Tonight I cried...

for the babies that I've lost

This evening I did a yin yoga, which requires long and deep stretches. This class focused on hip opening and lower back.

The instructor reminded us that hips are where we hold our emotions.

I have heard this before in other yoga classes.

But, while I felt teary during the poses, what came later, surprised me.

Maybe it was because the instructor mentioned that hips are from where we bear children.

Maybe it was because I spoke to my former partner’s daughter and helped her do her evening reading.

Maybe it was because I am hormonal and my biological clock shouting at me that my time is running out.

Maybe it is because of all the unprocessed grief.

But still—slowly, dripping, big drops of tears flowed down my cheeks.

And I cried for them. Both of them: the one that made it long enough to be considered a miscarriage and the one short enough to just be considered a chemical pregnancy.

I’ve cried for them before, not nearly enough.

I haven’t properly mourned them.

There was never time.

After the first one, I hopped on a plane two weeks later to go to El Salvador. Ten days later my mother was dead. A month later my brother had ended his own life.

A little over a month later, COVID happened.

Four months later, the other baby died.

To have miscarried and to never have been able to become a parent is a strange situation. People who have children can easily minimize it that you were not a parent yet, and those who have experienced infertility may liken us to similar cases.

But we’re not.

We’re unique in our own right.

I may have only been a ‘parent’ to one for three weeks and to the other for a few days, but in those moments, you can have a lot of thoughts, plans about the future.

Your identity begins to shift. Even that short time my body started to change and I was nauseous with morning sickness, a bit dizzy from increased blood flow and more hungry and using the bathroom more.

I was excited. I wanted that child. The first one. The second one ended in an argument where I was to blame for allowing this to happen. (Though not quite sure why, as it takes two to make that happen.)

So I never became a mother. But I was never not one.

I am in between.

My identity in this regard exists forever in that liminal space, which at points, feels like purgatory.

I tried to communicate this to my partner, who, of course did not get it. I used to chalk it up to the fact that he already had a daughter.

He said he didn’t become a parent or feel he was until she was in his arms.

I think he couldn’t care about someone until he could see her because only then could he love her because he was an extension of himself. (The only way I think a narcissist can really love another.)

I am thankful I did not bring these children into this world, with him, truly, I am.

Others have reassured me and I do—of course—agree that having a child with a vapid narcissist is not preferable.

And yet—that reality does not take away the pain and the grief. It does not make it hurt any less.

I am a mother who never had her children and that hurts.

Sometimes, I’ll be honest, it’s hard to explain complex grief and PTSD to others because I don’t even quite get it myself.

Why now—after 3 years—does this come to the surface?

I’ve cried for them before.

Hormones? Possibly. Though I’ve had PMS since then.

Biological clock? Possibly. But the alarm has rung loud—many times—since then.

I do not believe in repression of emotions and grief.

But my mind and cognition simply could not process or make sense of all that happened to me in such a short period of time.

As such, sometimes memories come forth in ways that simply do not make sense to me.

I did not realize myself that it was complex grief until I started to read others grief narratives, where it took them years to get over the loss of a mother or the couple was still mourning their lost baby a year and a half later.

Those dead babies could never be my sole focus. I had to attend to other things. Bury my mother. Absorb the shock of my brother’s death. Teach. Deal with COVID and day to day life stuff. I had my ex partner’s daughter that I took care of.

This is what it means to have complex grief.

That now, years later, I sit here in bed with a kleenex and aching hips, aware that somewhere deep within those bones, my body remembered that at one time, I was pregnant. At one point, it was planning to become a mother.

I am glad that they will never know pain, cold, hurt, and loneliness. All the hardness of life. I like to think of them as too innocent, pure and wholesome for that.

I can’t think that they will never know love and joy, pleasure and happiness too.

I have to believe that their souls, though they didn’t ever make it to this earthly realm, are floating somewhere in the abyss, bathed in love and sunshine and peace.

Peace that they would never have known in this world.

And because I even think of them, and remember them, that they existed—

I am a mother that never was.