I became pregnant with my daughter six months after my last hospitalization for anorexia; six months after the nurse kneeled down and told me she could see my fighting spirit just below the surface; six months after I took what was left of my life, cradled it close, and moved on.
Six months was not enough time to transition my mind and my heart and my body from living with death to producing life. I lived in fear of losing the baby, and the fear was acute and constant. In the beginning, her body was tiny inside of my tiny body but still I felt the enormity of the physical responsibility at hand. I had a miracle to perform, and I wasn't sure my blood, bones, liver, and heart were up to the task.
I was petrified.
And so I began to grieve almost instantly, even as I felt myself crack wide open with heartbreaking love for this speck of a soul that had somehow entangled itself with my own. Loss was imminent, so I felt, even moreso after the positive triple screen results and the subsequent genetic and termination counseling. To get through my days, I held my pregnancy loosely even as I clung to it for dear life.
My friends and family celebrated cautiously, seeing, no doubt, my reluctance to embrace this incoming, transformative force. I let her new little life come in and pass through and out as I moved from love to fear to loss to grief and then back to love.
To cope with the possibility of loss, I wrote letters to my unborn child, certain that what emerged from my heart would be known and felt and understood by her. I strung my fears from page to page like lighted bulbs on a string, illuminating every so often the deepest, darkest recesses of my soul where only the fear of losing a child can live. I handed my love and loss to this baby even as we grew and grew and grew together.
As I lay in bed during those full and heavy months toward the end, watching her roll and twist and stretch beneath my skin, I loved her with fierce endurance, bittersweet in those frequent reminders that while she lived within me, she was ultimately not mine to keep.
I wrote to her:
"I'm afraid I'm not strong enough to do this for you. I'm afraid I'm going to hurt you. I'm afraid my body isn't good enough, strong enough to take care of you. And losing you would be my punishment, THE punishment, for my anorexia.
I love you more than I've ever loved anyone before. Already, you are in my soul. And I would do, will do if this is to be the case, anything for you.
I want you to come into our lives. I want you to share your childhood with us, your life with us. I want to see you and know you. But...that feels selfish...I want what is best for you.
I love you.
I know you are not mine. I know you are a child of the universe, of God. I know that your life is your own, your path - the path you are meant to take - is your own.
I know that I am just meant to carry you, and to care for you with love if you are destined to be here with us.
Much love,
Mom"
The month before I gave birth, when attachment had overgrown resistance, I devised a contract with myself so that I'd have something to hold on to in the end if not my baby:
"November 12, 2004
I am 8 1/2 months pregnant. If anything should happen to this baby I will change my life in order to help those in need. This baby has given me back my life so I will give my life to those in need, not simply use it to better myself."
I signed my name.
In the final weeks of pregnancy, at a grocery store in Oakland near our apartment, I saw a stuffed baby toy. Up to that point, I hadn't made any preparatory purchases for the baby, fearing I wouldn't be bringing her home from the hospital. But, I reached over, grabbed the toy, paid for it, and brought it home. Though most of the baby toys have come and gone, I still see my fleeting faith in that one little bear.
Looking back with 5 years of motherhood now under my belt, I see the terror I lived in. I read the letters and know that I had one foot planted firmly in hope and the other in total surrender. Though I was carrying a baby, I could not erase from my mind the years of messages that my body was dying, that I was dying, that my heart might give out at any moment, perhaps unexpectedly while I slept. Before my baby was on her way, those messages helped me gain the perspective and strength I needed to claw my way out of a desperate situation. But once the pregnancy test came back positive, those messages, and that knowledge, filled me with a dread so opaque and so dense it immobilized me at times.
Today, my love for my daughter tethers me to the earth. When the tidal wave of life's constant disruption crashes down upon me and drags me out to sea, I fight my way back to shore because I know she's waiting there for me. I never knew myself -- or the power of my own love and strength -- before I became her mother. And if anything causes me to rise to a level higher than even I can imagine, it is her love for me.
During these summer months when weeks pass by without her, my world tips over. I dream endlessly at night and wake in total panic, wondering where she is. When I remind myself that she isn't here, fresh sadness seeps in. She is a happy girl wherever she is, and her life with her dad is full and rich with love and affection, but the resounding emptiness of my house when she's gone is sometimes more than I can bear. And as I drive back and forth through the orchards and rice fields, ferrying her from one life to another, I beat back my raw devastation at how often we have to say goodbye to each other.
I would have imagined that by this point, with our separate lives well-established, Rich and I would spin smoothly as satellites around this planet we've created. But, there is no settling into this strange and difficult life; there is only a painful and reluctant acceptance that even time isn't going to deliver an easy solution. Decisions are rock solid...and then they melt...while the clock ticks and the days pass and the months grow into years.
The thing about love and loss and separation and grief is that they don't soften into well-worn, familiar possessions over time, they are as fresh and new as the sun peering golden eyes over the horizon each morning. They stretch and snap and pull and tug and recoil when touched, and they sprout and blossom and reseed with each passing season. Every day they are young, impressionable sensations that expand and contract in relation to everything else. One love fades into loss into love into loss into love.
I miss my daughter with an instinctive desperation during these months. Her absence leaves a void in my life that requires constant management and attention. I find things to do, places to go, people to see -- peace, fun, adventure -- and life seems to regulate. Then she comes home and I see so vividly the distinction between motherhood and life on my own. Clicking between these different roles has gotten easier, less abrupt, less jarring, but nothing has brought the two closer together. The only sustainable ablution to this constant polarity is a fine and practiced filtering of every emotion through one intact, receptive heart.
After delivering my daughter to her dad recently, I drove home awash in the bitter grief that drowns me still, and wondered what kind of mother permits this bumpy journey for her child. It's not what I wanted for any of us, certainly not for her, yet these are the lives we lead, these are the lives we preserve. They're not pretty, they're not fancy, and sometimes they hurt us like hell, but for the time being -- which is all we have -- they're ours.
And so, with a heart still funneling that enigmatic mix of love and loss from one chamber to the next, keeping my spirit alive, I carry on. We all carry on. And that, I'm coming to understand, is the painful bliss of simply being alive.
~ Katie
