Power Magnification with Mother Collaboration
Originally posted at The Way of the Rose Facebook group April 11, 2020
Novena Day 52
The Joyful Mysteries
The Visitation
I really didn’t enjoy pregnancy. The week before Zane was born, Bill said, “Aren’t you glad you’ll never have to be pregnant again?”
Instead of relief I felt a rush of fear. Despite the fact that I was 41, hated pregnancy, and knew I only wanted two children I couldn’t agree. What came out was, “I don’t think I’m ready to say that yet.”
“But even if something happened to him, we wouldn’t replace him!”
I suppose it was inevitable that after Zane’s death that conversation would hang over us like a miasm. In the beginning Bill said he was open to revisiting the idea of another child and later agreed to try, but it was clear his enthusiasm was gone. It was the opposite for me, however. Holding Zane in my arms for the little time we’d had solidified my desire for another child. And I didn’t have much time, if any, left. Who knew if I was even capable of having another child?
(Just as aside here, it’s NEVER good to ask someone “why don’t you ‘just’ adopt?” as if that’s an easy solution. Broke, grieving 40-somethings, one of whom is convinced he killed the last kid, aren’t at the top of anyone’s list of potential parents. And we’d heard of so many adoptions falling through at the last minute. I knew my heart couldn’t take that.)
Since Bill wasn’t talking much, I sought conversation, understanding, and connection elsewhere. I desperately needed community, and I no longer felt comfortable with “normal” people. I cried too much, I thought too much about death, and I was way, way too cynical. Grieving parents are among the most isolated people in our society. No one who hasn’t been through it can truly understand what it’s like—and that’s good! It’s not a pain you would wish on your worst enemy. Many can empathize with the initial shock and horror, but it is impossible to imagine the constant, everyday onslaught of tiny loss upon tiny loss, the jolt of anger and bitterness that goes through your body when someone says something as simple as “I died laughing,” and the stab to the heart when you are taken by surprise by a happy family with a child your child’s age.
Normal people are always afraid that they will “remind” you of your loss, as if there’s ever a moment you could forget. Talking to others who “get it” can be a literal lifesaver. There was a SIDS support group that met in Manhattan once a week and kept me reasonably sane. Bill came with me a few times, but not enough to realize that feeling guilty was just a part of the grieving parent territory and had no bearing on reality.
Then we were invited to a SIDS conference as a family. The conference was the best thing that happened to us as a family in a long time. There were seminars and workshops for parents and siblings where people could share their experiences, their thoughts, their fears, and their grief. I went to one on subsequent children while Bill went to one on roadblocks to healing. As I’d suspected, the most common roadblock in the room was guilt. Bill told me the room was stunned by an EMT who was wracked with guilt because he couldn’t save his own son. In listening to the others, Bill was forced to acknowledge that there was nothing special about his grief. All those other parents felt the same way he did. I was so grateful when he really connected with a sweet group of people from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, especially one man who was exceptionally good at reaching out to people in pain. It was impossible to meet those warm people and think that any of them could have deserved the bum deal they had gotten. Bill started to think that perhaps, just perhaps, we didn’t either.
It didn’t last, though. Bill was not an outgoing person, and his grief closed him off to everyone but me and Kalea. I knew if he would just call the man from Pennsylvania he could help him, but he wouldn’t. Finally, the pain got so bad he was forced to forge a healing relationship with a therapist in order to survive.
In the meantime, I’d gotten serious about optimizing my remaining chances of conception. I’d read Taking Charge of Your Fertility and found the book’s website. I discovered there was a sister site, Ovusoft.com, dedicated to helping women use the techniques in the book to track their fertility. Ovusoft was the name of the software based upon the book that made tracking ovulation easy. The site had a message board forum where women asked questions and shared experiences. What a gold mine! On a random thread I connected with an old friend I’d lost touch with. She invited me to join a group that had gotten really close due to struggles with infertility. At first I wasn’t sure I belonged there because it had only taken me six months each to conceive each of my children, but they were welcoming and one of the members was about to have a baby that she knew could not survive. I knew I could help her through that experience. I particularly connected with another woman there who was pregnant with her miracle baby.
On another thread, someone mentioned she was trying to conceive after a recent stillbirth and was finding it agonizingly difficult to be around “normal people.” She wanted to know if there were others interested in starting a group for women who were trying to conceive after a loss. The response was immediate: The Aching Arms, Hopeful Hearts group was born. What a magical thing it was to be able to discuss these topics with other women who felt the same extreme emotions around the subject that I did. The support and love we offered each other accelerated almost everyone’s healing, and bonded many of us for life.
Zane visited me in a dream in a beautiful meadow covered with flowers during this time period. I was overjoyed to see him. He seemed about five or six, but I knew it was him. He had a beautiful little toddler with him; he’d brought his baby brother to meet me. I woke up so happy that day. Another time I fell asleep on an acupuncturist’s table, and when I woke up I realized I’d been holding a beautiful baby boy. I knew that the child was mine, and it dawned on me that he was much bigger than Zane had ever been. In fact, he felt like he was probably about 10 months.
Shortly after Zane’s second birthday, as my friend awaited the birth of her miracle baby, she reported in a panic one day that her daughter had stopped moving and she was going to the hospital for an emergency ultrasound. The news was bad. Her baby was gone. Bill had heard so much about her by then that he was just as devastated as I was by the news. As she waited to give birth to her daughter, in a sort of affirmation of life we made love that night, and—here’s that irony again—even though we had decided to take that month off from “trying” I found myself staring at a resoundingly positive pregnancy test two weeks later.
When I was 10 weeks pregnant and my friend was just starting to come out of her shock, I went to California to visit her and her husband. Unfortunately, I started bleeding while I was there and she had to take me to the emergency room of the same hospital where she’d given birth. An ultrasound revealed what I’d already suspected, I’d lost this pregnancy too. In a kind of reverse “visitation,” my friend and I spent the night at my hotel bonding over what might have been.
My darkest days were to follow. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and my 44th birthday were a blur. I had finally used up my ability to cope and decided I needed to go back to therapy for a while. With the help of my therapist, my Ovusoft friends, and my husband, I was eventually and perhaps miraculously able to conceive again. My health insurance covered one round of IVF, and the month before I turned 45, the last possible moment for either my health insurance or the fertility clinic, I tested positive one last time. Zane’s little brother was finally born two weeks after his big brother’s fourth birthday. He’s 13 now, and I can’t imagine my life without him.
My network of wonderful women friends came to the rescue again when Bryce wasn’t learning to talk. I had found a website that described a condition called “childhood apraxia of speech,” a speech planning disorder. The child understands everything but is unable to control the muscles governing speech. I knew right away that was what was going on with Bryce. The prognosis did not sound good, even with intensive speech therapy. One day out of the blue my friend Lourdes asked if I’d considered apraxia. I said, “Yes! That’s what I think it is!” She put me in touch with two other moms whose kids had apraxia and autism. Those moms plugged me in to a whole network of moms dedicated to healing their kids from disorders that all had similar roots. That approach was so spectacularly successful for us that by the time Beckett was in kindergarten, no one would have diagnosed him with a speech disorder.
I’ve been paying it forward to other parents ever since. A particularly fierce and ambitious group of friends whose children had gained enormously from our daily fellowship wrote a book about our experiences, twenty-four stories of group healing. In order to drum up a little demand so we could get the book published, we started a website dedicated to children’s health: The Thinking Moms’ Revolution. Since then we’ve published two more books, and a third is on the way.
So perhaps you can see why the Visitation is my favorite mystery? There is no doubt in my mind that when two or more “mothers” focused on love put their heads together, they can accomplish miracles. The “mothers” is in quotes, because biological motherhood is not necessary. Anyone can mother.
