The Space in Between
A super stunning article in Tricycle about miscarriage. It begins: “Today I would be (am?) eight weeks pregnant. But I am waiting to miscarry. I am waiting to no longer be waiting. My body is still catching up to what my mind learned last Friday.”
Isn’t that the most perfect description of it: The body catching up to what the mind knows. Both with miscarriage and with a pregnancy-less cycle in general: We are always waiting for our body to catch up to what the mind knows. And existing in that space between is a space of disbelief and hope.
The worst of hope. The hope that isn’t really hope but we call it hope because we don’t have another word for it. Those times when you talk yourself into not believing something because… chance exists.
This is a beautiful essay. A must-read.
2 comments
Thanks for referencing that. There was much in it I could relate to, after two ectopic pregnancies. I remember a friend telling me that “so you’re actually still pregnant” when I had been diagnosed with an ectopic, and was waiting for the medication to work. Well, theoretically yes, but in reality no. I was waiting for my body to catch up. But hope didn’t exist. And her comment didn’t help – it just denied me my grief. These in-between states are very complicated.
Finally got around to reading this… I can kind of relate. It was August 5, 1998, when I went for my 6-month checkup and ultrasound, only to learn there was no heartbeat. I was booked for an induction two days later on August 7th, and so I walked around for the next 40+ hours looking pregnant, feeling pregnant, but at the same time, knowing I wasn’t, not really, not any more. A strange place to be in, for sure…!
I especially liked this paragraph:
“Miscarriage is extremely common,” she says people love to inform you. She’s right. There are many things about which people love to inform you, especially when you are a woman. If it’s extremely common, where is the art and the poetry, she is asking. Why is there so much silence? So much grief in solitude? As women, we collect losses. Gigantic and minute ones, endless and everyday ones. We are librarians of losses. We accept and file them, some better left unread and gathering dust. I will always know exactly the shelf on which this volume was placed.