twisting platform dive into depression before this is all over. Can’t say for sure but it’s sustaining me for now. The open windows, the blinks of new color everywhere you look, the birds speaking their strange spring languages, the smells on the wind that hit me like spiritual CPR, the bees and, yes, even the damned red wasps.

It’s all of it, all of the hope a person can muster, packed tight in a bud that is waiting for the right time to open and receive the sun, to harness the energy and magic needed to make something new out of what’s already been spent.