when mama cries

www.flamingpear.com

I do remember my mother crying. I don’t know whether she cried more than most women. She just seemed more comfortable doing it, less reserved, unapologetic. I do remember her crying, and I never really thought there was anything wrong with it. I think it is my mother I have to thank for the ease I have always had releasing my own tears.

I do remember worrying, though, especially when her melancholy would carry on for a while. When she felt blue. When she would spend quiet time with herself, caring for the plants in our garden, rather than engaging with my sister and me as we played nearby. In those moments, I wanted her to cheer up. I wanted to be able to make her feel better. Sometimes I could, but not always.

One day, maybe it just got to be too much for her. And she left, to take care of just herself.

Have you ever read the book or seen the movie, The Hours? About how women throughout time have carried their sorrows? That story just gets me from such a knowing place. After watching it in the theater, my sister and I clung to each other, cathartic tears streaming down our cheeks until the credits had unwound and the lights had come back up in the theater. I looked at my sister stunned and eventually got up to wobble home on spaghetti legs.

Melancholia

The blues

Feeling down

Depression

Mental illness

We are so frightened of these, aren’t we? So stunned by them. I find it irritating when depression is referred to as something surprising…

You’re depressed?! How baffling! How mysterious! How could you possibly be depressed when your life is so good? Look at all the blessings around you! Cheer up! You can do it if you just choose to!

As something that has to be cured, overcome...

We must address this right away! You can feel better with the right help. You have to feel better! We must absolutely help you to feel happy again!

As something that has to be medicated, conquered, eradicated…

There is just so much depression in our society today. But now we know how to treat it! Now we know how to beat it! Now we can free you from its hold with the right combination of science and counseling.

Trust me, I am a big fan of therapy… It has saved me many times from sinking to a place from which I might never return. Zoloft helped me once too, when I just couldn't get my head above water no matter how hard I tried.

But can we look at depression, maybe, in a different way? See it. Recognize it. Say hello to it rather than shoving it down?

Hello melancholy feelings! Hello unexplainable sorrow that won’t go away in an appropriate amount of time! Here you are again! Welcome. I see you. I hear you. I feel you. I befriend you. Tell me what you need to share with me.

As someone who comes from a long line of people who – egads! – have experienced great depression (they called it melancholia back then) for a number of reasons (they were Holocaust survivors, they lost everything and saw horrible things), and some who have felt it without any apparent cause, it just annoys me the way we approach it in our larger culture.

As a woman who has struggled with my own depression, my own melancholia, my own sorrow and loss and grief and misery – several times, even before losing my child – I have a bone to pick with the way we approach our difficult emotions, how we hold them… or rather how intensely we try to shake them off and as far away from us as possible.

.::.

Shortly after Tikva died, an old friend sent me Miriam Greenspan’s book, Healing Through the Dark Emotions. Finally, I thought after reading the introduction, somebody who gets it! Somebody who understands that the way to get through the hard stuff is to go through it. To be with it. To listen to what it has to teach.

Greenspan lost her own first child, who died just weeks after he was born. Her second child was born healthy. Her third child was born with a serious physical disability. It is clear that her children have been her greatest teachers. But it is not a book about losing a child, nor one about parenting a child with special needs.

As a mother, as a human being, and as a psychotherapist with years of experience in private practice, Greenspan writes about three primary emotions, which she calls the dark emotions – grief, fear and despair. She writes about the alchemy possible when we can really feel them, really experience them, go deeply into the darkness that usually scares us away. And she writes of coming through to the other side, the “transformational process by which grief becomes gratitude, fear turns to joy, and despair opens a doorway to a more resilient faith in life.”

Greenspan writes about compassion, about how it is almost impossible to live in our time, in our day, in our society, with so much sorrow and struggle all around us – and not feel dark emotions. Why, then, do we feel there is something wrong with us when we feel depressed? Why are we told so automatically that it is something that should and can be fixed?

I had so many ah-hah! moments when reading her book. Not because it was something I didn’t already know, but because it just resonated with me as truth, and it was a reminder that came at just the right time…

That there is no way I am going to truly survive – and by survive here, I really mean to thrive after (because we are allowed to thrive again, we are!) – the death of my child if I don’t go first to those dark places in my soul, look them in the eye, and ask them what they have to teach me.

It’s that hindsight is 20-20 thing: I have learned enough from my less successful attempts at pushing down my grief in the past to know that this won’t get me far for very long. I have learned that I certainly won’t get anywhere remotely close to growth by ignoring what needs attention in the dark places in my soul. I tried that in high school, shortly after my mother left, and I found myself two years later with 65 extra pounds of weight on my body and an anger shoved so deep inside that I found myself too depressed to get out of bed.

.::.

Here I am now, ten and a half months since my sweet girl died. More than a year since she was born so fragile. Almost a year and a half since her ultrasound, when my world as I knew it imploded and my life changed forever in ways I am only now beginning to understand.

“Grief becomes gratitude, fear turns to joy, and despair opens a doorway to a more resilient faith in life.”

I’ll tell you something that isn’t easy to admit, especially here…

I do feel gratitude.

I do feel joy.

I do still have faith.

Something is being transformed deep inside me since – because – I lost my Tikva. I don’t think it would have happened if she hadn’t been who she was. If she hadn’t come and gone so quickly. I consider it her gift, what I get instead of my second child here in my arms, healthy and well. It is a gift of compassion. True compassion, which starts with compassion towards myself. Begins with patience and understanding towards myself as I go through the messiness of the ups and downs of each day.

When I read about the possibility for gratitude, joy and faith months ago, I opened up to the possibility that I could get there as I went through this dark passage. It’s true. They’re there – the gratitude for Tikva, the joy I feel when I see a hawk flying above or feel Dahlia climbing my body as if I were a jungle gym, the faith I have in good things ahead. They’re there – even when I only feel them in glimmers every once in a while, balanced by their darker counterparts.

I’ll keep going there, through the darkness, towards the light. And as I do, I’ll continue to cry as much as I need. Cry at the sorrow and at the joy. These days I wonder if one can truly exist without the other. Maybe that’s what Tikva came through to teach me.

.::.

How do you experience your dark and your light emotions? What are the ways in which you go there, deep into the shadows or leaping towards joy? Do you sometimes avoid your more difficult emotions? What works for you in navigating all the places in your soul?

warrior mama

When I was pregnant with Dahlia, I was absolutely, undeniably, nothing’s gonna get in my way going to birth my child at home, and naturally. I was even, I admit, judgmental about anyone’s choice to do otherwise – I just couldn’t understand why anyone would actually want to have their baby, on drugs, in a hospital. Without being aware of it, I took for granted that a healthy baby would be the guaranteed reward of my empowered choices – an exceptionally healthy baby who would thrive even more than expected because s/he would come out of me naturally and go directly to my breast, uninterrupted, in the comfort of our home.

Dahlia had other plans. After 32 hours of hard back labor at home and several of those hours stalled at eight centimeters, I made a very clear choice to go to the hospital for an epidural. Six hours later, she was born easily and safely and immediately put on my chest. Four hours after that, having signed a dozen liability waivers to be allowed to leave the hospital early, we were back home in our bed with our new daughter.

I had my healthy child, in spite of her hospital birth. Even then I took for granted the incredible miracle of her health and her life. I spent a good part of the next year working through my guilt around having chosen to go to the hospital and have an epidural. A part of me felt inferior for the choice, and I felt, in some way, that I had failed.

I did it with Tikva too. Even with this child whose life – of any length – I knew would be a miracle, I fretted for a while during her short life about having chosen the epidural. The epidural I told Dave I wanted because I didn’t feel relaxed, and I wanted – needed – to feel relaxed as I delivered my child whom I knew would be unable to breathe on her own, who might not even make it past her birth. Maybe it was my brain’s need to fret over something that really didn’t matter in order to distract myself just a little bit from what was so constantly at the forefront of my consciousness: That my daughter’s life was fragile and unsure, her future – and mine – unknown. That she very well might die, and that I would be forever changed no matter how the story unfolded.

My thoughts have rambled before around the question of how to birth a child and what my choices mean. But it’s not this that is on my mind right now. Though related, it’s something different.

I have read my share of birth announcement emails and birth stories since Tikva came through my life. All are different. All but one have announced the birth of a healthy living baby (or babies). Some were born in the hospital, some at home, some vaginally and others by scheduled C-section for various reasons. Regardless of location, those that told the stories of vaginal deliveries have shared one quality:

Praise of the superior mother who births her child naturally, vaginally, and without drugs.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a progressive place, a liberal place, a funky place, full of New Age and yoga studios and locally grown organic produce and raw food vegan restaurants and Michael Franti concerts in small venues. I love it here, it has been my home for 30 years. And I recognize that I am immersed in just a tiny sliver of the way most people in the U.S. – let alone the world – approach life. Before he met me, my husband didn’t even know babies could be born at home in the western world.

Yet there is a certain holier-than-though message being communicated here without being spoken outright, and I don’t think it is just here in California. As the day of Tikva’s birth approaches a year later, I have become extremely sensitive to it. The message tells me:

You are a powerful goddess, a mighty warrior when you have birthed your child naturally, trusting your inner wisdom and strength to guide you.

Because you are a warrior, you will be rewarded with the undeniable manifestation of your choices – a healthy child.

So what am I? What am I if I birth my child in another way? Am I less mighty, less empowered for choosing to have an epidural? Am I less of a warrior because I birthed my children in the hospital? Do I trust my inner wisdom less?

And what is Tikva, my child who died, whose body was too fragile to live for very long? Any less a gift? Any less a manifestation of the most incredible grace and magic life has to offer?

And what of Dahlia, my precious light who was born healthy, in the hospital, with an epidural?

See what I’m getting at here?

How about this for warrior:

I birthed two babies, and carried three. I said goodbye to one too soon at just 10 weeks of pregnancy. I carried Tikva for 20 of her 40+ weeks knowing that she might not live. I moved halfway around the world to give her every fighting chance. My relationship with my husband grew deeper and more solid throughout her life and since. Together, we cared for Dahlia while she, too, loved and lost her sister.

I loved my daughter fiercely for every day of her short life. I lived with grace, connected to her and to God in every moment. I loved her so completely, so unconditionally, that I knew when it was time to let her go. I held her as she breathed her final breaths. I felt the moment when her spirit left the beautiful body that I held in my arms for the last time. I stroked her soft cheek. I held my daughter as she died.

Am I less of a warrior because of how and where I birthed her? Am I any less her mother because she is not here in my arms?

So much of our collective identity as women is tied to being a mother. No wonder all of that comes into question – in our own eyes as we look at ourselves now, after loss – when our child dies. I can only imagine how much more so when that child dies before s/he is born, or during or shortly after birth.

But we are no less a warrior, no less empowered, no less mighty and powerful and connected to our inner strength without our children here to prove it. I never knew the depth of the warrior I could be until Tikva entered my life, until she departed. I never knew the grace I could live from was possible before her.

I think we are asked – in the moment of loss – to tap into a warrior in ourselves we might never have known was there. Because to mother a child who has died – to say goodbye over and over, to let go a little bit every day for the rest of our lives – is HARD. It is powerful, mighty, full of grace.

The work of a warrior like no other.

That’s what’s been on my mind lately when I think about birth.

That’s what I remember when I read another birth story, when I doubt for a moment the true warrior that I am.

Yes, I am a warrior too.

And so are you.

.::. .::. .::.

What makes you a warrior? Do you believe that you are? How did you approach birth before losing your child, and now?

my body electric

It’s time. It’s spring. It’s time to plant.

I take it out of the freezer where it’s been since last June, since Tikva’s birth.

I put it in the refrigerator and after a few days it has thawed.

I take it out again, open the top of the plastic container, and pour it into a bowl.

I look down on this magnificent thing – deep, dark red blood, a mass of veins, a symbol of life.

Tikva’s placenta, a few inches of her umbilical cord, and the amniotic sac that surrounded them and my Baby Girl. Incredible.

I need to cut off a piece of the placenta and put it in a sterile container. It’s going to a doctor who is researching the possible genetic causes of congenital diaphragmatic hernia. She may be able to isolate Tikva’s DNA from her placenta and include her in the study. Maybe tell me something that might explain… something. Perhaps. Before losing that opportunity, it’s worth a try.

So I dig my fingers into its softness, marvel at every inch.

My body made that. My body made that for my Baby Girl! That which nourished her while she was inside me, helped her grow. I can’t help but wonder at how amazing that is – it is not diminished by the fact that something still went awry as she grew inside me. In this beautiful thing in my fingers, I see what my body did for Tikva – I see how hard my body worked to nourish her and keep her well.

I cut off a small piece from one side, then another piece. I take a piece of the umbilical cord, and some of the blood, and I put them all into a small sterile container. Tikva’s DNA in a plastic vial. The rest back in the big container, back in the refrigerator. My hands under the flowing water, I watch the red of the blood run down the drain.

A few days later I plant the rest of the placenta underneath a new rosebush – golden yellow and orange roses with some pink. The best kind of fertilizer to help them grow and blossom. The roses are going to smell amazing when they bloom. The colors make me think of Tikva… warm and delicious and delicate and soft. So sweet.

photo by sleepingbear

I can’t help but be amazed at what my body is capable of – both the magic and the messy stuff. I’ve struggled with illness, with being overweight and underweight, with the constant practice of learning to love my body in spite of the jiggle and flab and blemishes. I haven’t always treated my body like a temple… I certainly haven’t always loved my body unconditionally.

But the three times I was pregnant I treated it like the Taj Mahal.

I took for granted the magic when Dahlia grew perfectly inside me and was born with relative ease. I was stunned with disbelief – Me? No way! – when I miscarried at ten weeks a few years later. Miscarrying felt like small potatoes when I learned that Tikva had a potentially life threatening birth defect – My baby? How can that be?

I’m honestly not sure what to make of it all – all that my reproductive body has created. I have planted two placentas: Dahlia’s with fuchsia colored dahlia tubers and Tikva’s with orange yellow roses. I planted the remains from my miscarriage with yellow dahlias.

Lots of flowers that are now in other people’s gardens.

One radiantly healthy living child asleep in my quiet home.

My slightly deflated spirit housed in this familiar almost-38-year old body that is both charged by what it is capable of and apprehensive about all that can go wrong.

My body actually feels strong, healthier overall than I have felt in years. It also feels – and certainly looks – older. I can’t say I really thought very intensely about being in my late thirties or even really noticed my aging body until this year – until I lost Tikva. It’s like someone polished the mirror and held it up to my face and said,

See? This is you. You are older. You have been through a lot. You are now even more weathered than you thought you could be.

Remember the movie Fame from 1980, at the very end when they do their senior performance and sing and dance all together…

I sing the body electric. I celebrate the me yet to come. I toast to my own reunion when I become one with the sun.

I sing the body electric. I glory in the glow of rebirth. Creating my own tomorrow when I shall embody the earth.

And I'll look back on Venus, I'll look back on Mars and I'll burn with the fire of ten million stars. And in time, and in time we will all be stars.

That song has been in my head the past few days as I have checked in with my own body electric. As I have thought about the possibility of rebirth after loss. About the kind of tomorrow I want to create – if indeed some of the creation is up to me.

I have been talking to my body, assuring myself that trust is still there between us – that body and I still believe in each other. I have felt pangs – my eyes have moistened – thinking about how incompatible with life Tikva’s beautiful body was. I have asked so many times,

What does it all mean? Why does it work only sometimes?

I have more questions than answers, of that I am sure. Yet I still feel like I have a lot to celebrate about my body…

My body that has given life, however fragile.

My body that is the only vessel I get this time around for my mighty and sometimes weary soul on this mysterious winding road.

My body that is – like Tikva’s – perfectly imperfect. Or is it imperfectly perfect?

I feel tremendous gratitude for my body electric – and the force of energy it both contains and creates.

.::.

What are you thankful for about your body? What brings you awe? What are you inspired to create when you look in your mirror?

This post is a part of The Body Shop at Glow in the Woods -- a month of themed reflections and memes that explore what we do in an effort to occupy these physical selves with grace after babyloss.

anything is possible

This afternoon I spontaneously took Dahlia to the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. They’re having a weeklong exhibit called Bouquets to Art, and boy was it gorgeous. As if the museum wasn’t beautiful enough, this week it is adorned with flower arrangements created to depict or appreciate different works of art throughout the place. And… I’d forgotten the two traveling exhibits that are currently there: Andy Warhol and Yves St. Laurent. Talk about eye candy… and color!

Someone recommended to me a few months ago, “Go look at art. Walk in a park surrounded by flowers. Go see something beautiful.” They were right…

Today I fed my soul.

Today I refilled my leaky well.

Today I stroked my tired heart with softness and vibrancy and beauty.

Today I sat on a cushioned couch under a disco ball, watching Dahlia skip and dance and hop among the moving lights and shapes that circled the floor. As if she were a work of art herself, an ever-changing statue in motion. A dancer. A happy child simply playing. Making others around her smile. Filling me up.

We flitted about, surrounded by mannequins dressed in Yves St. Laurent gowns, and Dahlia pointed at each one and said, “Mommy, this one’s me and this one’s you. This one’s you and this one’s me. Look, Mommy… Wow! This one’s my favorite…” Delicious. The bright colors, the sparkles, the eccentricity of exaggeration, just for the sheer beauty of it.

Today I loved my daughters, the vibrant living one dancing before me, and the spirit one whom Dahlia said she saw in the mist that was watering the grass outside. “There’s Tikva!” I loved them both from a bright and full place within me.

And I thought about possibility – the word I have been swishing around in my mouth for a while. Surrounded by all that color, all that imagination, all that life – however fleeting… there’s a reason the flower exhibit only lasts a week – I was able to feel the possibility of what is ahead with greater depth than before.

Because if a person can make art so bright, so gorgeous, isn’t anything possible?

If a child can be born as vibrant as Dahlia, or as fragile as Tikva, isn’t anything possible?

If we can move halfway around the world to try with all our hearts to help our baby live, is there anything we can’t do? If Tikva chose me as her Mama, how can my life be without meaning?

Possibility is tasty.

I have always been an optimist, even in my darkest times. I have had more hard times than many in my 37 years, so my eternal optimism sometimes surprises me. I must have been born this way, it just seems to be my nature – my spirit is a positive one. Maybe I just learned early on that if it’s possible to feel really bad, it must be possible to feel really good, too. I’ve always believed that you have to go through it to get through it. Maybe it’s true that knowing deep sorrow is the only real way of glimpsing profound joy. I don’t know… Maybe it’s not important to understand why the glass is half full through my eyes, but rather to be thankful for that part of who I am.

But back to possibility…

How do I reconnect with that sensation after so much possibility has been lost? How do I trust the possibility of happiness, fulfillment, even hope… after so much has been taken away? After so much letting go? How do I hold the likely possibility that I will one day birth and hold another healthy living child, and that it will be easy and smooth and real?

How?

I just do. Every day I make that choice. Every day, even when I’m not feeling it deep inside – and I have plenty of those days, too – I am choosing possibility. I’ve learned in my later thirties that I can actually choose what I focus on, that I am capable of readjusting my lens if what it is focused on isn’t making me feel good. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but the intention is there. Not an intention to always feel good – because sometimes I just need to cry and feel like crap. But a desire to remember that possibility is always there.

Before she was born and during her very short life, Tikva became such a symbol of hope, not just for me and my family but for so many others who followed her journey. Since her journey took her to another realm of existence, I have asked myself often, “How do I hold onto hope when hope has been lost? And how do I build new hope, new promise, new possibility?”

The thing is, possibility is always there, and hope is a thing with shallow roots but a powerful desire, always seeking to be replanted, to rise back up through the soil towards the moisture and the light. Towards beauty. Towards possibility. Towards love.

I have to admit that I didn’t find possibility at the museum. I actually went there already feeling it deep inside me. My eyes were open to seeing it, and there it was. The magic I encountered there reaffirmed promise, gave me permission to hope, showed me proof that more beauty is possible. And I was reminded of the incredible beauty that exists in the very short life of my little girl. I stood before a soft all-white arrangement of flowers and loved it completely because it reminded me of Tikva.

And Dahlia pointed at a stem of orchids hanging down from it and said, “That flower. That’s Tikva.”

Even though she’s gone, she’s never really gone. For me, Tikva will forever be proof that anything is possible. Not because she overcame the greatest odds and lived a long healthy life, but because she was powerful enough to teach me hope and possibility.

And the deepest love imaginable.

.::.

How do you hold possibility? Where does it hide after the loss of your baby(ies)? Where do you find it? 

that which remains

There are changes afoot in the lineup at Glow, and it's a right and wonderful thing. The contributors page now features a new category called 'glow emeritus' for founding writers whose lives and hearts have gathered enough momentum to bring them to new places from which to reflect.

Two new voices are joining our conversation here and we're thrilled. Today we bring you the first -- the wonderful Gal of Growing Inside. Gal, mother to princess Dahlia and angelbaby Tikva, gives us words that twist the kaleidoscope of this new view, inspiring us to see new colour in this unbidden and often bewildering spiritbaby parenthood. Let's make space by the fire and give her a hearty welcome, for we're deeply grateful to have her -- and you -- here with us.

Gray hair has settled in at my temples, clearly here to stay. Lots of it and more every day.

When I wear my hair down, the grays don’t show. But that means I can’t wear my hair back, and I like wearing my hair back. Especially when my hair is long, and right now I want to grow my hair long again. It’s been almost two years since it’s been long and right now I’m feeling the need for that again. Probably because I look younger, softer with my hair long, and right now I could use some of the lightness that comes with youth.

I don’t feel young anymore, not after the past year.

When I look in the mirror, I am struck by what I see in the woman looking back at me. She looks familiar, I recognize her but she is also new to me. She looks and feels older. Her eyes carry more sadness. She feels more grounded. Her gaze is more serious, her soul more honest. Along with the grays in her hair, her skin carries more fine lines, her forehead wears those not-so-subtle-anymore wrinkles that aren’t just there for a moment following an expression.

When I do yoga, the skin of my belly after carrying two babies hangs more limply from my core. My small breasts hang a little lower from nursing Dahlia and pumping for Tikva. My thighs… well, they’re just my thighs, jiggly and stretchmarked and still not my favorite feature, but the only thighs I get, so I continue to direct love their way in spite of it all. My skin is the skin of a 37 year old woman who has gained and lost weight rapidly (stretch marks), has had psoriasis most of her life (crusty itchy flaky scalp), had acne in college and still gets a zit or two at least weekly (blemishes and bumps), had shingles (discolored scars where the skin is numb from nerve damage). I still keep my nails short, 33 years after I started biting them, and I chew on the inside of my lips when I’m nervous, bored or focused.

I am full of imperfections, and in that, I am perfectly human. Alive, fragile, nervous at times, relaxed at others. I’m not five years old like my Dahlia, robust, skin smooth as milk, unblemished except for the daily preschool owie, radiantly healthy, at the very beginning of it all. She’s not brand new, and in losing her sister, she has been through more life experience already than most children three times her age. But still, everything is so new. And when I look at her I glow, and I also envy her, just a little, because everything is ahead. She can choose any fork in the road. She has nothing yet that she wishes she could undo.

There is something else I see when I look in the mirror, or when I close my eyes and feel what’s inside me. Like the hairs at my temples, I see the gray in my soul. It’s by no means my entire spirit that is gray, but there are wisps of gray there. Like the gray hairs, I don’t think they will go away, and they certainly can’t be covered up with color from a box. I imagine that I was born with a soul filled with color, and along the way of my life, I added more shades of brightness to my palette, and also introduced white to soften the brightness and black to darken it. I’m not sure if every single one of our souls begins as a full palette of bright colors, but this is what I see when I think of myself at my beginning this time around.

The past year dumped a pretty hefty can of gray paint on my spirit, with some drops splattering to pepper my temples. The gray mixed with the colors that were there – deep red and purple and turquoise and bright orangey yellow. The colors are still there now, just more pale, more subdued. The red is now burnt orange and pink, the purple more lavender, the turquoise now the color of an almost-black sky, the yellow more of an almost-there gold, like that last ray of light just before the sun sets.

I’m more tired now, more weary, and unexpectedly more peaceful. More accepting of what is, less rebellious against what I can’t control. Older and wiser, maybe?

This is what remains now, after losing my daughter. This is what remains after my heart was cracked open from sorrow and also from love. After some of the luster of my existence seeped out of me into the soil between blades of grass at my feet, to mix once again into the core of the universe from whence I came.

With the blemishes on my body and spirit, I am still here. Still vital. Still very much alive. More deeply connected to others, certainly more deeply connected to my most essential self. I have for the most part, most of the time, sloughed off what I no longer need – anxious worry about things that don’t matter, energy extended toward people who make me feel bad and petty things that aren’t good for me, time wasted on anything that is not at its core about love, genuine connection and compassion.

What remains is rougher than before, and also more refined. It’s the core that has always been but which has lost its smooth protective casing and is now more visible, more bare, more vulnerable… but mostly, more pure.

I never expected I would be looking at this woman and she would be me. It’s taking me some time to get to know her, but I do like her. I wish she didn’t have to go through all she’s been through to get here, but I find her quite beautiful. Not in spite of it all, but because of it.

.::.

What remains for you – of you – after losing your baby? What do you see in the mirror? Are you different than before? How do you feel about you now? Do you like what you see?