During the pandemic, I felt there was a morass of global unrequited grief—the kind that comes from generations of “get over it” living. I know a lot about that kind of grief. An accumulation of losses that are not mourned and may never be mourned, the death of experiences and dreams, and people coming so rapidly they cannot fully work through the nervous system to reach the heart.
When the twins I birthed were nearing five, I visited someone I was close to when we were both living with infertility. At dinner, their spouse asked if the six-year-long fertility experience had been “worth it” since I had successfully brought twins into being. In the quiet and expensive restaurant, the hush in the room felt shocking—as though I was on a stage being interviewed by a journalist—a journalist with an intense need for my answer to align with their thinking. For reasons I cannot connect to twenty-five years later, I told the truth while knowing it would greatly upset the couple.
“No.”
Their faces were blank. It appeared to me that my answer stripped them of the ability to speak or emote, or that the public environment forced them to immediately adopt a mask. When the “journalist” responded, it was obvious a passel of polite hounds leashed what they wanted to say, leaving them to grind out a single word.
“Why?”
Sensing the intense value being placed on what I said next, I took time to release each sentence, as if by doing so I might slow the eventual ending of our relationship.
“The earlier miscarriages, the drugs, the procedures, the destruction of my body, the horror of the birth experience... Those things changed me. I cannot look at who I am now without accepting how much everything has cost me.... I love the twins. I’m grateful they are here. And... I cannot imagine agreeing to go through it again.”
The couple did not look away from my face. The person whose body hadn’t been able to deliver a child whispered the final question before we parted forever.
“Even though you have what we both wanted, you cannot say it was worth it?”
My heart spasmed, perhaps bleeding a little from the cost of saying the truth out loud to them and to me.
“No.”
Nearly every year since that conversation, I wonder if my answer has changed.
A few weeks ago, the twins turned thirty. A month prior, the three of us traveled to the beach and spontaneously celebrated, calling our time together a meeting of the “womb warriors.” I wrote about my experience in Silent Howling. As we danced in the ocean, it reminded me of them swimming in the womb and me swimming in the womb before I was born. For me, it was a collective expression that the labels defining and often separating us do not represent a full womb story.
In a conversation that lasted over two sessions, the nighttime or “shadow” therapist I’m working with mentioned my lack of relationship with thinking of myself as a “good” human [insert laugh out loud emoji]. I think of myself as a “questionable” person. Not good or bad, on the cusp of either. Which to me means “dangerously improbable.” I cannot be trusted to be good; therefore, I might eventually turn out to be bad. This is a narrative I heard at a young age and incorporated into my definition when asked a question by the nighttime therapist.
“Do you experience yourself as a good person?”
The blank stare I exhibited was real, unlike those I saw on the faces of the couple in that restaurant all those years ago. Responding “I am a bad person” felt unauthentic, as did replying “I am good.” The therapist asked why I had no response. In my retro-eye, I saw the image of a parenting situation. One where I was carrying out the demands of a nurse and radiology technician and going against my innate human response. I felt trapped, enraged, terrified, and ghastly. I felt the most inhumane and evil I have ever felt, and I was unable to stop myself from doing what I was being told to do.
After I shared the memory, the nighttime therapist said something I had heard from a previous therapist.
“That’s called a double-bind. Because of the power differential and the abusive and coercive usage of care for your child being based on making this procedure happen, it made it so you couldn’t act in a way that felt right to you…therefore…”
The therapist left the end open for me to fill in, and with grade-school rote, I repeated what I had heard before.
"The situation made me think I’m bad, fulfilling all the programming I swallowed in childhood.”
My throat shut down. No words could escape. I mutely nodded yes or no until the session ended.
There is a narrow paw-path carved into the grass on a remote area of the land I live on. Every year for the past twenty-five years, when I mow, this little trail is easily noted. The mice and or chipmunks that use this trail through each season, even tunneling under snow during winter, are not a quarter of a century old. They are descendants of small mammals that lived on this land long before me, passing on information to each generation—a baton of familiarity that isn’t questioned, even when a human disrupts the time of day it can be used.
On Sunday, I shared with a young mother the story of whether or not it was worth it to go through infertility and birth. I was using it as a metaphor for how some life experiences aren’t easily labeled good or bad, intending to illustrate it with my usual answer to the “was it worth it” question. A different response walked out of my mouth.
“It’s taken me thirty years to be able to say this. Yes, it was worth it.”
An accumulation of losses that have not been mourned—the death of experiences and dreams—come so rapidly, shooting through the nervous system, to finally land in the heart.