tending a garden in a graveyard

Trying to make a human is a lot like gardening. Especially if you’ve never gardened in your life. Sure, you’ve had the odd houseplant on your windowsill in your twenties but nothing like having a full garden and choosing specific very expensive plants at a nursery and then trying to keep them alive and blossom and bloom in your care. 

I say that they are similar because, as my friend Lacy recently said to me, “plants are on plant time, they don’t put values on living or dying, they just are.” As long as you are giving them light and water as best you can, they will do whatever it is they’re destined to. Sometimes a plant you’ve hardly put any thought or care into thrives and turns into the fullest version of itself. And sometimes you can’t keep a plant alive as hard as you try. As much specific effort and resources you put into it, it dies. Fertilized human eggs are like this too.

I felt especially like this when I lost my first pregnancy a few months ago. Pregnancy happened earlier than we thought it might, me being at the geriatric age of 34 when we found out, we’d been trying for 4 or 5 months, and doctors tell you not to bother them with fertility questions until about a year into trying the old fashioned way. I was alone when I took the test (Jordan was in LA and I was in Seattle, as we too often are) and I was equal parts terrified and absolutely overwhelmingly happy. We wept giddily on video chat and I spent the day feeling like everything I looked at, touched, encountered, experienced, was brand new. A few days prior I had a hunch I might be pregnant because I had hydroplaned in my car pretty dramatically, almost crashing and my heart rate hadn’t even increased very much. I was so calm, collected, and confident that I thought “that’s weird” and wondered where that courage came from. I had this fleeting thought that maybe I was pregnant. Turns out unabashed bravery is my tell.

It’s so wild that once it’s confirmed you’re pregnant, the doctor then gives you a list of food and medication you can’t have and then tells you to go away for two months, TWO MONTHS just trusting that this little fragile miraculous completely momentous thing your body is doing is going according to plan. 

I loved being pregnant. I didn’t really expect that, to be honest. My body is sensitive and I hate being nauseous and I didn’t think I’d feel anything but the literal symptoms. But I felt something come alive in me, I felt animal and strong and magical. It really is so fucking badass that people with uteri can literally create more people. It makes sense cis men spend all this time trying to oppress women and convince them they’re weak. It must be terrifying to be in the presence of such incredible power. 

I don’t want to describe in detail the day we found out we lost it, but it was a very bad day. One of the darkest in my life, really. I had just passed ten weeks, two weeks shy of my second trimester. We found out because it was the day we were meant to see it for the first time on the ultrasound, hear the heartbeat, and start the process of finding out the sex, testing for abnormalities, etc. But instead I was sent home with instructions on how to know when I’d passed the fetus and some options for if I didn’t. The midwife reassured me that 1 of every 4 pregnancies doesn’t come to term and that under no circumstances should I think it was my fault. 1 in 4, you believe that? “It takes an unbelievable amount of things to align to result in an actual human. It’s a miracle it happens at all” she said. 

The next morning, they called telling me they actually weren’t sure if I had actually lost it based on my hormone levels and that I may still be pregnant, or that the fetus may be growing outside my uterus, and of those three options they weren’t sure which was true. It’s almost like we haven’t spent that much time and resources studying women’s bodies and pregnancy and we’re still guessing at a lot. It took them three days to confirm that I had in fact lost the pregnancy. In those three days we teetered between hope and grief, not able to lean fully into either. That first day Jordan and I sat by the lake wrapped in each other, breathing shakily and speaking softly, taking in the beauty and horror and confusion of being alive all at once.

I was given three options once the loss was confirmed. One: wait to pass it naturally. My midwife told me this could take days, weeks, months if we were really unlucky, and that leaving something in your body that was no longer viable could result in sepsis or other health concerns. She said most people who take this option have a religious or “moral” objection to abortion, which was both of my other two options. I could take mifepristone, the abortion pill, which causes you to bleed for days, maybe weeks, is only 70-80% effective, and is less hygienic. Or, I could get an abortion procedure called vacuum aspiration, which is exactly what it sounds like (super cute). The abortion procedure took some recovery but was immediate, almost 100% effective at removing the no longer viable fetus, and we could try to get pregnant again as soon as I got my period back. The midwife said she would deem an abortion medically necessary because of the risk, but that she wasn’t allowed to officially call it that so technically I had a choice. We chose the third option. But I understand that for some people, other options could make sense. Once we chose, the midwife called around to find a clinic for me. There was only one place that had an appoint within the next month, and United Health Care denied us coverage for the procedure there (don’t worry, a few weeks later a guy named Luigi made us feel avenged around this fucked up fact in our journey, not that I condone his actions OF COURSE) so we had to pay out of pocket. When I called the clinic she said they had discounts depending on our income. I said because I was a gig worker my income sort of varied and this absolute angel replied “what’s that? I heard you say $48,000, wow that’s our cutoff for the biggest discount! Let’s just get you set up with that.” Reproductive health workers are the actual best and you cannot convince me otherwise. 

The abortion clinic was unmarked, understandably and Jordan couldn’t come in, understandably. Everyone was incredibly kind, informative, and gentle with me. In every room there was an evacuation escape map and plan on the wall, for horrible but obvious reasons. They put me to sleep and, as I understand, it took about 5 minutes. I woke up in a dimly lit room with a heated blanket on my lap. The first thing I noticed was the deeply upsetting and painful feeling that something foreign had been inside me, the second thing I noticed was a sign that said “everything is okay - breathe” and breathe I did, interrupted only by an exhausted and grief stricken sob, followed by many like it. A young man, mid twenties ish, with wavy brown hair came in and gave me a snack and asked me if I wanted to call my husband, I nodded childishly while I sipped my juice. They walked me out to Jordan and I fell into him, groggily asking if we could get Jimmy John’s because I hadn’t had cold cuts in three months. He likes to tell the story of picking up the sandwich while I was in the car and then running back to the car for something when I asked through tears “oh no, are they out of sandwiches?!” like my entire mental well being hung on a Beach Club. Which, to be fair, in that moment, it did. I came back to our friend’s house in the woods where we were staying, because my college professor was subletting our apartment at the time (long story), and slept the rest of the day off nestled in bed with my cat against my chest. 

I want to be clear, my abortion was one of the best medical experiences I have ever had. Abortion clinics are vital care centers, abortion is healthcare and a human right, and if you disagree you should probably go fuck yourself. 

PS, three days later, Donald Trump was re-elected. Suuuuper fun week. 

I also want to be clear that I don’t feel as though I lost a baby. We had been careful to call it the “cluster of cells” for the first few weeks to remind ourselves of that. I am a loosely witchy spiritual person, but I don’t feel like our child died or that a soul left this world. Miscarriage is your body’s way of knowing more than you do, and mine knew that cluster of cells was never going to become a person. My womb was protecting me, as it is designed to do. I also know this is a different feeling and reality for every person who loses a pregnancy, none are incorrect. All are valid, this is mine.

One I thing I do know is that of the people who should decide when life begins, what is a child, and when a soul enters a physical body, politicians are not among them. I’m not sure any of us are. 

I did however, feel like something died. To have something alive and forming inside of you is, as I said, a huge deal, and you can feel its hugeness. A few days before we officially found out, I felt something go silent. My symptoms stopped suddenly. My body felt quiet and eerie and wrong. This is how it felt like a plant, but one I was growing inside me. One that clearly had no new growth, that was not coming back no matter how much I watered it or how much sunlight it saw. This death, for me, while not human, was haunting and hard. I still felt like I lost something big and meaningful. I felt a pang of embarrassment strangely, for feeling false anticipation of something that would never come to fruition. I still feel the reverberations from it, an emptiness that has yet to heal over. My uterus felt deafeningly silent until three months later when my period returned, and something came back online. Like a mill wheel began to turn again. 

The grief of a lost pregnancy is weird and complicated, we don’t really talk about it enough. If you’ve experienced one, I’m sorry, I’m around if you ever wanted to talk to someone about it.

I am not sure if or when I will be pregnant again - our hope is soon, but as my mother says “pregnancy is not something you control, you’re along for the ride but you’re not driving.” And so we are at the mercy of the turning of the earth and the natural way of things. And whenever, however our family gets another member, I know it will be big and wonderful.

In the meantime, thank you for reading this and being witness to something me and so many other people carry while they navigate stigma and sorrow and the mother fucking American government and healthcare system. Ultimately we could stand to remember that the human body is magic and everyone who has one should have full agency over it, and get to decide how they feel about what happens to it. And at one point, we were all clusters of cells that just barely managed to enter through the portal in the physical world and become ourselves. We put little potted plants on our windowsills and struggle with our first expensive tree we buy from a nursery. In one way or another, we all tend to the garden.