Wars have been waged over the age-old question: at what point does life begin? In a world of black and white when it comes to having children (a simple, “Do you have children?” assumes so much privilege), I, like so many other women who have experienced miscarriage or infant loss, are left living in the grey, asking ourselves an even bigger question...when does Motherhood begin?
After a devastating miscarriage at 10 weeks and the life-changing experience of losing my beautiful and deeply-loved daughter, Wynter Violet, at the beginning of my last trimester, I was left struggling with that very question. When does Motherhood begin? Is it the moment you take that precious pregnancy test? Perhaps it’s the moment one feels that first miraculous kick. Or does it come much later, maybe in the haze of the first debilitating sleepless nights of providing round-the-clock care?
I remember looking down at my stomach the day I returned home from delivering my baby girl. She was born surrounded by grief with the sound of celebrating families bleeding through the walls of my maternity room. I remember begging the doctors to please not make me deliver her. The sounds of cheers, first cries, and oohs and aahhs coming through the walls by celebrating strangers was the soundtrack to which I experienced giving birth to the daughter I would never bring home.
I remembered the feeling of her tiny hand on my thigh in the moments before that final, devastating push, giving me absolution or trying to, even in death, connect with me. My stomach, once a source of fascination and excitement, wonder and pride, had betrayed me. My body, I, had become my baby’s final resting place. I was a graveyard. It was a grief that bit with steel teeth. I felt empty inside, as if I died too that day, and the both of us, my daughter and I, floated away together.
People don’t know what to say to someone like me. After my first miscarriage, I was told that it was common and that I’d simply get pregnant again. After loosing my daughter, who had a name, a nursery, and a beautiful, angelic face, all comments stopped. It became unspeakable. It was palpable. I was untouchable. There were very few people who looked me in the eye after that and the only honest questions, “Where did she go?”, “Why did she die?”, “Are you sad?”, came from my beautiful nephews, too innocent and young to have learned to be anything but open and honest.
My body screamed of my motherhood in the days that followed, as my engorged breasts cried for me to release the milk that had come in.
I spent my third and final pregnancy on bed rest for placenta previa, quietly bargaining with any god who would listen to please let me keep this child. Like my second pregnancy, I felt who my baby was immediately. I was carrying a boy. A cherub of a boy with blonde curls and full lips like his sister before him. An angel. I never assumed I would get to keep him until I heard that first momentous cry. Feeling him in my arms, I kissed his head and wept with both joy and pain for the love I had for all my beautiful children and my road to this moment of glory.
Fast forward two and a half years later, I look at my blonde, curly-haired little boy with absolute wonder. The little boy who finds a million ways to laugh each day, whose smile lights up my life, whose whispers of “I love you, Mommy” sets my heart ablaze with a love unlike any I’d ever known. I dreamt of his face. I have known him from the moment he was conceived. He is my dream come true. He is so beautiful, so perfectly created, so good, I often wonder if my two little angels molded him out of the cosmos and sent him for me to love enough for all three of them a million times over.
So, here I sit, the mother of three, with one happy child at my feet. I’m a mother of a son, yes, to those people living in the world of black and white. I’m also a mother in the grey, where two little girls dancing, bare-footed and happy, heads thrown back with laughter, will live forever.
At the intersection of birth and death, I realized that I became a Mommy the very first day I felt that crazy, life-changing love. For however long their life, those babies were alive, they were loved, and they were mine. And I was lucky enough, and remain lucky enough, to be their Mother.
Previously published at findyourpleasure.com
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