Surviving Year Two: Week 22

Returning to My Magic

This is Week 22 of my Surviving Year Two Grief Project. Details about all my Grief Projects, as well as Grief Resources can be found here.

We are now solidly in 2017, a new year without my husband in it. While this is still such a brutal fact for me to live with, I am in a much better place than I was at the beginning of 2016. It's not that the pain and grief are gone — it's more that the pain and grief have woven themselves deeply into my soul and is now a solid part of me. Grief has shown me some hidden strengths I had forgotten I had. I have also been returning to my inner witch and spiritual crafter and have been cooking up a new ritual, honoring the transformations grief has brought to me and stepping into a new phase of widowhood.

Rituals are so important. Weddings, Baptisms and Memorial services are rituals. I think we need more rituals to honor the other huge transformations of life. When my husband and I decided to be child-free after trying to have a baby for a very long time, we had an Un-Baby Shower. That seven-day ritual transformed me in a huge way, and helped me honor deeply what I was letting go as well as helping me honor and welcome what was coming in.

I'm very excited and a little nervous about the ritual I am cooking up (again, with my powerful ritual-crafting friends, Lauren Van Ham & Lila Kihn). I will share with you all as much as feels safe and honorable to share, so stay tuned for more as it all unfolds.

Thank you for witnessing me. See you next week.

Un-Baby Showers & Ritual Crafting

Hand on Heart, during my ritual

The Birth of a Ritual

I have been on a 6-year odyssey to make a baby with my husband. This included all the usual methods(!), as well as fertility treatments like taking the drug Clomiphene. We were not successful in our quest and last year we decided to "stop trying." While my husband more or less happily moved on to start his new business, I felt stuck. I had poured my whole heart and soul into making a baby and now that we were done with that chapter of our lives, I realized I had no idea what came next.


Back in December 2011, I had read a fantastic article in Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction, called Becoming a Wise Woman: When a Spiritual Director Designs Her Own Ritual of Transition by Teresa Di Biase [there doesn't seem to be an online version, but you can back-order the issue]. In this article, Teresa planned a ritual to mark her passage into menopause and I was touched by her realization that she had never adequately grieved her inability to bear biological children. She writes:

I realized now, twenty-five years later, that the unexamined nature of the decision rather than the decision itself was causing me pain... There would be two fundamental movements: a letting go of the literal possibilities entailed by motherhood and young womanhood, and an embracing of a new kind of ripeness and fecundity associated with wise aging... what is next on our journey to becoming wise women?

The Hindu Deity Shiva, courtesy of iloveindia.com

I realized that I do not want to wait until menopause to mourn my own loss of fertility and therefore, the deep desire to craft a ritual was born. In fact, this realization, helped me realize one of my mantras: When in doubt, have a ritual! I knew that I needed to have a Grief Ritual, to mourn the loss of my fertility and the ability to be a biological mother, so I started my planning there. I asked for help from two incredible women in my life, Lauren Van Ham and Lila Cohlman. With their help, I realized that my grief was going to need more than just a one evening. As I did my thinking and research on Grief, I came across a description of the powerful Jewish tradition of Sitting Shiva. Shiva literally means "seven," and this week-long mourning period in Judaism is for "first-degree relatives" like mothers, daughters, fathers, etc, practiced immediately after the burial of a loved one.

This ritual really resonated with me, as it is so rare in our culture to have a ritual that works so intimately with death. In America, we are encouraged to "get over" loss as quickly as possible. The idea of spending a week with my grief, while very scary, also felt incredibly important and expansive. Also, being a fan on all the Hindu deities, I was also reminded of the God Shiva, the Great Destroyer.

Once I realized that I wanted a week-long ritual, I had a dream:

I am outside in the snow, looking into a round hut. Inside the hut, it is warm with a fire and full of a circle of women who are celebrating a very pregnant woman. I realize that I am not allowed into the hut, because my body is infertile and therefore not welcome in the ritual. I wake up cold and crying at this heartbreaking experience.

After this dream, I realized it is unfair that women who don't get to birth children do not get to have this important ritual of support and love from the women in their lives. I decided that after my Sitting Shiva time, I wanted to have an "Un-Baby Shower" (more on that, in a minute).

Grief Ritual

A friend and I commune with the fairies in the Oak Grove.

I worked closely with both Lila and Lauren in crafting this grief ritual. I chose to have it the first week of March, which would be the 5 year anniversary of my ruptured tubal pregnancy, which stands out as the worst experience of my whole baby-making journey. It felt so symbolic and significant to choose this week to do this ritual. Little did I know, it was more symbolic than I realized (more on that later!). Lila was kind enough to offer to host in her beautiful home, which feels like a temple! I invited three very special women to attend, so our circle (counting me) was 5, which felt like a very important and powerful number. We met at 4pm, so we could have both the light of the sun and dark of night to companion us as we created ceremony and ritual. This ritual feels very private and very sacred to me, but I will share that we spent some time in a very magical Oak Grove on Lila's property. In that experience, I was reminded yet again how important a connection to nature is in my creative, spiritual life.

"Angry Uterus" drawing from my Grief Journal

During the ritual, there was space to "speak from our uteruses" and I discovered that mine was very angry with me! She didn't appreciate all the drugs I pumped into her, not to mention the surgery that tore off one of her arms (fallopian tubes) and the plastic and metal forced into her. I realized that I had never stopped and asked her what she wanted. It was such a simple thing to do, and yet was so powerful.

After the ritual was complete, we sat down to eat a wonderful pot-luck meal together, which felt so nourishing and really added to the sense of care and love of this circle of women. One of my dreams is that this circle will birth into something bigger, where we can meet regularly to provide ritual for each other with a dash of dream work.

Sitting Shiva

My husband picked me up from my grief ritual, which I was very thankful for, as doing deep ritual puts me in a "high" place that no drugs have ever given me! As we drove home, I felt so loved and witnessed in my grief. None of these women questioned my need to grieve this loss and their love and support buoyed me up out of my sadness in a way that I could never find on my own. I felt like I was about to embark on an extremely long journey in the wilderness, all alone, but these women had packed a backpack for me, filled with food and good books and water and warm clothes. I felt like I could tackle anything and travel as far as I needed to go.

The morning after my ritual, I received an e-mail from my mother. She said that she had been dreaming of me for 3 days straight and wondered if I was okay. I told her of my ritual and plan to "sit shiva" in the coming week. She reminded me that my Grandmother (her own mother) was born on March 3rd, the day of my Grief Ritual. Reading this, I realized, that her mother, my Great-Grandmother, DIED GIVING BIRTH to my Grandmother! This is just one example of how, when we let go and listen to our intuition and guidance from the greater spirit, amazing things happen. I realized that I was playing such a small role in this grief ritual - I was doing healing work for ALL the mothers in my ancestry and I felt them all supporting me!
I also kept a journal during this time. I am an avid art journaler, and I just so happened to finish a journal just before my Grief Ritual (it's so interesting how these synchronicities happen!). Instead of starting a new "big" journal, I came across a handmade journal I made back in 2003, in my Masters in Art & Consciousness program at John F. Kennedy University. In paging through the journal, I realize that I made it just as I was getting "serious" with my then-boyfriend/now husband. The one page I wrote on in the journal back then had only one word: FERTILITY. Incredible. It's a small journal, and it took exactly one week to finish it, even though, again, that was not something I was thinking or worrying about. Click here to watch a video tour of my Grief Journal.

I had a lot of experiences during my Sitting Shiva time and I felt a lot of strong emotions, including powerful rage and deep joy. Again, the details of this time feel pretty personal, so I'm not going to share it here, but trust me, it was powerful and amazing. If I had to do it again, I would find a way to not have to work, or work out at the gym, and I would find a way to be in nature a lot more. But I made it work and it was incredibly powerful.

Un-Baby Shower

Once I emerged from my Sitting Shiva time, it was time to celebrate! What is an Un-Baby Shower? It's a celebration of the choice to be child-free. I don't think it's fair that only pregnant ladies get to be surrounded by love and celebrated and supported. ALL women deserve to be seen and celebrated as dynamic, creative forces in the world!

Thanks to collaborating with Lauren Van Ham, we came up with a fun afternoon of ritual and food and laughter. I had invited about 20 women to come to my house and shower me with love and I was amazed when 18 agreed to come! That morning, it was pouring rain, and all these women had to squeeze into my tiny house! But by the end of the afternoon, the sun was out and we all ran outside and frolicked in the field next to my house. This felt perfect in its symbolism of coming out of grief (the rain) into love and support of this powerful circle of women (the sun).

In both my Grief Ritual and this Un-Baby Shower, it felt important to have my body really be seen and loved, since it had gone through so much trauma in trying to make a baby. During the Un-Baby Shower, Lauren and I improvised off the whole "paint the pregnant belly" idea and invited all the women to paint all over my body. I wanted everyone to put "creative seeds" into my body to honor me and my journey moving forwards. It was so fantastic to be surrounded by all these women that I loved so much as they focused on various parts of my body, infusing an aspect of their creative energy into my soul and heart. Also, being a fat strong lady, it is always empowering to wear a bikini and be seen!

My husband Justin and I receiving a "hands-on" blessing.

We ended with a "laying on of the hands" blessing from all the women present. My husband and I stood in the middle and we were surrounded by hands infused with love and support.

Everyone also brought quotes from their favorite Child-Free Women, and I want to share a few of them here:

My infertility is circumstantial but my life is not barren. And to the women who are on the other side of hope, know that you are more powerful than your womb. You are maternal whether or not maternity ever comes. You are a woman and your love and how you choose to offer it, is a gift. ~ Melanie Notkin

I always love working with children. I never had any of my own. God has his purposes. God didn't let me have children, so everybody's children could be mine. That's kind of how I'm looking at it. ~ Dolly Parton

What is the meaning of life? That was all - a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little, daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one." ~ Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience. ~ Emily Dickinson

"After Enlightenment, the Laundry"

So what is life like after such an intense ritual? On the outside, my life might look the same as before, but internally, it feels like my heart has been released from a steel cage. Before this time, I felt so empty. As I watched my husband rushing around, growing his business and living a happy life, I felt like someone had pressed the "pause" button on my life and I had no access to the remote. Now, post-ritual, my mind and soul is over-flowing with ideas and projects. The weekends used to feel like never-ending spans of emptiness as I waited for the work week to start, and now, my weekends feel so full I can barely keep up! My current journal is exploding with art, I'm taking lots of photos with my FujiFilm Instax camera (thanks to one of my Un-Baby Shower gifts!) and my dreams are guiding me to do "psychic, spiritual performance art," whatever the heck that is!

I highly recommend that you look at your own life and see if there is a ritual that needs to happen. I am totally open to helping you with that. Feel free to contact me to do some creative brainstorming! I also highly recommend both Lauren Van Ham and Lila Cohlman, for their excellent ritual-crafting skills. Thanks for reading my story. There will be many more after this one, I am sure!

Nowruz

a Nowruz altar (from Current TV)

The Spring Equinox is approaching.  We already are noticing the arrival of Spring around our home. Our bulbs have pushed their way up through the dirt and weeds that I haven't pulled(!) and opened their beautiful little flower-heads. The lambs are frolicking and knocking each other over. The plum trees are bursting with delicate, pink flowers that rain down on me as I walk by.

It makes sense that in some cultures, this is the time that the "New Year" is celebrated.  One of my favorites is the Persian festival of Nowruz.

Nowruz (which means "new day") marks the first day of the Iranian calendar, and it is a celebration of new beginnings.

First the home is cleaned thoroughly - spring cleaning!  This is the time to get rid of the old things that do not serve, get into all the nooks and crannies and make a sacred space of the home.  I've written before about how powerful the experience of cleaning my home can be (even when I don't want to do it!).

The home is filled with flowers, particularly honoring bulb flowers like hyacinth and tulips. And tiny seedlings are started, often in egg shells!  I love this idea of growing new little plants in the home in one of the most fertile symbols there is. As my husband and I continue to try to get pregnant, the though of having my home filled with new growth and symbols of fertility is very appealing!


Nowruz is a time for honoring family and ancestors, eating symbolic foods, and bringing in a healthy and prosperous new year. Being an Interfaith Minister, I enjoy learning about the traditions of other countries and faiths and, just as all artists do, interpreting it through my eyes and letting the rich history influence my own spiritual traditions.

There is a great radio piece highlighting Nowruz, where Bonny Wolf visits Najmieh Batmanglij, a Persian cookbook author living in Washington D.C. You can hear it here.

Much more detail about this holiday can be found here, including all the foods that are prepared and their meaning, as well as other objects placed on the table, like a mirror for for "cleanness and honesty," a bowl of water with a goldfish, to symbolize life within life and the sun leaving the sign of Pisces, and a bowl of water with an orange in it, which symbolizes the earth floating in space.

Enjoy the Spring Equinox (this Thursday), in any way that feels right to you.  Enjoy!

Crafting Companions

In the Dream Art Group I am facilitating, we do an Art Check-In every week.  One of my intentions with this is to integrate art-making into our daily lives.  In the past, I have facilitated workshops where the art is made during the group time, and while that is also a very powerful experience, I found myself disappointed when I noticed that the art-making wasn't happening after the group had completed.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love making things...but having an art assignment every single week is pretty intense!  I'm really getting pushed in new ways.  Here are some really powerful things I have realized:

• Making art can and should be as important as going the gym, feeding myself and kissing my husband.


• When I make time for art every week, it becomes a lot easier to drop down into that creative space - and the results are that I feel more grounded in all aspects of my life.


• My dreams LOVE it when I make art in response to them.  My dreams have become richer and more powerful.


• We've only been meeting for 5 weeks and I am already amazed at all the new art in my house that I have made!

The last couple of weeks I have been making these little goddess dolls. The first week, I made them out of cloth. I used some old fabric I had lying around and I filled them with rice and lavender, as I HATE the toxic batting that craft stores sell to fill dolls with.  I also embroidered them and added little crystals on some of the chakra points.  I don't know why I made these dolls - I was just following my creative intuition, which is what I do every day, in some way.

The next week, I decided I wanted to continue with this goddess figures, but I wanted them to be more sturdy.  The cloth dolls felt too floppy.  For some reason, I wanted something I could hold firmly in my hand. 

The next little goddesses I made were created out of Sculpey. I love Sculpey. I grew up with my father making Fimo creatures.  I remember him making lots of little characters for his Dungeons & Dragons game and I also remember a face of Jesus hanging on the front door of our house with a cartoon bubble over his head (also made of Fimo!) that said "Love Your Enemies!"  I remember him sitting with his X-Acto knife, cutting out tiny black letters to put on that white background.  It was meticulous! The Jesus face also had tiny drops of blood and a tiny crown of thorns.  Now that I have worked with a similar medium, I am astonished at the amount of detail he crafted with those characters!

"Fertile Triangle" Sculpy & glitter (2008)

The other issue with having a week to make a piece of art, is that I often don't have time to be that meticulous.  I usually only have one afternoon to really get into making (I have 3 jobs!), and I usually want to get my general concept completed, with the intention to get more detailed later.  That time to get more detailed doesn't seem to ever come (I guess with all things that are important to me, I have to MAKE that time!). 

So this past week, I used Sculpey (I prefer it to Fimo, it's easier for me to use - it stays softer longer) and I made some solid, little goddess characters.  The first one I made seemed to have a long tail like a sperm.  Why am I making little Goddess Sperms?  The next one was a flat triangle shape and the third one was a little round lump with tiny breasts.  The third one is very satisfying to hold.

At this point, I finally realized why I might be making these funny little creatures.  I recently had a terrible experience while pregnant.  My husband and I have been taking a break while I heal,
both physically and emotionally, and we finally feel ready to start trying again in earnest - this week in fact! I still have a lot of fear around what could happen this time, and I realized that I was tapping into a very ancient place in myself and making little fertility/pregnancy totems.

"Fertility Altar"

Archaeologists have been finding little Goddess figures for many years.  Their original purposes will never really be known, but when I have looked at them in museums and books, they have a very voluptuous, fertile feeling to me (like the Venus of Willendorf).  Many of the replicas are very satisfying to hold. I realized that I am making my own versions of these little figures.  Perhaps to help us get pregnant? Perhaps to be angels and guides watching over us so we don't have another painful loss of a pregnancy? Perhaps to hold on to when I am giving birth?  I don't really know, but they make me very happy.

I have put them next to our bed, so they can watch over us.

I think I am going to make more this week.  We shall see what new goddesses I create.  I found some stone-colored Sculpey and some excellent new face molds!

What are you making this week?

Crisis of Faith

*Trigger Warning: this post discusses a sudden pregnancy loss*

A diagram of an ectopic pregnancy

I can safely say that the month of March 2007 was the hardest, most painful month I have ever experienced in this lifetime. I have always been a person with pretty unshakable faith in the good of the world. I firmly believed that everything happens for a reason and that there is a gift in every experience, no matter how painful. But this experience really pushed me to the edge of my faith. What is the gift in this painful, frightening experience?

On March 4, 2007, I woke with excruciating pain in my lower abdomen. My husband and I had just recently found out that we were pregnant, after trying for almost two years. My heart filled with fear that something might be wrong with the pregnancy. As I doubled over in pain, I couldn’t believe the amount of pain the human body could withstand. As if on cue, I passed out
cold, showing that the body does have a limit to the amount of pain it can withstand.

In that moment, I was in a beautiful field of grass, lying on my back with the sun on my face. I felt so good. My husband was lying next to me, looking at me the way he does when he is about say something goofy and sweet and romantic. “I like it here,” I thought. I had completely forgotten the pain I was in right before I passed out.

I awoke on the cold, bathroom floor with my head pounding from where I slammed it against the wall when I passed out. I crawled back to the bedroom, because every time I tried to get up, I passed out again. I woke my husband up (which took some time!) and told him that something was terribly wrong. After speaking to the advice nurse, we were soon in the car, driving to the emergency room.

The next 24 hours passed in a blur of pain and morphine and ultrasounds and lots of poking and prodding and pricking of my arms and body. The doctors on call weren’t sure how many weeks I was with child. I was right at that critical edge between being able to see the embryo and not being able to see it. If I was four weeks, there was nothing to see, but if I was six weeks, and they couldn’t see the embryo, then it was growing in a place it should not be.

Although the ER doctor dismissed my condition as “morning sickness,” and discharged me, my body wasn’t going to stand for that...literally! Every time I tried to get up and put my clothes back on, I would pass out. Finally, my blood work came back from the lab and showed that I was indeed six and half weeks pregnant. The embryo growing in my body should have been easy to see on the scan, but that little tiny apple seed of cells was nowhere to be found.

This told the doctors that something was terribly wrong, so they immediately readmitted me. I was informed that I had a tubal pregnancy. This occurs when the fertilized egg from the ovary does not implant itself normally in the uterus. Instead, the egg develops in the fallopian tube, one of the two tubes that transport the egg from the ovary to the uterus. When this happens, the embryo cannot develop into a fetus.

a page from my grief journal around
my pregnancy loss

I was quickly prepped for surgery. I was frightened and heartbroken that this new life that was growing inside me had to be terminated. This was the first time I had been in surgery since I got my tonsils out when I was 19 years old.

When I awoke, I was surrounded by people I loved and cared about. The looks on their faces told me that things did not go well. I found out upon awakening, as I slowly came off the anesthetic and painkillers, that when they looked inside my body, they discovered that the tube had ruptured. This meant that they had to cut open my abdomen and take the entire tube out—a serious complication of a tubal, (also called ectopic) pregnancy. When hemorrhaging (severe bleeding) occurs within
the abdomen, it can be extremely dangerous because a large artery runs on the outside of each fallopian tube. One of these arteries did rupture, causing me to bleed severely; I lost over 3 pints of blood.

During recovery I developed a serious infection in my incision; this often occurs in emergency surgery, when the patient cannot be prepped properly. As my husband rushed me back to the emergency room for a second time, I cried in the deepest of despair. Even though the hospital saved my life, it hurt my heart and soul so deeply to be going back to this place of cold metal and empty walls.

During both hospitalizations I was kept on the maternity ward, where I was surrounded by newborn babies. Nurses would continuously call me “mom,” thinking I had just given birth. I cried out at night, screaming at God. “Why are you putting me through this? What possible good can come
out of so much pain?”

Although I cannot answer these questions completely, I have in fact experienced some miracles through this whole ordeal. One of the most amazing gifts is feeling even more deeply how much my husband loves and cares for me. He has been truly amazing through this journey. I was thankful for my husband even before this happened, and I didn’t think I was capable of loving or appreciating him more—but I am and I do. I wish I could nominate him for the Nobel Prize for Loving Husband! Thank you Justin!

Coming through this experience has also put many things in my life into perspective. We live in an extraordinary time. In most other times and places, I definitely would have died. I am so thankful and amazed to be alive. I had excellent doctors who made sure that I lived through the emergency surgery they had to give me. Technology, skill, and knowledge saved my life. When I experience moments of despair, I remember that fact. When I feel that my life is worthless and full of pain, I remember that these amazing doctors fought for my life. My husband, parents and friends fought for my life by caring for me and loving me unconditionally.

My perspective has shifted in all parts of my life. I feel so thankful now when I walk outside and feel the sun on my face, or cuddle up with my cat and listen to him purr, feeling the warmth of his belly against my face. These simple experiences are all gifts.

Just like most people, I have to work to bring in money. Much of my work is focused on my ministry and I love it, but there are parts of my work that feel a little more disconnected. After having to miss over a month of work, I am realizing what I miss and what I don’t. My life is far too precious to be spending doing work that doesn’t feed my soul and inspire me. I have made a deep promise to myself that when I am strong enough to go back to work, I will only do work that feeds me and makes
me feel whole.

Another page from my Grief Journal

There is still so much healing for me to do. My husband and I have begun dealing with the grief of losing our pregnancy. As I sit with the loss of this life inside me, I wonder: was it even a life? At six and half weeks, the heart had just formed and was starting to beat. The embryo was about the size of an apple seed and growing rapidly. The umbilical cord was developed. The eyes and ears were starting to form as well as an opening for the mouth. The heart had begun to pump blood and most of the other organs were well under construction. Buds were forming on the body to become arms and legs.


Is this life? Or was this embryo inside me still just a mass of cells? Or was it both? Did this little life have a soul? Or does that come later? Why did this life come to me, and leave so quickly? I have heard many different theories, as I have asked these questions of my friends. Some say that instead of a baby I had “an angel.” Others say that some souls can only come for a limited time and that I somehow “signed up” unknowingly to host one of these souls. I actually don’t have any “answers”, and my feelings are mixed, but I continue to work with these ideas and thoughts and feelings as I find my way to my own truth.

I also continue the journey through my “crisis of faith.” Amazingly enough, I find that as my body heals, my spirit is healing as well. I find that I still have faith in the good of the world. I still have
faith that experience has more gifts to give me than I can even imagine. And I still believe that God loves me. I’m amazed that I can feel this, when there was so much pain and anger (which is still very present!).

I am learning so much about patience and loving myself through this healing process. It is so
easy for me to want to rush this experience...to hurry up and get “back to normal.” But I will never be “normal”—not in the sense of being the person I was before. This experience has changed me, and I will never, ever forget it.

I have only just begun to make art around this experience. My energy level is still quite low (not to mention the difficulty of sitting up for long periods of time), so I have just started to do some drawing and writing in my journal. I know that the art will come in time.

I welcome your prayers of healing, and I would love to hear from any and all of you who have gone through similar experiences. What was your healing process like? How did your spiritual life change?

Some Helpful Books About Pregnancy Loss

“Grief Unseen: Healing Pregnancy Loss Through the Arts”  by Laura Seftel

“Unspeakable Losses: Healing From Miscarriage, Abortion, And Other Pregnancy Loss”  by Kim Kluger-Bell

“Trying Again: A Guide to Pregnancy After Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Loss” by Ann Douglas