Retail Therapy in a Necklace (or Two)

A couple months after my hysterectomy, a mom at the park casually asked me how many kids I want to have. It was too soon, I had no quippy answer prepared to shrug off the question, and it caught me off guard. I ended up telling her everything that happened to me, and she reciprocated with stories of her own postpartum experiences. I am grateful for sisterhood, motherhood, personhood. Grateful to wear the marks of what it took to bring my children into this world. Grateful to be surrounded by supportive people who make space for me to express my hurt and confusion out loud.

There’s nobody to blame for why this happened to me... like so many things in life, it just happened. And that makes it hard to accept, because, frankly, I don’t like being told what to do.

For a long time I didn’t feel anything; healing for the first year largely meant physically putting one step in front of the other every day to make sure I am there for my family. Not to say I was pushing away the emotions exactly, I just don’t think I was ready to feel them.

Because when I lost my uterus, I also lost my vision of what my future could look like (though, I suppose, we’re all kind of deluding ourselves if we think we know what our futures look like 🤷🏻‍♀️). But in the past few weeks I’ve started to feel those emotions I’ve been waiting for. It started when Dorothy turned one and I realized I don’t have an infant anymore. Realizing that all of Dorothy’s firsts may also be my motherhood lasts makes all those moments a little extra bittersweet.

Not that I want to be pregnant right now (it's no secret that I didn’t love being pregnant), but thinking about those sweet baby kicks that I’ll never feel again—that gets me every time.

The most difficult part of processing my feelings right now includes having a hard time seeing pregnant women, and thinking about pregnancy in general. At first I thought it was feelings of jealousy, but it really isn’t. It’s a reminder of this loss of control and loss of potential. So for now, healing means allowing myself to feel this way. It means giving myself permission to be sad and angry, and not feel that I have to cover up these difficult emotions with positivity or gratitude (but maybe just a little sarcasm sometimes 😉).

In my experience, healing also happens slowly, sometimes painfully, and often unexpectedly. All of a sudden something can happen, and you have to stop and ask yourself, “oh, is this how I feel now?”⁣⁣

That is what just happened to me when I lost my necklace with my kids’ names, and went to order a second one. Of course, the same day I placed my order, my first one turned up 🙄, but here’s what’s cool about these two necklaces:⁣

My first necklace—the chain with two tags—I bought as a way to stay optimistic that I would someday, somehow add more names to my chain. It represents a moment in time where healing meant denial about what had happened. And that’s okay. ⁣

My second necklace was designed for these two names alone. It is a celebration of life, and still leaves room for the recognition of loss. I am coming to terms with the fact that I will likely never have the big family I always dreamed of. But for now, this stage of healing has led me realize a sense of peace that allows me to enjoy all the ways that these two perfect little names represent my whole heart. ⁣

Both necklaces by Tiny Tags.⁣