It’s time to tell you that the day before Thanksgiving, I had a D&C because of a miscarriage I’d had, unknowingly, the week before. I didn’t know until my doctor looked for a heartbeat we’d already heard twice before, but could no longer hear at 10 weeks. Once you know, once there is no more hopeful anticipation or praying or safe calculating of when it might be you might meet this new child or tentative peace with the connection of things, there is only the silence where the heartbeat once was mixed in with all the grief you realize has been there all along, riding its steady course under the new hope and the new heartbeat.

 

 

I’ve alluded to this before, but I haven’t spelled it out until now. I haven’t been ready. It was a pregnancy we didn’t tell anyone about, not even our mothers, until it was gone. Then, for the two months that this day marks, I needed to grieve and process emotions that are already so complicated from the trauma of losing Lorenzo. I needed to start collecting hearts for two.

 

 

But I’m speaking out now because I’ve found and given support and solidarity in speaking out about Lorenzo and this loss deserves that, too. I’m speaking out because I met someone recently who, when I told her I was writing about losing a pregnancy at six months, said: “More people need to write about that.” I suppose I am now writing about losing at 10 weeks, too. I suppose I am writing about losing. And hoping. And praying. And grieving. And hoping again. And again.

 

 

While I was pregnant again, I didn’t plan on attending a close friend’s wedding in Playa del Carmen, Mexico and then taking a side trip to Tulum with two girlfriends. I was too scared. Too worried about all that needed forming and how I would never forgive myself if something went wrong that I could have prevented. So, I thought staying home would keep this new life safe. As it turned out, what went wrong this time had already gone wrong as early as it possibly could have, far earlier than when the heart forms.

 

 

It’s called a partial molar pregnancy. It is not at all related to what happened before, but is another rare and complicated occurrence that, again, shouldn’t recur. Where there was a 2 in 10,000 chance of HLHS, there was a 1 in 1,000 chance of this, even though I was doing everything right again. It’s “twice bad luck,” as the genetic counselor put it. It comes with added risks to my health and because of that we can’t try again for several months. That realization felt like taking broken pieces of a scarred heart and then mincing them into pulp, into dust.

 

 

So, what do you do when you’re holding the dust?

 

 

You and your husband skip Christmas. Instead, you take your dog on a road trip. You feel gratitude for a shooting star across the sky in a part of the country blanketed by the stars you can’t see in the city where you live and never can see in the hemisphere you grew up in. You cry when you get the biweekly blood testing this new loss requires and you cry when you’re just walking down the street or when you read kind words from a friend or when a pregnant woman sits down next to you in yoga class. Then, you dedicate your shavasana to her baby because he or she is the hope in the room with you. You start volunteering at an orphanage. And when Laura says, “You know you should come to Mexico,” you say, “Yes, I do,” and you buy a ticket that same day.

 

 

You remember what it’s like to be 16 because you are with the people who knew you best at that age.

 

 

You watch two people commit their hearts to one another.

 

 

You dance.

 

 

You wake early to see a sunrise in Tulum, Mexico, the first place where the dawn touches that country.

 

 

You find many, many hearts.

 

 

You eat good food and have the conversations that make you laugh and cry and look out at the ocean for a long while.

 

 

You float in that ocean for an hour because it’s calm enough to do so and read all day in a hammock and when you fall asleep in a Bali hut your body remembers the feeling of the subtle waves and the soft swing of the hammock.

 

 

You miss your husband and your dog. You come home to them bearing gifts from the other country and then you realize the dust is still there, right where you left it. But so is your family.