Recent Losses

The past three months or so have been really transformative in some deeper ways than our external environment. Right around the time that we moved to Topanga I learned that I was pregnant. This was a fairly long anticipated and an incredibly joyful development for us. I’ve been working really hard and using all of my energy for most of the time since just keeping my body going through fatigue and near constant nausea, thus the lack of blogging or painting for the last three months. I’ve been in survival mode, but also basking in gratitude, joy and hope for the arrival of this new person into our lives. It’s been a pretty amazing journey to totally give over my body and undertake this kind of biologically creative work. Unfortunately though, this particular journey doesn’t have a happy ending. At about 12 weeks we learned that this baby had some very serious problems. Over the last 3-4 weeks we have had a lot of testing done to understand more the nature of these problems, and we arrived at the very sad knowledge of this baby’s inability to survive into this life. I can’t really think of any news that I have received in my life that was more immediately crushing than this. I didn’t quite get to the halfway mark with this pregnancy, and was never able to feel the baby move, but I did get to see it very clearly on the high powered ultrasounds, and I heard it’s heart beat. I did give over my body to the process of growing and nurturing it and I had enough time for the strong surges of love and protectiveness to develop. For however short and ill-fated this pregnancy was, this was my baby and I’ve never had a baby before. It changes everything. For a few days after receiving the bad news I didn’t know how life would go on. But of course it does.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this through the last 3-4 weeks as we waited for answers and tried to learn more about our situation. For the past few weeks I wake up almost every day at about 5:00 am and re-examine the facts and feelings in my head and heart. Some things have come clear, and others probably never will. First of all, I can accept this. Growing life and giving birth are dangerous events and there are so many things that can go wrong. Having worked as a farmer and gardener these are facts with which I am familiar. Not every seed planted will bloom, not every chick hatches, not every piglet or kitten born into the litter will make it. There are natural laws that we will never understand and to which none of us are exempt. I know that I am also far from being the only woman ever to experience this, and breaking this news to my grandmother and mother in-law, two women in their ‘70’s and ‘80’s, I was certainly met with sympathy but no surprise. A story like mine and stories more tragic than this were very familiar to them, and probably are more familiar among my peers, even with all our advanced modern technology, than I had before realized. Concerning western medicine and modern technology though, which I am not always convinced solve more problems than they create, I am glad to say now that I have regained some confidence and gratitude that I was lacking for some time. We were saved a surprise late term miscarriage, still birth, or dying baby by the amazing advances in fetal diagnostics. We were also able to get clear answers about what our baby’s problems were, what might have caused them, and if they are likely to repeat themselves in future pregnancies. We were lucky and relatively comforted to know that our baby’s problems were not genetic or chromosomal, not caused by anything that we could have done or not done, and extremely unlikely to repeat themselves. And this then leads into the fact that we will never understand why this, and things like this have to happen. We were the 1 in 5,000 or so to have a baby with these particular fatal problems. Why us? I feel so disappointed and abused by life, to have waited so long for this, to suffer through some of the toughest parts of the journey, to have come so far, and to end with a loss. It’s very bitter. Sometimes lately I feel old and scarred, and marked with a mantle of tragedy. I’m afraid that I’m wafting the scent of sadness wherever I go, and I’m socially reluctant and protective lately. I was waiting to tell friends and family that I don’t see all of the time about this pregnancy, thinking that if it didn’t work out I wouldn’t need to mention it to everyone, but now I find that it would feel too isolating to try to hide this. While I know that I am really ok, and in a few months of taking care of myself mentally and physically I will be totally fine, I will never be quite the same as before this happened. It’s been a very powerful life event.


In our last 3-4 weeks of waiting and agony it’s been particularly painful to continue with the fatigue and nausea knowing that it was in service to developing a baby with pretty much no hope for its future. The pregnancy ended a few days ago, and I could almost immediately feel energy and appetite coming back to my body. We’ve done everything that we could to see this terrible, grueling episode through, and it is over, and I’m ready for the healing to begin. The grief still comes and goes, but I think I’ve seen it’s peak, and the same goes for my misery at this point as well.

Despite all the pain, some really good things have come out of this. As discouraging as this experience could be, I am almost surprised to find that I finally feel sure that we will actually have a baby someday. I used to wonder and feel much less sure of it than I do now, and that is a strange relief to find that I just don’t feel worried about that anymore. It was also good for me to realize that my body, for all the trouble that I have had hormonally over the last few years, was doing a great job supporting and growing this baby. I felt pretty miserable, but in a totally normal way for the first trimester. My overall health has been good, and I feel strength and energy restoring quickly to my body. Also I understand that although this was our personal tragedy, it was a straightforward, inexplicable event that doesn’t need to scar or torture us into the future. We’re healthy, we’re very lucky and happy in our marriage and family, we have an interesting and happy life where we get to spend a lot of time doing things that we love. It’s also been interesting to realize that the most recent chapter of our life in CA, including the move to Topanga and this pregnancy, seems to have effectively effaced whatever remaining unsettled feelings or unsolved questions I have had about the direction and turns my life has taken in the last few years. It’s been a wild ride, but I feel myself coming to a more fixed point. I started out over five years ago as the homesteading, activist, young New England farmer and that identity disintegrated and morphed into where I stand now, which I’m still defining but seems to be coming more clear as something along the lines of a bi-coastal, artist, wife, mom type figure. We did lose this baby, and that is very sad, but I also lost some questions and anxieties and confusions that I didn’t need anymore, and so they just fell away. The transition doesn’t plague me anymore, and I feel fully pulled into the present.

New Chapter: Topanga

Well a lot has happened in the three months since I wrote last, and this will be one of my last entries from the first year in L.A! It’s been a very transformative time, on a very deep level, especially these last three months. I’ll start with the external changes. First of all, I found my spot in L.A. Everybody loves to hate L.A., but in order to stay here, you gotta find your neighborhood that you CAN love. Some friends of ours love their work project of an edgy/artsy neighborhood in east Hollywood. My youngest stepson’s mother, no matter how broke she is, will live nowhere but the palm lined high rent shopping areas off Montana Ave in Santa Monica. There is a fierce pride amongst my new Chicana artist friends for their neighborhood around Cesar Chavez Avenue, where many of them are third or fourth generation residents. I have fallen in love with Topanga Canyon, our new home, and it is my sweet spot in L.A. First of all, I think I partially love it because it is so NOT L.A. Except it is. We have the same school district, the same water system, have to drive the same freeways etc. etc., but we are separated from the smog and the glare by the largest preserved track of wilderness this close to a metropolitan area in the U.S., Topanga State Park. The park stretches up over a mountain range, ending a corridor of wilderness stretching to Oxnard and is home to countless coyotes, deer, mountain lions etc. When we drive up off the Pacific Coast Highway toward home now we pass along a narrow, windy road through the canyon in between mountains and bare rock outcroppings and see no houses or sign of people for several miles. It’s only about five minutes in the car up to the town, but in those five minutes it feels like you pass into another world. Topanga is known for its heyday in the sixties as the L.A. hideaway of various famous musicians like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, and for the herds of dirty hippies that flocked up here around them. Being close to Palisades, Santa Monica and Malibu, it has gone up a bit in price and esteem around here as the years have gone on. It’s still dusty, and you can still find plenty of hippies, but now they’re mostly old and rich, and intermixed with famous actors, young families, artists and ultra pure living yoga instructor types all at home in their houses and compounds tucked into ravines and the sides of mountains. There are so many Om signs and Buddha statuettes in this canyon that archaeologists are going to be very confused someday. Topanga has a small town feel and takes community very seriously. When we moved onto our street we got several welcome visits and a community roster with everyone’s names and contact numbers on it for communication and for coordinating the shared green space at the end of the street. We found a car pool to Nick’s school, and it seems like there is always some community event or festival going on that is much anticipated and well attended. It’s nice. Most of all though I think I love the mountains, the coyotes at night, the wild parrots, and the feeling that the natural world here is close, right outside your door, fluttering in your window. As the seasons turn and spring has passed into soft, beautiful summer in my beloved Maine, the lush greenery and regular rains of winter here have given way to Santa Ana winds and stronger sun, to browning hillsides and dusty roads. It’s harsh summer in L.A., and I am ready to be back in Maine. But I know it will be all too soon before I come back again in the fall, and I am glad to feel at least that I’ll be happy to dig in more deeply to this landscape and community when I get back here again for year number two in L.A!