I don’t quite know how to begin.

I have been avoiding… all of you.

There has been an internal debate about what to share on this blog and what is just too much. Finally, I have decided that transparency leads to clarity.

We will see.

Over the last year I have suffered two miscarriages. The second one being at the end of July. Both were physically and emotionally excruciating.

After the first miscarriage I was crushed under piles of shame. Shame for not being “good/healthy/vigilant” enough to carry my child full term. Shame for the choices I made earlier in my life that put me in the position of trying to have a baby in my forties. Shame for my internal arrogance at getting pregnant easily.

Shame for eating Snickers bars.

After the second miscarriage I felt scrubbed clean of hope.

Since then, I have been struggling to find my way back into a state of curiosity about how my life is unfolding.

Stuck between extreme longing for a child and wanting to know how everything will turn out. I know we never know until we know, and by then the knowing is the new reality. But that doesn’t stop the internal temper tantrums about wanting to know. The big foot stomping, fist shaking, ranting at the heavens!

“Will I ever be able to have the baby I have dreamed of having my whole life?”

“Why couldn’t I just keep one of the babies?!” 

I understand there could be many explainable health reasons for losing a child, especially at my age, but I think there is a bigger cosmic “Why?” I am asking.

Yes, there have been some “Why me?” feelings rumbling around in there but now I am finally coming to deeper questions. I have started working with the techniques of a wonderful fertility pioneer Julia Indichova and the question she posed to our group of women is:

How is this experience bringing me back to my heroic mission in life?

Right now, I don’t have that answer.

I don’t even know what my heroic mission in life is.

But if an elephant sat on my chest and I had to come up with an answer before she would move I would wheeze out something like -

My heroic mission in life is to swallow enough light that the darkness inside is illuminated. And when that darkness meets the light it is transformed into diamonds that shoot back out my fingertips and Bedazzle all who come within my range so that we all shine and sparkle together. 

Or maybe it would be something else. I just want the elephant off my chest.

So here I sit, deeply sad, sometimes angry, clawing my way back to hope.

But I remember being in my doctor’s office as she confirmed that I was indeed miscarrying again and all of my bones deflated, curling into my organs. As I shrank into despair I could barely hear a song playing on the radio in the nurses station through the open door.

The song was Don’t Stop Believing by Journey.

Even then, I had to smile just a tiny bit.