The moon darkens and my blood begins to fall. Thick, brilliant, blossoming blood. Blood so heavy, it pulls my spirit down into the earth and leaves my body behind.
Every month, I build a nest inside my belly, a soft nourishing place for life to begin. I speak to the stars. Watch as they fall towards me, say, there she is. She's finally coming home. Home, to this sweet warm soft cradle I've prepared her of my flesh and blood.
True, in younger years I did everything I could to make my womb inhospitable. IUDS and spermicides, condoms and Hail Marys and hormones of all forms, blockading the entrance and poisoning the waters for any would be life-bringers. Not because I didn’t want a child, but because I wanted that child to have a father and a mother, and neither were clearly available. The years ticked by. The blockades did their work. I did mine.
My womb is a rich and tended place. Soft and warm. Healthy and vital. Blockades and poisons wished and washed away.
But now, I am 41. Doctors call my warm nest of nourishment “geriatric” and offer me hormones to replace the ones my body might not provide. My supply of eggs, created when I was in my own mother’s womb, is nearing its end. There is no waterfall slip and slide between my legs to celebrate a rain of fertility every month; the spring is has slowed to a faint dripping oasis, sometimes there, sometimes not.
Every month, there is a 5% chance I will conceive. Every conception, a 50% chance I will miscarry. Becoming a mother after 40 takes a certain amount of patience, a certain amount of tolerance for grief. It takes an uncertain amount of tenacious hope.
I wake to blood between my legs, again and again. I wake to a feeling of fullness; my womb contracting, not expanding. It can be hard to tell the difference. In the last few days before the blood flows, hope spirals my reality, I vision that gentle ache as a welcoming. This twinge, life setting her roots. This pull, my body stretching to accommodate it. I see her coming down, that light in the sky, starchild, such a long journey from that far off nebula of ours!
I see her, I feel her, and then I wake up to a red tide.
Sometimes, this heavy blood fills me with a sense of existential impotence.
My womb becomes a grief portal. It paints my life as 41 years of miscarriages. Not just the ones from my womb, but a far more insidious collection. Stories begun and never finished. Dreams that had no legs, no binding to reality. I see my not-enoughs, my failed projects, loved ones who I hurt, the stories that I let rot on my hard drive. I see the houses I could not make into homes. I see the friends I could not keep alive. The world I could not save from greed and fear. I am a failed mother, humanity is sick with despair and my body earth is choking on the smoke of their violence. I can never be enough.
The tears are relentless. They pool in the half moon shallows of my eyes. Salt tears, iron tears, like my blood. Releasing hope back into the sea. All the poisons in my blood come to the surface, poisons I’ve fed myself, poisons the world has fed me.
You will never be enough. You are too late. You are too old. You are too broken. You are too sick. You are not smart enough. You are not successful enough. You made the wrong choices. You failed yourself. You will never be enough.
Today, I have no peace with the beauty of a world I cannot control. The successes born from failures, the power born from pain . . .the necessity of endings, of death to feed life; these do not soothe me today. I feel no peace holding the books I did write, watching the films I did finish, remembering the work that did heal, the friends I still have. The homes I have built. They hearts I have mended.
No peace in the thought that fire can cleanse.
I cannot be soothed, even knowing that there will be another cycle, that this end is its own beginning. That this pain births tomorrow. I am a wet, red inferno, burning from within.
When the fire has consumed its fuels and the roaring flames begin to flicker, comfort trickles in small ways. The steady presence of my partner, the soft and colorful embrace of our home. A begonia’s tentative first blossom. The song of the neighborhood sparrow. The relentlessly gorgeous silver light filtering through naked branches and dried seed pods. The things that hold me while my blood falls heavy to the earth. It is best if I am still, it is best if I do not fight.
Salt blood, salt tears, cleansing blood. Month after month. Washing away pain and hurt and disappointment, poisons that are inhospitable to life. I bleed and I cry and I give them to the earth. My blood feeds the magnolia that houses the birds and paints the sky pink in the spring.
Today, I cry and bleed, I grieve until I am exhausted, so that tomorrow I can return, empty and cleansed, to tending my nests, nurturing my world, talking to the stars, tenaciously hopeful, becoming a place hospitable for life.
RECIEVE
Robin Wall Kimmerer reads her book The Serviceberry on Spotify Premium & you can taste the jammy almond goodness in her vision for reorienting our culture around abundance, connection, and gifting. Don’t have Spotify Premium? I will gift a copy of the audiobook to the first person to leave a comment about their favorite gift from nature.
READ
Jane Ratcliffe finds herself in the rich belly of Darkness.
ROCK OUT
Nirvana reunites for the first time since 2012 and the palpable emotion makes up for missed notes and mis-takes.
LISTEN
I’ve been taking a chill pill on the news since Trump took office and began his bull in the china shop routine, waiting for the dust to settle. It’s much hotter news to cover Trump’s illegal crazy man announcements than to cover when they are overturned, blocked, or simply don’t happen. Ezra Klein urges us Don’t Believe Him in a hopeful reminder that this chaos is purposeful, and that Trump does not actually have a crown or a magic wand. (NYT gift article)
REST
This is so beautiful and touched me so profoundly. You’re inspiring and relatable and I ached with every word of this. Thank you for sharing.