The invisible mother dancing through the storm, about 6 weeks postpartum from a miscarriage. Photo by Colin A. Danville
This was my life in my 20s. I came into the revelation of my motherself when I was 24 years old. I was living at the time in a shared house with too many roommates. I was deeply in love, or so I thought, with a man who I believed was my ideal partner, my soulmate—except for the frequent interludes he spent with the other women he also loved. Still, barely making the rent each month to cover the two rooms we had in the back of the house, I held onto the fact that I was the one he lived with. I told myself that made me special.
Early one Saturday morning in spring, gathered around the large island in our sunlit kitchen, a few of us sat together over bowls of steaming oatmeal or granola and nut milk. One of our roommates announced she was pregnant. I was so happy for her, and also instantly aware of my own desire to give birth to a child. This had not been something that my boyfriend and I had talked about in recent times, mostly because he was so closed to the idea. It was a constant source of disconnect for me in our relationship, but one that I would ignore—like all the other women—for too long a time to come.
In the beginning years of awakening to my motherself, I didn’t know how to place my desires for motherhood inside the very chaotic realities of my love life. There were a string of ill-suited situations before I partnered with the father of my children. What I often felt made my experiences of recurring miscarriage so unique was that I was involved with men who didn’t want to have children (some specifically not with me, some not at all). So the tragedy of the loss was complicated each time by their obvious relief in the premature shedding of my womb.
Once an obstetrician at my follow-up appointment after being in the emergency room said very casually, “This happens. Everything will be okay. You all can just try again.” I remember having no words for her, just more tears. She meant well, I knew, but how could she know that the guy sitting across from us in her examination room had spent everyday of my short pregnancy begging me to get an abortion. Many times my postpartum season after a miscarriage was bizarre and disorienting like this. It was like grieving alongside someone else who is rejoicing that you are dying, as a miscarriage is an actual death taking place inside of your own body. They are joyful because they didn’t want to live with you as you are, they didn’t want to experience you as a mother.
I would struggle to reconcile these emotions. Why am I still here? Even now, all these lifetimes later, all these children later, I revisit the woman I was back then and ask her questions, as gently as I can, to uncover more parts of my process. It has taken me a long time to embrace that stage of my development into motherhood and not cringe at all the memories. Sometimes we don’t like the girl/woman/mother we were in our past, but the real healing comes when we can love and celebrate her anyway, and see her as a vital player in our becoming.
I have taken to identifying myself during the shadowy years of fertility trauma, consecutive losses, troubled relationships, and suppressed longings for motherhood as an Invisible Mother. As a writer, language is so critical to me, and has the power to really create space for our experiences when we don’t see our story reflecting back to us from the world as it is. Just finding or creating a phrase, a word, that can encompass the fullness, or at least some partial reality of our fullness, can go a long way towards feeling whole and sane when unraveling the many layers of heartache and despair. For me, not being seen as a mother by my community, not being able to call myself a mother, despite all the many initiations I’d had in the journey toward motherhood was a whole other form of pain. The invisibility of my losses—they were all in the first trimester and I wasn’t showing—added a further layer of erasure to the whole experience. Not only was there no baby, but there weren’t even any witnesses to my grief. Always, I had to mourn alone.
Sometimes I even wondered if my torment was all in my head. If no one else could see me bleeding, maybe I wasn’t bleeding. But over time, I learned how to make space for my grief, lonely as it was. I realized that the only way for me to come out of my despair was to lift myself up one breath at a time, however long it took. I devised strategies for making it through the raw horrors of the moment: declining invitations to friends’ baby showers, throwing away all loss-stained underwear, zoning out on Netflix until at least the physical labors of losing a baby had subsided.
Once the contractions were over, another part of the healing would have to commence. I always give my children a name, or rather, I hear a name upon conception or soon thereafter. And so even in times of loss, I have this person, this spirit being, this idea, to communicate with. I learned how an essential part of my healing and recovery was in continuing to dialogue with my baby, even though they had transitioned from their path toward being wholly human. Writing letters to them or about them, speaking to them, drawing or painting pictures for them, dancing with the energies I still felt coursing through my body in the wake of their existence—all of this was a way to honor the realness of my motherhood. I needed to anchor my experience in something that came from me, in something no one could ever erase or deny, even when there’d be no baby coming forth this time, no proof that there had indeed been someone there growing inside of me.
Our fertility dreams, when we are listening, will continuously lead us to leap into unknowns. Photo by Colin A. Danville
I also developed these ways of coping through recurring losses because in my circle of girlfriends, many of them were having babies for the first time. Try as I might, I could not avoid all their baby showers. I could not suspend our friendships indefinitely while I grieved in silent, hidden spaces. For some of my closest friends I became even more deeply involved in their mother journeys, taking on the labors of being a doula, babysitter, postpartum support person for the family. I thought if I can’t have my own baby right now, at least I can be of service to a mother. At least I can be next to the sacredness of motherhood, even if no one else can see that I too am a mother.
It’s important that no matter how our families, or partners, or friends, or doctors, or community see us, that we see ourselves. Having lived almost a decade of my life as an invisible mother, I often recognize the tell-tale traits in other closeted invisible mothers. It’s sometimes a matter of survival, of self-preservation. If you’re not surrounded by loving, empathetic people, it can be dangerous to reveal your motherself or your mothering dreams. Sometimes people, even the ones who imagine themselves to be in our corner, can say the meanest, most insensitive things. For many invisible mothers, we are treading thin ice as it is to just function as peacefully and positively as we can. And all the while we’re trying to thread our way back to full faith in our fertility space and our womb space so that we can do the inevitable work of trying again. Any negativity, harsh words, or indifference during this extremely vulnerable time can be devastating, debilitating.
I say all this to say to any of my Beautiful Invisible Mothers out there reading this post, I SEE YOU! Your fertility is real. Your babies are real. Your mothering dreams are real and deserve to be cherished by those worthy of your love, your fertility magic, your energy. Your story matters. You do not have to gather false strengths. It’s okay if you need to sit your homegirl’s baby shower out this time. Send money, send a card, do something nice for her in your own time after the baby comes. A new mommy will always need a helping hand. You are never obligated to explain your absence to people who don’t have the capacity, or the compassion, to hold your story with care.
I wish someone had told me they could see me when I was going through my invisible mothering years. I wish someone had simply said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” At the bottom of my grief there was this perpetual ache from being so unnoticed, so unacknowledged, and then also feeling like it wasn’t safe to even ask for support because I couldn’t risk not receiving kindness or empathy. In my mothering practice I have come to understand that the hard parts of our fertility journeys are not just passages of time to get over or brush away or ignore. How we experience them, how we grieve them, how we recover, how we restore our fertile radiance in the eternal postpartum of those faded possibilities impacts the opportunities and realities we are able to access in our forward fertility and future mothering journeys.
Many times instances of fibroids, irregular cycles, difficulty conceiving, hormonal imbalances can be traced to unresolved traumas that altered the natural flow of our fertility processes. We live in a world that will stress external remedies, countless pills, and costly treatments over the extended time, effort, courage, and emotional stamina it might take to uncover the secrets to healing our hurts from the inside out. In addition to, and possibly even instead of, whatever medical advice we receive, we might need to dance through the totality of our experience. We might need to sit with the pain or confusion for a while and just allow it to be named in our hearts and minds. We might need to write or talk through our story. We might need to uproot our lives from one particular geographical location and open our fertile selves up to discovering what might be born from us in a new place. We might need to end the awful relationship once and for all. We might need to walk away from a relentlessly demanding career or a soul-shattering circumstance that leaves us in constant entanglement with factors, environments, or people that do not serve our fertility dreams. We might need to finally, and confidently, center our fertility, being vigilantly intentional that everything and everyone else we’re pouring our precious labors into is aligned with our deepest, wildest fertility dreams.
Now I look back at the me of my 20s and I love her, I praise her, I cheer her on through the marathon of loss and heartbreaks. She is the reason I am here today, with my bustling band of munchkins that keep my busy and on the move all day long. Her perseverance, her determination, her faith in her fertility even when no one else could see it or cherish it—all of that is why I get to know myself as a mother in my current reality. Her labors, so many of them unsupported, unseen, and unloved at the time, are the reason I get to be Mommy today.
No matter where we are in the process of our fertility, everything is always connected. Be kind to yourself, Dear Mother of Your Own Making, whoever you are, wherever you are. Your fertility is a continuous practice of possibility. Every moment, every thought, every action, every ovulation, every pregnancy, every missed cycle, every loss, every birth, every labor, every dream, matters.