A Harsh Blessing

Nature is a spiral. Like a jazz song, the themes repeat again and again, embellished enough to seem different this time. I suppose so we can experience the same melody at more and more expanded consciousness states.

Nature spiraled around on me again this summer with a tune I wished to never hear again. I hesitate to share it, as it is profoundly personal, but this essay is rising in me, so here we are.

My husband and I were expecting again until we weren’t. So many moments mirrored from exactly two years ago when we lost our girl half way through the pregnancy. We were in the same house on the south shore of Massachusetts when I found out this time, when I lost her last time. My oldest daughter’s birthday spent in the hospital again.

After finding out he was coming, it was like I stepped into an alternate universe where the sun shined brighter and everything smiled back. I was off the grid of my life where the most unexpected things could happen. I’d stepped outside the reach of the stars.

But Saturn doesn’t make exceptions for anyone, and the rug was pulled before the little one could make himself at home. Long enough though to envision the world with him in it. In my mind, he got to travel the world with me, my daughters got to give him a bath, my son got to teach him to pass a ball. Long enough to say hello before saying goodbye.

Life has come back around and here I am again, what I thought was a blessing spun into a curse. But, I know better. I know there are no curses, that it’s all blessings. I guess that’s it, isn’t it? It’s all blessings, to what extent can we see it?

So I’m looking hard, picking through the charred wrapping paper for the diamonds in the ashes. Looking for the “I get to’s.” My heart torn open again, I get to feel it stretch to new spans. I get to realize the tenuous miracles that are the lives of my living children. I get to see my partner brought to his knees and yet still holding me up, never letting me fall.

And I get to realize that universe and this one are one and the same, a place where everything smiles back.