Autumn Shower

I’ve had two posts in draft form for the past couple of weeks, but for some reason I can’t finish them just yet. The words aren’t flowing.

I don’t feel philosophical today or wise. I feel tired and emotional. We tried this month though I’m never really certain if we’ve hit the window at precisely the right time. Six hours, the approximate length of time an egg is actually ready and able to conceive, feels like aiming for a pin hole on a giant dart board. So now we’re waiting, all the while I’m hyper aware of every twinge in my belly and trying to decode its message. I feel moody today and that makes me panic because I worry that it’s PMS rearing her ugly head for another month. It would also mean that we’re not pregnant and that just depresses me.  I’ve cut out caffeine and I’m back to taking my vitamins but I worry that it won’t make a difference.

I can feel the tears waiting to spill over today.  The glow of my computer screen and the din of my colleagues working are the only things that seem to be holding them in. 

I’ve just realized that I’m going to a baby shower this weekend with not one but three pregnant women. These are all women I love. Dear friends who have offered their support. In my deepest heart I’m happy for them. I will love their children when they arrive. But there’s also the sadness for myself and my husband and the thought of sitting in a room and having to look at their beautiful swollen bellies is a bit too much for me right now. My heart hurts a bit too much.  

When I’ve had to attend baby showers in the past, I’ve armed myself by wearing fabulous shoes, carefully applying my makeup and styling my hair.  But this time I know it will be a sham. I don’t feel like bandaging my wound. I feel like giving it air, letting it breathe.  Does this mean I will arrive naked? No.  But I won’t try to paint the pony either.

I’m suddenly recalling a scene in Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s book The Secret Daughter.  It tells the story of a woman in her 30s faced with infertility and the long journey of adoption. Through her character, Somer,  Gowda gave words to emotions I didn’t even know I was feeling.  The opening chapters vividly paint the heart-wrenching picture of Somer’s third failed pregnancy. And if I recall correctly, Somer explains her first pregnancy and loss as the “dividing line of her life”. Before, she wasn’t sure she wanted children and after, she wants nothing more. Soon after her last miscarriage she goes to a baby shower for a dear friend only to run out in tears, wounded by questions asking when she planned to have a baby. To the outsider they’re harmless conversation starters but to us in the trenches it’s like trying to outrun shrapnel. Some days you feel like trudging right through the mine field just to prove to yourself that you can but sometimes you just want to hide.

This is a difficult time of year for me. It brings up emotions I’ve buried so deep that I’ve forgotten about them until I’m suddenly tear-eyed and wondering why.  This is the time of my first pregnancy and our first loss. The dividing line of my life. I try not to hold onto the past so I don’t taint the future, but I also know that I need to give myself permission to feel my feelings and walk through them. I picture myself walking through a dark forest. A stand of red pines, mist floating in the air, a blanket of pine needles under my feet.  I have to keep walking.

Just before I sat down to write this I was feeling agitated so I decided to get my iPod and headphones from my car. It’s a way to soothe my soul and block the noise in the office so I can think, call it my version of an office door.

As I reached for my iPod, there in the car’s console was an acorn I’d stashed during one of our camping trips this summer. My younger wiser self must have put it there so that today my older weary self would be reminded of hope just when I needed it.  I’m grateful.

Of rainbows and horses...

Rainbows...


Found at: http://www.onenesstravel.pranalight.de/rapanui_horse_rainbow.jpg



Yesterday as I was driving home from work I witnessed the miracle of a double rainbow in the eastern sky. Dark grey clouds provided the perfect canvas for the brilliant September sun to create this extraordinary sight as it began its descent toward the horizon. I feel such a sense of peace when I see rainbows. It's as if a wave of calm soothes each of my cells.

Like acorns, rainbows have become significant for me on this journey. Several months ago I had a vivid dream in which my grandmother and I stood watching a heavy rainstorm through the living room window of my childhood home. As the rain clouds passed they revealed a vibrant rainbow whose colours were deeper than I have ever seen in real life. I looked up rainbows in the dream book I keep at my bedside. It explains that rainbows foretell of good news and symbolize hope. Whenever I see rainbows now I say a silent prayer of gratitude for their beauty, for the gift of sight and for the three little souls who came into my life.   

and horses...

This spring I had the awesome opportunity to participate in three sessions of Facilitated Equine Experiential Learning (FEEL) with my friend who was training to be a facilitator. This experience deserves an entire posting of its own but I mention it here to explain the impetus for my poem below titled "Two Mothers". At my first session I met a beautiful horse named Angelina. We connected instantly. To me she exuded mother energy. Something in her soft brown eyes drew me in. It was only when I formally met each member of the herd through their brief biographies that I discovered she had aborted a foal and had no living offspring. Angelina is a sacred healer for whom I will be forever grateful. It was after working with her that I wrote this poem:

          Two mothers - one horse, one human.

          United in grief for the souls they carried but never saw. 

          Their eyes reflect a sadness containing the women they were before

          and after their children were lost.

          She tells her ‘it’s not your fault’.

          She grieves for her, she feels her heart.

          Let it go, let the fear go, she says.

          She wraps her in tenderness.

          They stand in stillness together.

          In the shadow of women who say she doesn’t deserve the title,

          she tells her to own it, to own her truth.

          They know their truth, they feel it in their bones, in their hearts, in their souls.

          They are the mothers of sky children,

          whose eyes sparkle in the stars,

          whose sweet breath dances on the wind,

          whose heart energy is felt in the warmth of the sun,

          whose tears wash over them in raindrops,

          whose laughter is found in rainbows,

          whose strength grows with the trees, 

          whose night-time prayers are written on moonbeams.

          They are mothers.

          And together they heal each other.







A Jar of Acorns...

"Faith sees a beautiful blossom in a bulb, a lovely garden in a seed, and a giant oak in an acorn."  ~ William Arthur Ward

One of the most healing things for me on this journey with infertility has been the insights I've gained by paying attention to nature and her mysterious yet sometimes brutal ways. One of my most profound spiritual teachers is my husband who also happens to be a talented arborist, an artist of the trees. Through his experience and wealth of knowledge he has opened my eyes and my heart to the challenging, beautiful, awe-inspiring world of Oaks, Elms, Redwoods and Chestnuts; the grandmothers and grandfathers of the earth. He has illuminated my life with wonder.

When I became pregnant for the third time in 2009, following two previous miscarriages, a dear friend e-mailed me a quote about acorns and their symbolism in Celtic mythology. Its subject line read: Gather Ye Acorns! She wrote, "oak trees and acorns were thought by the Celtic culture to be powerful fertility symbols. Acorns gathered at night were the strongest bringers of fertility." I began to look at the fruits of the oak in a different light.  

Sadly at a mere 6 weeks that pregnancy ended in a devastating miscarriage. That was more than two years ago but I keep collecting acorns because it gives me hope. 

A couple of weeks ago my husband brought home acorns from a Bur Oak tree to add to my collection. Unlike the acorns of White and Red Oaks which appear to wear little caps, the nuts of the knarly Bur Oak look like they're wearing fuzzy bonnets with a crown of hair peaking out. By design these precious packages foretell the appearance of their potential selves each portraying a unique character. How wonderful! 

I recently found another explanation of acorn imagery: "In Norse and Celtic culture, acorns symbolized life, fertility and immortality. Since the acorn only appears on a fully mature oak, it is regarded as a symbol of the patience needed to attain goals over long periods of time, thus representing perseverance and hard work."

What strikes me is that it's only a fully mature oak that bears acorns.

The past three years have certainly been a time of growth for me in so many delicate yet deep ways its difficult to enumerate. I have become an explorer in my own life. I travel inwardly to the depths of my sorrow and outwardly to gather experiences and meet the teachers I need to meet. I read. I am nurturing my voice. I am giving myself permission to be in this world; to occupy space, to speak my thoughts, to sound my heart. I am following a spiritual path that continues to unfold. Several months after my last miscarriage I wrote in my journal: My babies are giving birth to me and when I am born, I will be a mother. I'm still in the womb.

In the book Simple Abundance, a regular resident of my bed side table, author Sarah Ban Breathnach makes a careful distinction between perseverance and persistence in the chapter 'The Tao of Success'. She writes,

"Perseverance in life is being steadfast; persistence is being stubborn. Perseverance is achievement’s perspiration; persistence is its sweat. Persistence is knocking on Heaven’s doors so often and so loudly on behalf of your dreams that eventually you’ll be given what you want, just to shut you up."

I keep waiting to be gifted with a child to confirm that I am in fact worthy of motherhood. But I'm starting to learn it doesn't work that way. "If you think you're not strong enough to bear the Glory, rest assured it will be withheld until you believe you can and ask for it," Sarah Ban Breathnach writes. The challenge has been issued. The next curve of my journey has been revealed. 

In the meantime my tender heart is consoled by a fact my husband shared with me as we sat in bed, from Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees. "Over the course of its lifetime, a redwood may produce a billion seeds. On average, in the fullness of time, one of the seeds may grow up to become a mature redwood." Preston explains, "the seeds of a redwood are tiny and most of them don't grow...redwoods produce most of their seeds only in certain years, when conditions are just right, which are called cone years." We've cast some seeds and they didn't grow. Like the redwoods I'm trying to have faith.

And so with a jar of acorns on my bookshelf, a prayer in my heart, and all the vitamins a girl could want, I continue on this journey with my beautiful husband dancing with patience, perseverance, persistence and most of all love.