Day of Hope and Healing…

What does that mean to me?

I pause a moment to honor my own courage and heart in trying again. In feeling fear and doing it anyway. Of daring to hope. It takes courage to open oneself up to loss again. To risk pain. To knowingly step forward into what may result in suffering. I celebrate my own daring to try again. For me it paid off, others continue to experience only additional pain and loss. It was a gamble. A roll of the dice. Losing babies shows you how chancy the childbearing year is. How full of promise and how full of pain and disappointment. I’m shocked by how often I continue to think about pregnancy loss, miscarriage, my own little Noah.

Just this weekend, I talked to Mark about the unresolved feelings, questions, and confusion and what ifs I still have and I guess will always have about my own miscarriage experiences. And, I told him, I still think about it every day. Every, single day, three years later. Is that just because I’m a “highly sensitive person” or is it because I was changed to the core by the death of my little baby? Every day I remember him, every day I remember what I learned, and every day I remember how it felt. So, this Day of Hope and Healing to me, is a chance to acknowledge and remember, to celebrate my own strength, and to love the gifts that loss brought me. I still feel a sensation of having a “hurt place” instead. A distinct spot in my uterus that remembers the baby that did not make it. A place that bled with such vigor that I was afraid I would not live. A place that tried so hard not to let go and then yielded. I laid in the bathtub and thought, “I will always be a little bit pregnant with him,” and maybe I am.

Today is The Amethyst Network’s Day of Hope and Healing event. I spent some time yesterday in the woods thinking about this and what it means to me and the above is what I spoke into my little voice memo recorder. I’m excited about our vision for The Amethyst Network in training for miscarriage doulas and offering support for loss families, so today on our Day of Hope and Healing I also donated to our Indiegogo fundraising campaign. We’d surely appreciate your donations as well 🙂 Also, make sure to check out the Day of Hope Pinterest board for inspiration.

A couple of weeks ago, Zander made some sculptures while I was working on my own and he surprised me by making this little “guardian of the dead.” He says she is holding and nursing baby Noah:

Based on my own past “guardian of the womb” experience, I also made a new little sculpture for myself:

On the way back to the house after taking these pictures, I noticed that some tulip bulbs I planted in a terribly haphazard manner last year are actually starting to come up! That felt like…hope.

Today I also made some revisions to my miscarriage memoir and decided to reduce the price to only 99 cents on Kindle!