Assuming the Position
physical and emotional reconstruction
I wrote a lot of this two weeks ago and didn’t press publish.
Not because it wasn’t true or didn’t resonate — but because the hope I was feeling started to flee.
It’s strange how quickly a fragile feeling can be replaced by noise, responsibility, and structure. The pressure of needing to function doesn’t really go away, and the world (as we know) doesn’t pause for you. In fact, it can permeate and fill every crack if you let it, and I let it.
It came in a rush and left just as quickly. Life filled the space that my hope was in. I slipped back into a familiar holding pattern — that strange place where you feel like you should be striving harder, pushing more, building something bigger… while also feeling like nothing actually matters.
I didn’t abandon the draft because my words stopped being true. I abandoned my draft because the future, hope, and optimism, stopped feeling reachable. They weren’t gone, they were still there, just distant, abstract, and somewhat hyper-positive. Like your friend who is way too optimistic and you want to inundate them with real life shit. With logistics. Work woes. Appointments. Protocols. Next steps.
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with grief: the kind where your brain tells you every future is closed and every effort is pointless. My job won’t slow down. I’ll never have a living child. The house will never stay clean. My hair will never be thick. My waist — never small.
This isn’t necessarily specific to grief, everyone knows the pattern, but after Teddy’s death, it started to feel less like a pattern and more like a hostage situation.
I live in a strange contradiction every day — I’ve survived one of the most incomprehensible things that can happen to a person. And sometimes, because of this, work doesn’t matter. Deadlines don’t matter. There are no fires.
But also… there are deadlines, and they do matter. I need a job to pay my job, for structure, for career growth, for my own personal drive to succeed, for normalcy. For just showing up.
So I treat everything like a fire drill, because it is a fire DRILL. I know that none of it compares to the actual fire that has burned my life down before. And I find myself asking, will anything ever matter as much as my son?
Lately I’ve seen it in people’s eyes and bated breath, they look at me like they are waiting for an answer I can give them. Is she okay? Is she finally hopeful? Has she turned this into strength and resilience? Has she had that surgery? Is she trying? Is she still sad?
Can I still be sad?
When I sat down a week ago to write, the birds at my feeder were grabbing their last bites of the day. The sun — finally deciding to show up — cast leafless tree shadows across the house, especially in Teddy’s room. His room always gets the best golden-hour light.
I lit a candle and put my phone on do-not-disturb. The dishwasher was humming, my favorite sound. Paul was in the basement gently playing guitar, and Hugo was curled beside me.
Everyone, myself included, was assuming their positions for the evening, and I became still enough to reflect. It was something I’ve been dreading, but have been so ready for. To write about being hopeful.
About eight months after the death of my firstborn son, I suffered an ectopic pregnancy. It was a rare, annoying occurrence - something that seemingly defied odds - and while heartbreaking, it gave us answers to questions we didn’t know we had. Not answers about why or how, but about how to move forward. What to do next. Insight into healing. A dead-end sign replaced with construction zone cones.
During the scan to locate my pregnancy of unknown location, there it was: a perfect heart. It wasn’t beating. It didn’t belong to a pregnancy. It was the shape of my uterus. My uterus, the same one that housed my son for nine months. The one that worked so hard to push him out, that was eventually cut and ripped open, that sheds every month. Something so integral to mine and my son’s life, shaped like a heart.
A uterus is supposed to be triangular-ish. When it’s heart-shaped, it can mean there’s a wall, in my case a septum, running down the middle, nearly dividing it into two cavities.
This can result in miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, preterm birth, or stillbirth the majority of the time. It’s technically a fertility issue. One I never related to, and still don’t. I got pregnant naturally, with short rounds of trying, and had no complications during pregnancy.
He died after he was born. It doesn’t make sense. He shouldn’t have made it, and yet he did. And then he didn’t. I think about it all the time: how it was missed, how we’re here, why this happened.
The septum had never been seen before the ectopic pregnancy. Sometimes, if a baby implants successfully, it grows and pushes the septum aside. It can go undetected until there’s a reason to look closer.
Since then, I’ve consulted with multiple doctors and received opinions from surgeons. All recommended that if we want future healthy pregnancies, ones that result in a live baby, we correct the septum.
In the past year, I’ve accepted two new labels: loss mom and fertility patient. I’ve walked into doctors’ offices with IVF in the name. I’ve had fertility workups, saline sonohysterograms, and now, I’m two weeks out from having had my uterus reshaped.
What I didn’t mention earlier is that when I sat down to write this, I had to re-tape my intrauterine balloon catheter tubing to my leg. I replaced my estrogen patch on my belly and graduated from postpartum underwear to my regular ones, still with a massive pad stuck in the middle.
I was terrified to have surgery. Afraid the sound of a blood-pressure machine would trigger PTSD stored deep in my body. Afraid the surgeon would puncture my already volatile uterus and take away my ability to carry a child altogether. Afraid the anesthesia would never wear off.
But I was also scared it would go well.
And then what?
I heal? A few months later I become pregnant, with an entire uterus worth of space for a baby to twist and twirl? I was scared to be hopeful. Scared to look toward the next chapter.
After Teddy died, I knew we’d eventually be cleared to try again. After the ectopic pregnancy, I knew clarity required surgery. And after surgery, waiting, and healing, and time — which is less concrete, more ambiguous, and is more of an open door than a hurdle.
So, that’s where I’m at. Healing. Trying to let myself look forward, while still trying to appreciate what is right now. I refuse to call it optimism or hope, and maybe that’s because I’m too scared to use those words.
But maybe this is what my version of that looks like. Not a one time feeling. Not toxic positivity. Not a belief system. But just a way of orienting. Of not making promises to myself or being bound to a deadline.
I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. But I do believe I’m where I need to be. And that wherever I go, there I am. I don’t think suffering makes a person better, but it can make someone more wise. I feel more wise. I trust myself to show up to the next thing without feeling the need for redemption.
So I’m facing forward — my chin up and my shoulders back — assuming the position.
… and maybe that is hope.
Xoxo,
Teddy’s Mom