Today was magical, bittersweet, joyful, peaceful, tearful, and gentle.
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This past week we planted a mountain laurel tree in the front yard of our new house.
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Today is Bereaved Mother’s Day. I spent some time this morning looking back at photos from the day Ellis was stillborn. It’s bittersweet to remember.
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Yesterday was hard. We had our first appointment with a perinatal specialist because this pregnancy is considered high risk due to our history of stillbirth and miscarriage. Ultimately the baby is healthy, which is wonderful, but everything is a little more complex with pregnancy after loss.
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Early in my grief after stillbirth, I read a book titled Finding Hope When a Child Dies. Its main thesis resonated with me and has continued to define my experience of grief—that the death of a child (or anything that we love deeply) is an initiation of sorts.
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I’ve noticed a handful of people on Instagram have unfollowed me since our pregnancy announcement and it made me realize that I want to acknowledge how many emotions come with these sorts of things.
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I’ve been struggling lately to maintain my hope. It’s been two weeks since our failed IVF cycle and I’ve felt pretty empty. I know the odds—we have a 70-80% chance of success with each frozen embryo transfer—I just honestly didn’t believe that we’d get the bad odds, again.
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2019 is not ending the way we’d hoped—we learned yesterday that our first embryo transfer was unsuccessful. Though we’re disappointed on many levels, I don’t want 2019 to be defined only by grief and loss. It was also a year full of hope, rainbows, and risk taking.
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Today we are so excited to finally be moving into our new (112 year old) house! We’ve been renovating it for over two years—a time that has been full of more joy and more sorrow than I’ve ever experienced.
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I’ve been reflecting on the idea of resilience lately. I want to know more about how it’s possible to find beauty, gratitude, and joy in the midst of grief and trauma, which was my own experience after the stillbirth of my son, Ellis.
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I‘ve got bittersweet feelings about summer coming to an end—it’s been such an enjoyable season and I’m sad it’s almost over. I feel like I’ve been making up for last summer somehow, when everything was shrouded in the darkness of grief after Ellis was stillborn.
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Yin has been my healing energy lately. Yin is slow, quiet, receptive, and creative.
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I just checked this book off my summer reading list and, wow, it is so rich. It’s an easy read that doesn’t sacrifice depth. And it’s just good storytelling, too.
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I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on my state of being after a year of loss, grief, and transformation. I feel like I’m finally starting to emerge, like a butterfly coming out of its cocoon.
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An ultrasound confirmed on Tuesday that our little babe stopped growing a few weeks ago. I should have been about 10 weeks pregnant.
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