There is something profoundly soothing to me about walking on a beach—the sound of waves lapping at sand that is squishing between my toes, the feel of wind in my hair, and that smell of salt in the soft caress of ocean air on my face. I can close my eyes even now, as I sit here typing away, and just…remember.
I don’t live near the ocean. There isn’t a stretch of beach sand for hundreds of miles. I live in the mountains far away from any shoreline, but even so, when I close my eyes, I am there regardless of distance or barrier of mountain range. I close my eyes and breathe remembering the smells of Plumeria blossoms from last summer when my family took a long awaited vacation to Oahu, Hawaii. I remember the “before time” when we held hands and laughed as our four year old cheerfully ran from the foamy waves, his first time experiencing the ocean. We wrote his name in the sand, made a giant sand octopus together, and giggled at the tiny pale crabs that scurried around the beach.
We took our family photo on that beach—seven pairs of happy feet forming a circle in the sand. I felt grateful as I looked into the shining eyes of my sons. Some people would laugh at the fact that I had five sons, teasing me about not having a daughter. Others would frown over the fact that I had five sons, as if I should be somehow penalized for having a large family no matter how happy we were. Some quickly assume that we are “crazy fundamentalists.” While others decide that I must have somehow missed out on the women’s movement. Those people couldn’t know that I’d lost babies in the past. They couldn’t know how grateful I was to have the children I have, and how devastating it was to lose the pregnancies I’d lost- that I had lost as many as I’d been able to keep. Nevertheless, at that moment, aiming the camera down at that circle of feet, I felt whole with my family—complete: all of our many troubles and dramas in the past, our five living children blossoming beautifully, my education in full swing with honors, my husband’s carefully written book accepted for publication, the world seemed to be opening its arms to us in a warm embrace.
Yet here I sit a year later, with a great chasm in my being. Somewhere between last summer and now the entire galaxy shifted and altered my understanding of what was possible…and of what was not. I had thought my family was complete, and now I know it never will be.
When you walk on the beach, you can always turn around to see the pattern your feet have made in the sand. You can see where the prints are deep and well-set and the points of wandering into drier areas, light patterns of toes and heels. You can see where you’ve been and how you’ve wandered into the sea here, and dug your toes in there. You can see it as clear as a summer day. But looking ahead, well, there are no prints to be seen. At least not prints of your own feet. Though you can see the paths of others who have walked before you, it isn’t possible to see what your prints will look like until you have walked in a spot, and turned around to see the pattern. That is life—you can’t know what will happen to you until it happens.
This is why I had no idea a year ago that I would be here, with a new hole in my heart and empty aching arms that could have been filled with the warmth of twin sons if things had been…well…different.
I never would have believed it if someone had stopped me on the beach last year and told me that my entire world was about to shift in a way that would alter my family forever with pain, loss, tears, and despair intertwined with meaning, magic and a vast reality I could never have truly understood until now. Quite frankly had I been offered the optional path of all this “wondrous growth” I would have politely declined and run quickly in the opposite direction to hide in a coconut tree. I’d had my share of “growth” thank you very much! I was done having babies damn it! DONE! I was already aware of snide comments whispered in the grocery store about how I must not know about birth control. Yeah…maybe THAT was it…maybe, as a childbirth educator and pre-med student of psychology I was unaware of how the human body worked??
No…probably not.
I get pregnant easily. It does not seem to matter what kind of birth control I use, or if I use it by the book. I’m the girl in your freshman year that got pregnant the very first time she had sex. Not the second time, or the third….the first. I’m the single mom that people frowned upon no matter how hard I tried to be a good mom, no matter how happy and nurtured my child was. I’m that woman who got married to the perfect man at twenty, had a sudden miscarriage at 20, another at 21 and a healthy baby at 23. Another miscarriage. Another baby…and two more babies…Yes…I was done. My body was my own again after 12 years of tandem nursing, and I adored my living children with passion. But there it was—the positive pregnancy test. Age 34, in the midst of getting my pre-med degree, and pregnant with baby number six. I cried, because I was happy, and because I was afraid of being judged by others. I knew it was a miracle. Well, maybe not a miracle, but the odds had been against the possibility of getting pregnant with my copper-T IUD by a whopping 99.9%. Even so, we got busy with the task of re-framing our life, adjusted to what was, and laughed at the hilarity of it all. I endured biting comments about being in competition with “Octo-mom,” and laughter about how it had better be a girl this time. After all didn’t the odds lay in the favor of female offspring after all those boys?
I didn’t care. I just knew I loved this little being. I was excited to hold a sweet smelling baby in my arms again. People were flinching and groaning acting as if we were throwing garbage in the forest by having another baby. “Oh Sara (sigh) how can you DO it!?” I knew they couldn’t understand, and I didn’t really care much. Well…I cared a little, because it always hurts to be judged, but, mostly, I just knew what others thought didn’t matter. It was simply sand in my eye; nothing to be maimed by. Not like the crippling words that came later on that made me want to rip off my ears to prevent the words from sinking into my heart- words that compelled me to lose my breath and beg to be allowed to flee into the night to protect and bring back the life that was being stolen from us.
“I can’t find a heartbeat. You’ll have to birth him, but he’s gone.”
“No reason that we can see—these things just happen sometimes.”
“It was twin boys. The other one must have been hiding behind, where we couldn’t detect him.”
Followed by the awkward “I’m so sorry…”
I thought the picture we took in the sand last summer was complete, anyone would have thought the same thing looking at the five strong beautiful boys playing in the waves, but now, when I look at the picture in its place on the wall above the home of our Greek tortoise, I see that it was missing four tiny feet- feet I didn’t even know were a possibility only one year ago. Feet that never touched the earth nor buried tiny toes into the delightful softness of Hawaiian sands. Feet that I will always miss and always love.
I close my eyes to look at the prints I’ve made in life. They are clear and deep. They show no evidence of the struggles and losses I’ve been dealt unless it is the salt water that fills them as the waves roll in… the salt water of my tears.