Self-Love ✍🏻

We were doing things in the modern order of an older couple — getting pregnant first and then maybe we’d get married. But that dream dissolved on December 3, 2015, when I learned at my twenty-week checkup that my child would not be born alive — that it was, in fact, dead inside me and had been for over a month. 

A year later my partner and I became a cliché — a couple whose divergent grieving and healing paths cleaved corners into our hearts such that they never fit together again in the same sweet way, and we grew to resent each other. That was our third miscarriage and after it he didn’t want to pursue parenthood in any form — not by fostering, adoption, or pregnancy. And so, at age 41, I left him to give myself a chance to find a partner who wanted to make a family with me. 

I believed the experience of raising a child would be deeply healing for me. I saw myself sprinting that final relay leg into adulthood, and by that I mean I’d gratefully and permanently drop the role of me-as-ch…