"Celebrating the lives of our children, embracing the good, and taking refuge in sisterhood."
A week ago I attended a women’s retreat up at Sundance, called “ A Mother’s Nature”. The title is pretty fitting, considering it was for women who had lost infants. I want the event logged in my little space of “things I want to remember always” part of my life and journey. Which means i'll post it here.
Rewind to a few months prior. I had moved out of the basement of family I was living with, and moved into an apt with my friend. I had just gotten out of a relationship that shouldn’t have ever really become a relationship and I was annoyed at myself for my track record of dating people I know aren't right for me.
It seemed like everything I had known was crumbling beneath me. Loss will do that to you. Whether it’s loss of a loved one, a relationship, faith, anything. It gives you this dreadful but empowering feeling of “I have to start from scratch.”
I was feeling overwhelmed and misunderstood. I knew one day all of it would probably make sense, it always does. Life has a way of turning discomfort and rawness into wisdom and understanding, but until then, you have to be willing to sit in your pain for awhile. Maybe feeling misunderstood is what leads us back to God eventually, because it means we’re outgrowing who we used to be.
Either way, change is terrifying. And lonely.
So I told God that i’m at this weird transition period of my life and it’s uncomfortable and it’s making me shut people out that I shouldn’t shut out. And I told him I was gonna take a break from second dates and he understood that. I told him I knew eventually I would be okay, but right now, I want it acknowledged that being me is kind of cool and exciting sometimes but actually it sucks sometimes too.
Later that day, I got a text from Mandy Hawkes, who I had never officially met but she had family in my parents home neighborhood. This past summer my dad had called me one day and told me her story. She had a stillborn baby girl at 38 weeks. Frances was her name.
My heart did that thing where it opens up and it’s so uncomfortable you just want to sit in the corner and cry for awhile, knowing how much of a living hell she is experiencing. I felt it for a moment, that hell. I prayed to send good energy her way.
Now months later she was texting me letting me know she was putting on a retreat for women who had lost babies. When I got the text my heart said “yes” but my head said “maybe”.
I was nervous. It’s been over 2 years since he died. It felt like it might be reopening wounds that had been closed. They’d never be closed all the way. But at least they were closed enough to be bearable at this point.
I told my dad about it, and he agreed. “I feel like you’ve moved on.” he said. I knew the second he said it I hadn’t moved on and at all and I would never move on. But I knew what he meant. He meant that I used to have my own little family, but when Jon Gabriel died and I got divorced, it went back to being just me. I was finally starting to get used to the idea of it being just me. To talk about it with other people who had little families of their own, and then be reminded of that little family that is no longer mine, it sounded a little overwhelming.
But one day, I realized that these days I rarely get interaction with women who had been through the same thing as me. So all at once, I decided it was worth a shot.
The first day of the retreat I got there really late because I had to work. When I walked in, everyone was quietly sitting around the table exchanging stories. The energy in the room was different. One thing was for sure: this was a safe place.
And the stories? Each person’s story was so powerful and unique in it’s own way. The circumstances around each story were different, but the feelings experienced were all the same.
I remember so many times thinking, “wait, you felt that too? I’m not crazy!” And everything I shared, someone in the room understood or had experienced something similar.
Some people’s losses were just recent. Like last month, recent. I was in awe at their bravery to come and show up, knowing how raw everything must still be.
And that’s what we did, for 2 days, we exchanged stories. We took pictures. We meditated. We did yoga. We went on walks. We did all sorts of things that brought us completely out of comfort zones and because of that, we were all one.
I think about each one of the women there, and it was honestly the most beautiful thing you’ve ever witnessed. Seeing their pictures and feeling their pain. And it occurred to me, grief is not something that needs to be fixed. It’s something that needs to be bourne. Together.
And I learned that sometimes when you are forced to grieve loss, the loss of a loved one or just the loss of how your thought your life would turn out, it’s easy to want to remain closed, and deal with the pain on your own.
But you have to fight the urge to withdraw. You have to say, "I know feeling this vulnerable and real is the scariest feeling”, and then you have to say “But i’m going to be open anyway.”
And that’s what I took away from my time with these amazing warriors. When life happens, fight the urge to close and shut everyone out. Stay open.
Remaining open is the only way to turn a situation from the biggest mess into something not only bearable, but breathtakingly beautiful.
So thank you to all the women there who were brave enough to remain open again and again and again.
Thanks for allowing me to remain open.
And one last thing. I realized once my marriage ended, I never went back to being a one man team. I’ve been a two man team ever since I looked down at that pregnancy test and realized I was going to be a mom. Jon Gabriel is my family, and he always will be. As long as I’m here, his story will be told. Where I go, he goes.
And that's the beauty of angel babies.
♥♥♥♥♥♥