When the berries don’t ripen

Miscarriage and recurring miscarriage

Even plant mothers experience miscarriage.

I remember when I used to feel relieved at my monthly cycle.

As a young woman, it seemed the worst thing I could do would be to get pregnant.

“Teen pregnancy” was always spoken of with such great disdain.

My straight-A self could not fathom getting pregnant—that would be terrible, I thought.

Not even when my body had those secret longings.

Now, my cycle has such a different significance.

The big change happened after the birth of my first child, at the return of my first postpartum cycle.

It didn’t feel like a cycle.

It felt like a miscarriage.

I grieved.

As I write this, I have now had as many (or more) losses as I now have children.

Speaking with other women, it seems the more pregnancies, the more losses.

It also seems the more pregnancies, the more the awareness of the losses.

It doesn’t matter if you already have children, the losses are felt to the very core of being.

In some ways, knowing what you are missing may make the experience all the more potent.

It’s been close to 2 years since I’ve had this post in mind to write.

Even with my understanding and emotional process, it’s been challenging to finally hit send on this—I’m not immune to the feelings of guilt or shame so many women go through when they have had a miscarriage.

It was late summer, and the weather was already turning toward wet, blustery Fall.

I was having an early miscarriage, and taking a walk outside.

Gently bleeding, grieving, I walked by a wild blackberry bush. It was one of the ones with the pointed leaves, not the common rounded Himalayan variety.

It was covered in unripe berries, and with the season’s turn, looking at them, I knew they wouldn’t ripen. Yet there they were on the bush, pretty, firm, perfect in every way as the rain and frost hadn’t yet had their way with them.

It seemed such a sign.

Miscarriage is nature, miscarriage is natural. The berries don’t always ripen, even when the mother is robustly healthy and the berries have no defects of their own. The timing is… well… as it is.

The tight and tart little berries I was looking at would soon fall and fertilize the ground for the next growing season.

As I walked on and considered this story nature had just presented me, I didn’t feel any less grief for my own loss. What I did feel, and it sticks with me to this day, was a feeling of greater kinship with the natural world and its many mysteries. Even plant mothers go through this.

Miscarriage is one of those topics that lead women to seek consult: What can I do to prevent this? How can I make a baby stick? Did I do something wrong? Will I ever be able to have a baby?

As this had been my second loss in a row, I had certainly been asking all of those things.

While there is much good advice out there, I also find certain gaps in most conversations.

One of the big ones is the soul conversation—and I don’t feel completely called to be the one to talk about spirit babies—but I will say you can communicate with these babies even if they are only with you a short time. They also seem to be able to communicate long after the fact (like, years).

And then the topic I wanted to share about today is how important connection to nature is for our fertility.

Recurring miscarriage is a different thing than infertility where no conception is happening.

Here, the conception is happening, but then the expected growth and development isn’t, and that can be at any different stage of pregnancy that things stop.

There are many biological components I could speak to, even and including our body’s wisdom in activating anandamide, the “bliss hormone,” during miscarriage just as it does in birth.

But then again, life is just mysterious. We can’t control it, and we certainly can’t force it to come.

And so, I think I’ll just leave this a post as is and welcome you to explore these topics with me slowly, gently, in good time.

I have written about things that support the first trimester here. There are no universal salvations, answers, or solutions, but maybe some things we can do to make things a little easier on ourselves as we try to bring forth life in our modern environment.

Many blessings.