I Carry Your Heart…featured

“We wanted to write down exactly what it is like to lose a baby, but for some reason the page stayed empty. And we could not have described it any better.” ~sayinggoodbye.org

I found out recently that quite a few studies have discovered fetal cells in a mother’s body long after they have given birth. The official term is “fetal cell microchimerism”. It gets really scientific, and I am by no means qualified to explain it, but the general idea is that cells are exchanged between the mother and baby, and after birth or even miscarriage, the cells remain. They have been discovered in the mother’s blood and organs, including the heart. You can read more about this here or here.

Having experienced a miscarriage with my first pregnancy, this has had a profound effect on me. I really struggled after losing that baby. I wanted to see no one, but I wanted to tell everyone. I wanted a glass of wine, and then I cried because I could have a glass of wine. I questioned everything I ate, everything I did, even everything I didn’t do. What had I done wrong? I hated hearing, “You’ll get pregnant again.” I didn’t want to get pregnant again, I wanted to still be pregnant.

As the fog of grief slowly lifted, I decided I needed a way to commemorate the baby. A tattoo – something that would always be with me. If you know me, you know I love quotes. After the miscarriage, there were a lot that resonated with me (I don’t know the original authors, or I would credit them). One said, “Now she flies with butterflies.” While we never knew the gender of the baby, it was the thought of its little soul as free as a butterfly that I loved. Another was from a poem in which a mother refers to the baby she lost as her “beautiful unknown.” My Beautiful Unknown. I could think of it as nothing else after that. And so I combined the two for my tattoo.

For me, getting this tattoo was a sense of closure. A way of holding on, but letting go at the same time. Shortly after, I began to open up to the idea of another baby. When I discovered a few months later that I was pregnant, I worried every single day that I would miscarry again. I tried very hard to suppress the hope that would often bubble to the surface. I was afraid to get excited, to get attached, to love this new baby. How naive of me – as if one can stop the heart from loving. And it turns out I didn’t need to – that baby starts Kindergarten this August.

I know I am extremely fortunate. That so many women endure multiple miscarriages and infertility. They are the true warriors. One nearly broke me, I can’t imagine another. Maybe it’s helpful to some knowing that cells from those babies remain within us. They are literally a part of us. Personally, I find comfort in this – believing I have more than just the tattoo that’s always with me. I can’t help but think of this excerpt from E.E. Cummings’s poem, “I Carry Your Heart:”

~here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart – i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart) ~

So to my Beautiful Unknown: I carry your heart. I carry it in my heart.