Give Yourself A Fucking Break. Trigger Warning: Loss of a Child

Okay so this post is not what you thought it was going to be, but here’s the thing, I am absolutely petrified that I am going to get pregnant. Which is funny as hell because I am nowhere close to being in a relationship, let alone in an actual relationship.

A friend of mine just passed her first trimester, and I just learned what that means. The thing about pregnancy is that they don’t prepare you for all the shit that you’re going to have to go through, and I know this, because I’ve been pregnant.

The only thing I learned about getting pregnant, is that if your period stops after you’ve had sex, for several months in a row, you might be pregnant. For the average woman this is a pretty good indicator, for someone with severe iron issues however, this is a day that ends in Y.

I talk about the loss of my would have been, might have been, could have been, baby in my new upcoming book “I’m Still Talking,” but I want to address it here because not a lot of women talk about the loss of a child.

For years I have looked for other women who have lost children, and I haven’t been able to cross that threshold and talk to anyone, because it is such a deeply personal, individual, experience.

Growing up Catholic means that when you lose a child, no matter what the circumstances are, you are going to blame yourself – and maybe this is true for mothers who lose children, when they aren’t Catholic. However, Catholic Church Priests specifically teach women that their purpose in this world is to bring life into this planet.

So when you lose a child, there is a whole part of your grief that is devoted to this idea that you are a failure, that you aren’t worthy of giving birth to another child, because you failed at your original purpose.

The first thing that I have to work on, because I am still working on it, is to remember that my sole purpose as a woman is not to just bring children onto this planet. It is to exist as a student, and eventually a teacher, it is to learn, and to grow and evolve.

Getting rid of that guilt is going to feel huge when I finally do it, but then you add in the fact that you as a parent know it is your obligation to protect your children, and I wasn’t able to do that. I counter this with the fact that I didn’t know I was pregnant until it was too late, even though I suspected.

I let my insecurities convince me that I was wrong, and I lost my child. There is an argument to be said that there were two people who lost a child, but the truth of the matter is that my ex boyfriend was so abusive that I don’t take his feelings into consideration.

I struggle with that a lot, because the loss of a child is something that people are supposed to experience as a couple, but the truth was that our entire relationship was an issue of convenience for him. I was there, and he needed a safe space to be. He didn’t love me, and ironically I don’t feel bad about that. I think it would have been worse if we had somehow loved each other through the toxicity.

I have always believed that things were harder for me than they were for anyone else in the world, and I try to remember my blessings, but I realized recently that the only reason I was convinced without detour that life was so much harder for me, was that I wasn’t talking about what I was experiencing.

I wasn’t sharing my experiences because I didn’t understand how to say “this happened to me, and that happened to me too.” I am learning that it’s a process of learning how to acknowledge the bad stuff so that you can make room for the good stuff.

I know that I am completely lucky that I am not attached to the person who would have fathered my first child, forever. I also know that this doesn’t change the fact that I would have liked the chance to be a mother, knowing that I wasn’t ready.

I would have tried to get ready real quick, but it wouldn’t have been enough. I don’t know if I can, or if I will have children in the future, but I know that whether or not I do, it won’t change the love that I would have had for my unanmed, unbirthed child from my twenty-three year old self.

The only reason there is shame in the loss of a child by way of miscarriage, is that people who hear we’ve had one, expect us to be sad and miserable. They expect us to be broken versions of ourselves, because that is either how they were made to feel, or that’s what they were told we feel.

While it’s certainly true, in my experience, I realize now that I was completely numb. I wasn’t just broken I was completely shattered, because it was so much deeper than the abuse that I was experiencing.

After I lost the child, “he” left, he just walked away, and I can almost picture him skipping away, because I know, and he knows, that he abused me until I lost that child, and walked away without consequence to his person or his ego.

I am working on forgiving him, but more importantly than forgiving him for his behavior, I am forgiving myself for mine. I didn’t react in a way that told people I lost a child. I lost my fucking mind. I started drinking more, I pretended it didn’t happen until I forgot it did, and I moved the fuck on with my life.

It’s only this year that I learned that I still have all of that pain and sorrow inside of me, hiding until I am ready to deal with it. It appears in smaller bursts now, than it did when I was younger, in part because I am older, and in part because I just refuse to deal with more than I can handle.

Today I got up, had a smoke, and went right back to bed, because I kept hearing a displeasing voice in my ear insult me, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with the trash side of my mentality that wakes me up with negativity.

When I woke up the second time I got stoned and I started writing, because that’s my norm. I like being able to put how I feel on the page, and throwing it out into the universe so I no longer have to deal with it.

But if you’re not at the place where you are ready to start sharing your grief, give yourself a fucking break. Sometimes we have to hold onto it for a little while before we’re ready to really dissect how we feel. This process is perfectly natural and can appear in several different ways.

In my case I started spinning out and drinking and partying and it took me about ten or twelve years before I was ready to calm down and really think about how all these terrible experiences made me feel. Beyond just being angry, I was devastated.

I was so heart broken, by so many different things, that I honestly didn’t think my heart could break any further. But it does every time I think about my unbirthed child. I think about how old he or she would have been, I think about what names I might have picked.

I think about all the places I would have taken them, and I wonder who they might have become. I can’t stop thinking about that, I can’t change the fact that I sometimes give it creedence purely so that I can cry, other times I put it away because I know I am not strong enough to deal with it.

The one thing that I don’t do anymore however, is reach for alcohol to deal with emotional problems. I just don’t have the energy to get drunk anymore, not that I don’t drink. I can still do a glass of wine here or there, I just don’t drink regularily.

Largely because I don’t have anyone to hang out with who drinks, that’s a huge step towards getting away from using drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism.

I didn’t used to think that, I used to think that my friends were my family, but if that were true they wouldn’t have stomped on my head while I was drowning.

These days I am rebuilding my “family” from the ground up, starting with myself and my mom, my aunt, my brother, and the people that I started with when I first came to this world.

That’s all I can handle right now, and I am okay with that.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall