Here is what I have learned this year: trying to bring life into this world is a warrior's task. And I am not entirely sure that I am a warrior.
In December of last year, I learned I was pregnant. I began the year with all the hope and joy that comes of dreaming. A new child fresh and new. Everything possible. I would be a mother again, my greatest role so far, the one I cherish most deeply.
But by the end of January the dream was gone. I was bleeding, my womb and heart empty, a grief cutting so deep I thought I might not survive. I was a changed woman.
In May, a new life was planted. I was pregnant again. At first, I felt the rejoicing... But things turned so quickly. But soon I was sick and tired. Feeling a weariness in my bones I had never known before. Every day I am sick. Every day I can barely keep food down. Every day I feel hopeless. Almost every day I debate if it is worth getting out of bed and I would stay if there wasn't a toddler, a husband, a job, a life making demands that cannot wait. Nearly 6 months in and I am still sick, losing what's in my stomach in the middle of the night or the tiny hours of the morning.
To be honest, it makes me feel inadequate. So many women I know love pregnancy. Even when they were sick and tired it didn't debilitate them. They were happy and hopeful. So every day I face my not-enoughness. My illness feels like a daily failing.
And at surprising moments the grief of the life lost still sneaks up on me. The thin skin I thought had developed over the wound of the miscarriage, peels away so easily. What should have been the birthdate passed in August. I should be holding a child now, I think. I should be celebrating. Instead, I am sad and sick. It makes me want to curl up and cry.
I feel strangely unattached to the child living inside me. He is a stranger. I wonder if he feels my distance. I, unreasonably, feel I am already failing him as a mother.
"You're absolutely glowing!" the well-meaners say, as if I am as new and shiny as a lucky penny, or a prized jewel. As if I am not sick and worn and just a slice, a shadow of who I know myself to be. It makes me feel completely unknown and unseen. Am I invisible, I wonder? Is my pain obsolete?
"I don't know how you do it?!" they cheerfully say, as though I am some kind of hero. As though "doing it" were a choice. I am not heroic, I want to tell them. I am barely surviving. I do it by spending time nearly every day crying about all that I am not doing. Grieving all the joy and strength I do not have.
For me, in the end, there is likely to be wonder worth the misery. In a few months I will hold a slippery, crying babe in my arms and I will whisper, "welcome to the world." I will fall in love again. I will sing lullabyes at 3am for an audience of one. I will feed him with my body. I will be awestruck by the curl of his lips, the flicker of his eyelids, the openness with which he takes in the world. And I will think: I made him. I brought him here. I was a vessel for a miracle.
But for now, I am still in the hardest year. And it is terribly exhausting and terribly lonely. Perhaps, you are there too. Perhaps you have felt grief and pain that made you numb to the joy everyone else expects you to carry. Perhaps you too have been isolated by a weariness you couldn't even put into words. Perhaps you have born the weight of not being okay for months or years, and having to breathe and smile and live through it because there is no way to the other side except through.
Perhaps, we all just need to know we are not walking this hard earth alone.
