Starting again, imperfectly

When was the last time you realized "Life will never be the same again"?

Life is full of initiations. 

When I was thirteen, I stood above a roaring rapid, a small kayak at my feet. The adults with whom I was traveling, down Utah’s San Juan River in summer, invited me to ride on their larger, sturdier boats, but something called me to try the rapid solo. I wore a lifejacket, just in case. When I emerged from the hungry mouth of the muddy, swirling gauntlet, soaked and smiling, I was different, somehow. Something inside of me had gone forever into the water, and something inside of the water had gone into me. 

Photo by Chris on Unsplash of the San Juan River, winding through the Goosenecks.

When I was twenty-six, I climbed aboard a one-way flight headed for Seoul. I had given away all of my paintings, most of my books, and temporarily, my dog. (Only temporarily!) I knew no one in Asia. But I felt compelled to go. Years later, the friends I made there stood around me at my wedding. One of them officiated. Three of us wore fresh tattoos of the Red Thread – from a Korean folk story about the invisible forces of fate, in yeon, reaching out to connect us all. 

When I was twenty-seven, I headed home from Seoul in summer, called to my brother’s bedside because he was stricken with brain cancer. By Christmas that year, his tumor was in remission, I had gotten together with the love of my life, and landed what I considered a dream job. Two years later, both the job and my brother were gone. Only the love remained. I flew west again, to release my brother’s ashes into another river in Utah, where we had played as children. I felt empty and hopeless as I climbed up the cliffs, out of that canyon. Once again, something inside of me had gone forever into the water, and I carried its metallic taste of change in my mouth. 

When I was twenty-eight, I began a new career as an educator. In my backpack, that first day of graduate school, I carried very little. Pencils, a notebook. A few hairs from the dog I had reclaimed. (As I promised, his abandonment was temporary!) I felt hopeful once again. At thirty-one, I left a particularly disappointing and disastrous teaching job in tears, hugging a globe I’d taken from my now-former classroom. I held the world in my hands, but wondered if I’d ever go back again. 

When I was thirty-two, I entered a surgical theatre, my two ovaries heavy as figs. I was there to undergo IVF, to build my family after years of battling endometriosis. 

The first time, it worked. My son is now three. As he grew from a tiny seed into the weedy, wild and wonderful person that he is, I found a wonderful new school, where I nurtured almost 200 other kids alongside him as an educator, reading them stories and teaching them how to write and sending them off to high school. There was no better feeling than to imagine that something of me had gone into them, and something of them had forever gone into me. 

The second go-around with IVF, it appeared to work, and at Christmastime in 2021, we felt the kicks of our baby girl to be, due in June. In Jan ‘22, these hopes were dashed abruptly, as I experienced a series of life-threatening complications that, in another legislative reality, might have been life-ending for me. 

Gathering my things from the hospital where the doctors saved my life and we lost her at 21 weeks’ gestation, I found myself once again with only ashes in my hands. 

By my daughter’s due date in June, I would be diagnosed with PTSD, tell my beloved bosses I was taking the next school year off, and bury her under a sunflower. Something inside of me had gone into those ashes forever. I did not know then if anything else would ever come out. 

But something always does, doesn’t it? 

A year later, new shoots of creativity are emerging from my life. I am starting again. Imperfectly. 

In this project, Initiation Writes, I aim to reclaim for myself, and those reading, a sense that every initiation matters, including the ones that end in ashes.

While not all of my stories here will center on my recent loss, I do hope to break the silence around the truth of the late-term pregnancy loss experience, because it is a silence in which misguided and misogynistic American policy has been allowed to metastasize. And it has been a hell of an initiation for me.

I do hope that as readers, we can stop these policies from continuing to oppress a population of birthing people who deserve nothing but compassion. I also hope to show that grieving people do not need to have already reached the mythical and elusive “rainbow” following loss, any loss, before we say a word about the raging storms we’ve seen, or are still surviving. 

At the same time, I want to clear a space to tell all kinds of bigger, wilder, wider stories about our lives. There are so many interesting initiations we undergo as we age and learn, beyond one narrow life to-do list – get married, have the babies, land a solid career that lasts forever. I want to clear a space for us to witness and be witnessed in those initiations. A space with more room for mysteries, and miracles, that can’t be explained or predicted by five-year-plans. 

Where am I taking this? I don’t know. In looking back on every initiation I’ve personally experienced, there were never any guarantees. Only the call to take that one first terrifying step. To come in, come in, to come back in. 

Thank you for joining me here. Let’s answer the call together.