Jennifer Massoni Pardini

New Words

Certain things mark time: music we love, a scent in the air, a certain haircut. Children seem to move even faster than all that. With H. right now I want to remember that she sings every third word or so of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The other day she said “ballerina” and I couldn’t believe such a big word came out of my, well, big girl. Sometimes, I marvel at the sheer length of her—how much she has grown! I try hard to imprint her little voice as it wraps around her name when she announces her actions, “H. down!” or “H. strong!” as she picks up something half her size. She treats Ruby like a sister, both with love and a fiery protection of what is hers. These days, her Elmo comes absolutely everywhere with us. And when I leave her room for a nap, she waits until I am just at the door and then shouts “Hugs!,” my cue to come back and snuggle her—a routine she created. She puts her palms on my cheeks and almost giggles her sleepy “Mama” into my ear. My heart does its best to soak up the totality of all this, all of her.

These are a few of our sign posts for fall 2015, on the eve of H. turning two. For Lorenzo, the sign posts have to be different. There are the ones firmly lodged in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter of 2012—the wet leaves covering Santiago’s wide sidewalks, all the laps Ruby and I did around the neighborhood, the podcasts in my ears as I tried to remember the wide world beyond us. It was summer too, that June, when we were home in California. So there is the reflective shimmer of my mom’s pool as I sat, raw, on the back deck, my milk painfully dammed behind ice packs. And all that undeniable sunshine… Just the month before, I’d swum in that pool with Lorenzo. On my backstroke, I looked up at the redwoods piercing the sky and imagined our future. So that memory is also there in the shimmer.

As time has gone on, there are our rituals: the heart sparkler we light once it’s dark on June 2, the memory book I add to year-round, the green-ribboned box I open in order to see him. Also, my posts, essays, and articles—where I have told different aspects of his story. I am so grateful to all of you still reading.

As H. says new words, I write them. Here are three new pieces about Lorenzo:

The Washington Post Magazine has a moving section called “MINE,” highlighting a small thing with great meaning. For me, that is the first heart I found, ushering in the #chainlinkheartproject. Ryan and I were in Peru to honor Lorenzo’s September due date. So other sign posts are those onshore winds and the pulse of the rocks pummeling against my calves as they rolled back into the sea. I almost didn’t take the heart with me; it was a time when possessions mattered little. But thankfully I picked it up, where it tucked so easily against my palm. Because Lorenzo’s possessions, the grand total of them so few, matter a great deal. That rock has now journeyed from the shores of South America and all the places and times it tumbled through before, to the offices of one of our country’s most storied newspapers, where it was photographed. Lorenzo has reached so far.

For Modern Loss, I write the status updates I never did, amidst all these words I have. Online is a complicated space. I have relied on it immensely, here and in the outlets that have valued Lorenzo’s story. But I never could put loss on Facebook and I’ve never been back. This piece explains why.

Even I am surprised that three and a half years later, I still have so much to say. I explore that for Literary Mama‘s After Page One series, devoted to the duality of being a mother and a writer and how one influences the other. I have stopped wondering if I will ever stop writing about him. Nobody stops loving their children and writing is how I show that love to someone who isn’t here to be sung to or snuggled. But he, too, grows, if only inside my mind. The other day I saw him as the three-year-old boy he would be in a different time with a different heart. He’s blonde like his dad was at that age—and running.

Balanced Rock

We text daily a lot of the time. We video chat twice a month. But all four of us have only met in person twice. The first time last May, when one loss was so raw and so wrong in the way it will always feel because nature moved out of order in our lives. Then, we gathered in triage. We all needed the tears that came for all of our babes. H. was four months old at the time, my active motherhood still new, my gratitude full yet Lorenzo painfully missing—just as any mother’s heart expands when another one of her children is born.

This year, we traveled to Colorado. Loss no longer raw, but still—always—wrong. A new life was there, too, a life that was hard for her mom to dare dream of last May. But here she is, finding her fingers and dancing to Taylor Swift and making us all feel better.

A Colorado #chainlinkheartproject

Forty-eight hours with my loss mamas is my kind of retreat. I don’t need massages (though I wouldn’t turn one down), but this trip is much more of a salve for the soul. We speak in our shorthand. We mention our lost babies’ names as fluidly as we do our living children’s. We vent in a safe space about those who still don’t get it, one and two and three and nine years out. We shoulder the comments that seem so innocent to the Innocents, but that remain with us until we can take them to people who get it, where they can finally dissipate. We don’t judge. We don’t always say the right thing either, but if we miss the mark there is an immediate acknowledgment, a reframing. We don’t move on until things feel OK.

I apologize if I sound a bit vague. Part of it is to protect the sanctity of these visits as well as the personal losses of such valued women and sources of support. I am privileged to know the color of their grief and how they have braided it into the lives they’ve gone on to create—for themselves, their partners, and their children both here and not. I trust them: they are among the very few who have ever seen a photo of Lorenzo. Another part is that it’s difficult to describe wondrous things: hazy dreams that leave a feeling more than a vision, the deep sink of a needed hug, the sudden overwhelming when we think we’re going along just fine.

Garden of the Gods

I can describe this: On our final day, we drove out to Garden of the Gods. I can’t imagine a more mystical place to take our healing bodies. The red rocks rise in staggered shapes from this swath of high desert. The sun is close overhead, asking us to shed our layers as we climb closer to Balanced Rock, a wonder of time and physics. Even at 290 million years old, it’s fall someday is inevitable. But on this day with these women under this sky, I realized that we have already fallen. We are standing again, side-by-side. Most of the time we reside in our four separate states, but once a year we make it matter that we breathe the same oxygen for a couple of days. We cook and have second cups of coffee and take walks and play with the baby and stay up late talking and all those normal things good friends who live far away do when they get together. We also cry and ask for help with a new corner of the grief and offer support for where our separate journeys do or don’t overlap and express how it feels for life to follow loss.

Balanced Rock

The air is thinner up this high. The sun 6,000 feet closer. The horizon clearer. I missed H., too, all these miles away from her. When I stepped back down, I was ready to travel home to her and Ryan and Ruby. We journey in both directions.

If you are grieving I will say this: Find your people. Because we can’t expect the Innocents to get it though some, in their brave empathy, do. It took me a year to find these women, and we are still getting to know each other. But they know the most significant part of me, as I do them. That’s what we truly see clearly, wherever we are.

October’s Close

As I recently posted and as I wrote last year and the year before, October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, October 15 in particular our day. I was impressed with the coverage this year, especially in mainstream publications such as People and The Huffington Post. These stories are not niche, after all. They are common and therefore general interest like many other aspects of parenting.

On October 15 this year, I was at Bethany Beach, Delaware with my mom and my daughter. And the entire day was beautiful. In the morning, we bundled and strolled the boardwalk. The tiny downtown was decorated for fall, and H. shouted “Pumpkin!” at each one she found. She went over and hugged and kissed them, too. “Hi, Pumpkin.” “Bye bye, Pumpkin.” All she is saying these days just about crushes me—her language such a powerful reveal of her little mind. “See you soon, Mama,” she says whenever she strolls a few feet away.

Mid-day, we all rested. While H. napped, I posted new hearts.

In the afternoon, the sun bright overhead, we took H. to the beach. It was only her third time at the ocean and truly her first time as an upright explorer, which I find somewhat devastating for the child of two native Pacific Oceaners. But, oh, to witness the wonder as she patiently took it all in: the sand on her feet, the shovels we used to dig, the roar of the water as we moved closer. Soon enough, she was running for it, just as I’m told her surfing father did as a toddler. As we greeted those waves—small for me, huge for her—I lifted her up and set her back down, the water rushing over three generations of toes again and again. I found a seashell and H. found a rock for her bucket. It was all so… perfect.

And at 7 p.m., along with the millions of others who have lost their babies, we lit candles for Lorenzo. We placed the shells and stones alongside and passed the minutes as soft music played. I thought mostly about all that Lorenzo has allowed to happen, to be because he couldn’t be. I think so many thoughts about him at all times of day the year round. I am always his mother.

This October, Cards and Compassion for Pregnancy Loss

I met Dr. Jessica Zucker this past March at BinderCon L.A. We attended the panel on Death and Loss because we each lost pregnancies in 2012. So, you could say I’ve known her since then—in the way you only know someone, even a deep version of yourself, once you suffer losses like these. Once you hold your first child stillborn in your arms, as I did. Once you deliver your daughter much too soon at home, as Jessica did. Until you stand back up, empty, and find a way to continue on with lives that have forever changed.

Words by Dr. Jessica Zucker. Artwork by Anne Robin Calligraphy.

I also knew her by happening upon personal essays about her experience, as she happened upon mine. “I’ve written my way through my healing,” she told me recently, and I felt that glory of recognition, as I’ve been doing the same. Our healing paths finally crossed and I am so grateful.

I felt a similar glory of recognition this past week, when Jessica launched her beautiful line of Pregnancy Loss Cards. There, written in soft lines and colors, were the words I had longed to hear after I lost my son at 24 weeks and, five months later, a subsequent pregnancy at 10 weeks. I didn’t want to hear what I actually did: “There are no words,” “At least you can get pregnant,” and, “You are young, you will have more children.” Or, as Jessica heard, “Be grateful for the child you do have.” Or, as we both heard time and time and time again, “Everything happens for a reason.” As Jessica reminds, “Fuck: ‘Everything happens for a reason.'”

Words by Dr. Jessica Zucker. Artwork by Anne Robin Calligraphy.

Three and a half years later, I am still shocked that any of these are acceptable words of comfort for people who have lost their children—the most unacceptable reordering of the natural world I know. Thankfully, Jessica is helping to find words of comfort for parents like us. As she says of the inspiration for her cards, “I just want them available so that people can no longer say they don’t exist, or ‘I don’t know what to say.'” The cards also include a Baby Loss/Stillbirth Announcement, something I would have considered sending for Lorenzo had I known about it.

That’s the thing about baby loss. You don’t prepare for it as you prepare for the baby. You don’t know about Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep unless someone tells you about it while there is still time. You don’t assume you can still send an announcement. You don’t know about all the support and stories that are out there, waiting to welcome you to what writer and loss mom Katie Coyle calls our “Dark Sisterhood.” You don’t know how to be a dark sister, a childless mother, a mother of two, one living… until you are.

Words by Dr. Jessica Zucker. Artwork by Anne Robin Calligraphy.

It’s with heartfelt intention that Jessica has launched her cards in October, Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. “This is our month,” she says, “our day,” of October 15 in particular, Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. If you know someone who has lost, consider sending a card. As we loss moms remind people all the time, you do not cause us pain by reminding us of our losses. We are always thinking of our babies. We feel better, in fact, when they are acknowledged.

Thank you, Jessica, for acknowledging what can so easily remain unseen if we don’t talk about it, don’t ask about it, don’t do something as simple as signing a card. Thank you for knowing what to say, though I am so, so sorry that you do.

Women’s Rights on Rewind

I may be losing hope. Hope that our country can unite in meaningful ways toward a common good and promising future. Hope that those representing us at the highest levels will speak the truth. Hope that the enviable rights we do have will be retained. Hope that the inhumane gulf between classes will shrink. Hope that our children will grow up to be stewards of a healthy planet.

As Syrian refugees flee for their lives and lose them in the process, as gun violence only escalates, as fires rage and temperatures rise, as women’s rights to the health of their own bodies and the decisions of their own minds continue to be diminished by a largely white, male, privileged political elite, I am trying to stay calm. I am trying to believe that worse things won’t happen. That they can’t directly violate us.

Then, the U.S. House votes to defund Planned Parenthood based on manipulated videos, details of which Carly Fiorina presented as fact during the most recent GOP debate. These videos came to light relatively recently, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen Congress move so quickly—while threatening yet another abusive government shutdown—in order to strip us of access to long-held constitutional rights. Meanwhile, the world suffers in urgent ways. What’s more, our government officials are allowed to do this, to use false claims to take away true rights. Can someone please explain this to me?

When I was 24 and briefly between full-time jobs, I went to Planned Parenthood for reproductive health exams and affordable birth control. Implicit in that care and service was that I would have less of a chance of ever needing an abortion. However, I had peace of mind knowing there was a place to go if I did. There were many other women in the waiting room with me during those visits. We had walked from our different lives toward the same needs. These are a few of the reasons #IStandWithPP.

I now have to wonder if my daughter will grow up with the same peace of mind. Yet, we pride ourselves on being a country that doesn’t move backward, that advances our human rights, medical science, and the pursuit of happiness. Well, we are happiest if we are healthy, makers of our own destiny, and not backed into a corner. My daughter and I can’t remember what life was like before Roe v. Wade, but our mothers and grandmothers can (#AskYourMother). This dangerous past is exactly what those who voted to defund Planned Parenthood want for our future. But not theirs. The vast majority of them couldn’t get an abortion if they wanted one. The vast majority of them are not female or poor or desperate or needing to finish school or failed by contraception or simply unable for whatever reason to raise a child—or still a child themselves.

I never did need an abortion from Planned Parenthood. But when I was nearly 24 weeks pregnant, I needed to terminate my much-wanted pregnancy for medical reasons. I made a decision with an informed mind, a devastated heart, wise medical counsel, and the love and concern of my husband and co-parent, Ryan. Not one government official needed to be consulted, though now that is changing. Our decision changes nothing about my love for my son or how badly I wish he was turning three today, September 20, his original due date. My induction and delivery had to take place in a hospital, not a Planned Parenthood clinic. And if my son’s body could have helped medical science better understand why only half a heart grew inside of his, I would have wanted others to benefit. In life, after all, his body would have been subjected to medical test and invasive procedure after medical test and invasive procedure—pain we protected him from.

That option wasn’t presented to me, however, just as it wasn’t that he would be a healthy three-year-old boy today. If it had been, it would have had zero sway on my ultimate decision (something else those in opposition want us to believe). This option is presented to those who choose it in the context of these videos. Those who have made it have helped science make medical breakthroughs across a host of diseases since the 1930s. But again, those in power are legislating away our agency to make decisions about our bodies, health, and futures. They have clarified that we women do not deserve their protection; they would rather push us closer to harm. How can anyone not consider this an outright attack?

When we’re at war, our anxieties rise. Our hearts twist. Our human nature is tested. I am not sure how we pass this test together. One thing I do know is that I cannot, in fact, stay calm.