Crypto & Pit Bulls
Ideas of “value” and fierce protectors - what my life after miscarriages was about
There was a time when I wanted to figure out a way to get the topic of miscarriages into the Modern Love column at the NYTimes. I wanted to tell a love story that represents me and lots of people, a story that doesn’t end with a baby or a human relationship. What resulted was the following essay - Crypto and Pit Bulls…
Crypto & Pit Bulls
By Liz Hansen
I’m at the Oakland Animal Shelter, roaming around rooms of distressed animals, looking for a dog that may or may not exist. I’ve been called here by some mysterious, internal directive that an hour before said, “go to the dog pound – now.”
I didn’t question the voice. It was in line with a meditation-induced vision I’d had a week prior: me and a black dog happily walking on a forest trail. And then, there she was, in the last room of the pound, sandwiched between two barky and aggressive shepherds was Tinsel, a one-year-old, medium-sized, black pit bull mix laying on her side, unbothered by the chaos all around her, content to just wait it out.
“Her,” I told the volunteer, “I’d like to meet her.”
We played in the yard, she was spritely and liked to be chased. Ping-ponging around, a sleek energetic sparkler who, to this day, has a look in her eye like she knows secrets about playing. “Follow me,” her eyes say, “I know how to have fun.” A week later she came home with me and I renamed her Olive. She was fierce and independent and chatty and willful and cuddly and excited to be alive – all the things I used to be.
My world was slowly forming back into some semblance of emotional stability and contentedness after a devastating break-up a few years prior. It all had to do with children and parenting. I had suffered several miscarriages and one particularly gnarly one that required a second trimester abortion that resulted in freak hemorrhaging and hospitalization. The layers of disappointment and trauma set me and the ex upon separate paths: me, still wanting to pursue parenthood, him, not at all. So I left, intent to find a new relationship where I could have kids.
Easier said than done: for the first year I was numb. There was no way I could meet new people, in my depressive irritability I could barely tolerate folks I already knew. And sex, forget about trying to make a baby or even cultivating pleasure; I was unable to contemplate my body, this thing that felt like a trauma-prone flesh sack. And my brain, it was a grief stew, thick with depression chunks and mealy with sluggishness. What used to be an innate curiosity about people and the world had shrunk to a singular curiosity about how early I could go to bed each night without deepening my depression.
My life had become small by necessity and design. I made my home cozier, a nurturing nest that I didn’t want to leave. I needed as much space as possible to grieve, to have panic attacks, and to retreat into my shell until it felt safe to emerge again. I had a lot to get over and let’s face it, our culture does a shit job of modeling how to authentically and effectively grieve; I made it up as I went along.
So, where did the majority of my effort go? To a Monday through Friday office job, the less stimulating the better, but I was grateful for the structured routine. I couldn’t risk anything that might foster ambition as I was also grieving my perceived failure as a writer. I’d left LA and the pursuit of a screenwriting career to be with my ex and now, sans family or a career in the arts, I declared myself a complete creative and procreative failure and didn’t want to risk further disappointment in either realm.
Me and Olive: we made up a healing journey for ourselves, socializing each other to realms that misunderstood us. I was her third owner and vowed to protect and nurture her despite the challenge of her spirited personality. I taught her not to bite and she taught me to not be afraid to express the intensity of my emotions - to let them through and out.
I got a job as a Silicon Valley Executive Assistant, specifically in fintech, and then more specifically in cryptocurrency. My life was about work, therapy, yoga and the dog. I’d take Olive to dog parks where I marveled at her resilience and cheer - my new motto - I too could be cheerfully resilient.
Sometimes I’d hang out with family, but friends - no way; seeing their kids produced a sadness I couldn’t yet face, let alone metabolize. More heavy, though, was witnessing parenting in action. Observing friends who had been raised by mentally ill parents dance around that role themselves was especially troubling and somehow became private proof of how deeply I’d been cheated — why them and not me?! Forgetting that I too suffered mental health issues well before my many miscarriages…
About two years post-breakup, I got on the dating apps. My first few dates were pathetic — meaning, I was pathetic. In my head I thought of myself as “the dead baby lady” and I worried that the intensity of my past made me spoiled goods. I vowed not to give a full answer if asked why I was single. “Just don’t talk about the miscarriages,” I’d tell myself, but I always did. Right outta the gate. Ghosting prevailed. I dated one guy for almost a year but we lived 2000 miles apart and that was as close as I could get then - physically and emotionally.
A year after that, the pandemic happened and dating was off the table. Olive was my one companion during quarantine. New facets of grief revealed themselves as I faced the shelter in place alone. I became ragefully jealous of those with partners and kids to hunker down with. My house and heart felt empty. Olive needed a playmate and I needed a more cuddly creature to provide me some kind of physical comfort and connection, so I adopted a puppy pit bull mix named Gordo.
Pit bulls were bred for their tenacity - for their resilience. This quality gives them a bad reputation – set them on a destructive path and they will stick with it. Set them on a path of loyalty and love and, let me tell you, you will feel not only safe and loved, but safe in your love.
When I told one of my brothers about the new dog, he was genuinely confused. “You used to like cats. What happened?”
“I’ve rebranded,” I joked. “Crypto and pit bulls – that’s the life for me.”
But it wasn’t really a joke. When old friends asked what I was up to, I started to say, “crypto and pit bulls.”
They all thought I was kidding, “It’s true,” I’d say. Their foreheads wrinkling, I’d explain, “I had a lot of miscarriages and a horrible break up … and life, well, it took some surprising turns.”
The conversation would then become about crypto, not miscarriages, and I’d say things like: cryptocurrency is just a digital representation of value… blockchain is just an unchangeable digital ledger on a computer network…it’s like how letters went from postcards to email to text messages and emojis – money is following suit…
I’d forestall the inevitable judgment about crypto and quickly offer, “It’s like the biggest conceptual art project ever. Money — value — what is value anyway? It’s a social construct. Something is valuable only because society agrees it is.”
I longed to be asked about miscarriages so I could say things like: babies are just a flesh and blood vanity project… babies are proof of concept that you will one day be a disappointment to future generations…we went from children being laborers in agrarian societies to being sentimental status symbols and unhealthy emotional extensions of self …
A few months after Olive came into in my life, I had one particularly bad week. Miscarriage grief often leads to feeling isolated by and ashamed of its sadness and anxiety because nobody wants to talk to us dead baby ladies about our dead babies and so, when we cry about it, we cry a lot and alone. The day I couldn’t stop ugly crying Olive, like any faithful dog, came to my side and stayed with me. Her sweet face looking up at me, she cocked it to the side, as if to say, “what’s going on? I see you.”
Some dogs are neurotic sponges, like codependents with bad boundaries - if you get upset, they get upset and that doesn’t help. But not Olive, she was resilient, unbothered and comforting. She sat next to me and let me pet her and I calmed down. “Oh Olive,” I remember thinking, “thank the gods that you’re a pit bull - you’re hearty enough to accompany my trauma...” Pit bulls, I’ve decided, are supreme emotional metabolizers. She soothed my loneliness and made it okay to let my icky feelings take their own time and intensity.
The ideas fueling my interest in crypto, I realize now, were a grief tonic. As a childless woman in a culture that expects on-demand everything (including on-demand fertility, pregnancy and healthy children), of course I’m invested in counter-narratives. I want new ways to produce and assess and transact social value. I liked working in crypto around other people who were embracing these ideas — my brain lit up in ways that it hadn’t for years. Here it was: this new way of conceiving value and there I was on the cutting edge, at the beginning. I knew things about value that most people didn’t yet know existed. Finally, I could actually imagine a future where values were shifting, were my childlessness was inconsequential. If there were new things and ways to value, then I knew I’d be okay.
It’s now six years post break-up and I’m at peace with not having human children. Sometime between the Tiger King phase of the pandemic and the day when California’s firestorms turned the bay area into an orange Mars-scape, I became deeply grateful that I didn’t live with a four year old in what would have been a very unhappy marriage. It helped me come to peace and stop yearning for the mothering narrative I’d chased for so long.
Now I have to steel myself for the unexpected grief that will undoubtedly emerge when my peers start to become grandparents. I can see it already — I’m in a retirement home called “Tesla-Coin GardenPod 22” and all the Jennifers and Jessicas are giving me updates about the Madisons and Skylars and about the grandbaby twins Prozacabeth and ZoloftaSean. I’ll choke back the vomit as I call over my pit bulls and begin to pet Olive III and Gordon the IV until my nervous system has reset.
Do we have babies to grow love, because they’re cute, because we have impulses to nurture and control? I wanted a baby because I wanted to feel the full power of my body and I also wanted to see the world through an abstracted version of myself. I wanted to witness a mind grow and a personality develop. I wanted to repair some of the parenting I did and didn’t receive. I wanted a loving do over. I wanted to nurture creativity and soothe a familiar nervous system. Now I do it for myself, proud that I’ve found a path of courage and resilience that questions what and why I value – anything. I feel lucky to have found love and value and meaning where I didn’t think to look for it before.
THE END
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Can I just simplistically say that was stunning, Liz? It is you who knows how to pull readers in, have the words conjure up pictures, and mix abject pain with joy. ( The portrait of those two characters capture who they are). Bravo,