Tag: miscarriage

Applying Compassion

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Musings, Poems

In 2005, my first pregnancy ended in a traumatic miscarriage. I recognize that all miscarriages are traumatic; this one, however, did not take care of itself. After the initial days of a slow bleed, I experienced a day of what I learned later (during the labor for my first live birth) was essentially hard labor. At thirteen weeks, my body went into full contraction mode to expel this pregnancy. I began to recover. I grieved. I went back to work, only to experience massive bleeding which began while I was teaching a class. I rushed to the ER at Women’s and Babies Hospital, where I was given surgical help to complete the miscarriage.

This was one of the most difficult times of my life. In the hospital, I received immediate and compassionate care from everyone involved. There was no questioning, no second-guessing. Of course my records confirmed that I had had a sonogram the previous week that showed a nonviable fetus. Still, I experience horror when I think of the stories I have read of women in my same situation who were forced to wait and bleed for hours or days because a rigorously anti-abortion hospital would not give surgical assistance without establishing the lack of a heartbeat. In some cases, women have developed infections or lost grave amounts of blood or even died for lack of essential medical care during miscarriage.

Will these merciless anti-abortion laws increase the risks for miscarrying women? I have absolutely no doubt that they will. On top of that, women who are experiencing the tragedy of pregnancy loss, of the self-doubt and shame we carry about how our bodies have let us down, will be placed in the position of being interrogated about whether they did anything to cause their miscarriages, with the risk of being charged as felons if they are not believed.

If some of us are particularly twitchy and quick to rage and grieving these days, it might have something to do with this, with having to re-open the trauma of our pregnancy losses–for whatever their reason or cause–finding ourselves imagining what the world will be like for women of the future who may have to endure what we experienced, only without compassionate care or empathetic understanding.

It’s time to trust women to understand what is happening to our bodies.

All Our Children

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems


#resist — I found this in my classroom zen garden last week.

I am sure that I have written this before. Still, it seems to want to be said again.

The first time I was pregnant,
I spent Mother’s Day
with the dawning awareness
that I was losing that baby.

The next Mother’s Day,
I held that one’s brother in my arms.
Becoming a mother was fraught
with much more peril than I’d anticipated,
each son preceded by a shadow child,
a rainbow child.

We talk amongst ourselves
about the lost ones,
and we wonder:
Were they just the first attempt
of these two who made it,
missing the train on the first go?

Were they the vanguard,
the waymakers,
making a pathway
for their brothers to follow?

Were they forces of nature,
faerie children,
unleashed into the world
to watch and protect?

But here in the sun of today
are these two shining changelings,
eyes older than time.
They know they belong here
in these bodies made of earth,
of wind and bone.

Perhaps they sometimes hear
the spirit children
singing in their dreams.

Some random quotations:
“Money is numbers and numbers never end. If it takes money to be happy, your search for happiness will never end.” ― Bob Marley
*
“Truth is an agile cat. It has more than nine lives.” ― Joy Harjo
*
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).” ― Mark Twain
*
“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”  ― Fran Lebowitz
*
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
― Gandalf (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Gratitude List:
1. Wood duck on Goldfinch Pond.
2. Three chittery indigo buntings flitting across the road.
3. The new giving project idea at church. I have never seen such unmitigated joy in response to the announcement of a new giving project. People clapped.
4. My mother. All the wisdom and Presence she offers to so many people.
5. And my grandmothers. And my mother-in-law. And all the women who have been mother to me. And Mother Earth.
6. My children: the two who bless and challenge me every day.
7. All our children, who challenge me/us to make the world a better and a safer place.
8. And Icarus Oriole, who sings to me all day. (I know he is really singing to Her Ladyship who hides herself greenly in the leaves, but it feels like he is singing to me.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Making Way for New

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Poems

lily
Sad that so many of my ferns have been killed by the cold, I am hoping that the lilies of the valley fare better.

Each of my sons is preceded by a shadow child.
Something calls my children to a time before they were.
And yet they were reluctant–both–to leave the womb,
resisting the raging tides that expelled their siblings early.

Or perhaps my body just refused to give them up,
these two it had managed to hold onto for the count.
My body said, “I’ve got this one.  I’ve got this one!”
Forty-two weeks, and the child was knocking at the door
and still the body wasn’t ready to let go her charge.

Sometimes that which is lost makes way
for that which is to come, creates a space.
That first one would be ten now half a year,
but my eldest celebrates that mark one month away.
That year, I labored twice, in May and May.

How often do we plant a tenuous seed of hope
in fields laid bare by grief and loss?
When you look in the eyes of the past
can you see where sorrow ends
and something new begins?

Gratitude List:
1. Book Sale scores: Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language, three Italo Calvino (gonna be surreal summer of reading), a Milan Kundera, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rushdie, Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea, and Reading Lolita in Tehran.  (I haven’t read Lolita myself–the premise creeps me out–but I have heard good things about Nafisi.)
2. Josiah got a book of 365 crafts a year, and has already made a cardboard gnome house in response.  He thinks there should be many more giant craft books like this.  I showed him my collection, which he says is boring.
3. Ellis got a book on science fair projects and spent the afternoon researching home-made solar cells, which is the topic of his science project this year.
4. Weekend breakfasts
5. Those geese calling out by the pond.

May we walk in Beauty!

Through the Same Door

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Poems

despise not small things

Day 29 Poem-A-Day Prompt: Write a Birth Poem.

We all came in through the same door.
The young ones just beginning to learn
what their bodies can do,
the new crones bidding the blood farewell.

And all those rounding bellies.
There were more of them than any of the others.

I sensed the wolf the moment I walked in the door.
I almost looked around to see her,
before I realized the shadow was my own.

Of course.

I stepped across the carpet
carefully toward the desk,
past the pair who sat together
with heads bowed in wonder
over the full bowl of her womb,
willing them not to look at me
lest they sense the blood on me,
lest some contagion contaminate
their innocent joy,
lest the wolf turn her face their way.

Me, I had walked this way before
with my strange and dark companion,
carrying my empty bowl.
I was only there for confirmation
this time.   I knew what I had come to hear,
knew how to follow this particular path of grief.

Walking out again, afterward,
the fresh-faced ones were still there,
and the wolf and I again took pains
not to taint them with our shadow.

We left by the same door
and closed it quietly behind us.