On Pregnancy Loss, Life, and Body Wisdom

Space On Space Higher Council advisor Charity May moderated a conversation with Yesenia Hunter and Emily Logan virtually over Zoom about miscarriage. Intertwined within the conversation are reflections on the complex emotions that emerge from pregnancy loss and birth experiences, the wisdom of the body, trusting the body, and our culture’s poor grasp on what it means to grieve. The conversation is anchored by a sculpture made by Yesenia called Tejido en maiz (Woven in corn).

Tejido en maiz, wood burnt drawing on gourd, drilled holes, transparent beads, light, 2013. Image courtesy of Yesenia Hunter.

Charity May: Let’s start with your art piece and your relationship to it. When did this piece begin to form?

Yesenia Hunter: I started this piece before I had a miscarriage. In Spanish, the way to say “to give birth” is to say “dar a luz,” to choose to give light or bring light into the world. I had been thinking about motherhood and the way my mother had brought so much light into the world. My mother had 17 children; she was pregnant about every two years for 20 to 23 years. 

In this series called “Dar a Luz” I was thinking about her love and heartache as a mother. She had been refused access to birth control by her mother-in-law who controlled that aspect of her life. As a Catholic, she was told she wasn’t supposed to use birth control. She had said that if she had been able to access it, she may have not had 17 kids. Nonetheless she brought all of this light into the world.

I did not know I was pregnant until I miscarried. This is where these contradictions come in for me. If I had known I was pregnant I might not have wanted to be pregnant. I had a flood of guilt, sadness and this weight of responsibility to something that could have been. I had taken a gourd and was shaving off the outer skins. The gourd, when it dries, is as hard as wood. I drew on it with a wood burner and called it Tejido en maiz which means to be stitched or crocheted out of corn. The corn is represented as being Mother. The baby that's growing inside is nurtured by the corn, and then there’s all this light. The back side of the gourd has tiny holes that I drilled in different sizes and then tapped beads into. When you put it on a light, it casts cosmic freckles all over the wall. 

At the time, I didn't know that I was working on it as a form of therapy. I was thinking about loss, thinking about my body, shame, and the guilt of feeling relieved that I was no longer pregnant. That I was relieved about not being pregnant is the part that messed with me because nobody talks about that.

We have fights about whether we should have abortions, access to birth control, and we fight about whether women should have control over their bodies. We have all those debates, right? However, what about this cloudy part of engaging with guilt, the burden of losing, feeling inadequate, and wondering if something is wrong with your body? I was actually glad that I wasn’t pregnant, because it would have shaped my life in a completely different way. It almost felt like, “Did I wish this upon myself? Did God do this to me?” I was trying to pinpoint blame and shame and it always comes back to the body. When I look back on those moments of making, it was therapy. I’d sit on the kitchen floor with friends, with my husband and sometimes the kids would work on stuff next to me. The process of being able to disassociate, come back into my body, and then leave it for a bit, and come back again as I worked was therapeutic.

CM: What you're describing there, the movement, is almost like a dance. Would you ground us into that physical state? Where were you on your motherhood journey?

YH: It was 2012 or 2013, my husband and I already had our four children. Our little one was in kindergarten. My husband had finished getting his bachelor's degree in music. I had started going to school at a community college and taking classes. I felt like I was done being pregnant. We had no intention of having another child.

The pregnancy was a complete surprise for us–well, the miscarriage. I don't think we’d verbally discussed that we were done growing a family, but I think we both felt like this was a transition. The kind of parenting that my husband and I do is connected and shared. I felt like if I was to get pregnant again, it would be a huge burden on me. I was already carrying a burden of trying to go to school and trying to think about, “What is my calling in life? Why am I here?”

I think many people ground their calling in motherhood and on parenting children. I don't think that's fair for our kids or for us. Let me explain what I mean by that, because I think my mother would disagree. My mother would probably say if we asked her, “What is the biggest calling in life that any woman has? She might say, “It is mothering and parenting your children.” While I don't disagree that that is an important role to play, I felt like I was entering into a new time in my life where I was going to choose the path of education. 

Perhaps that's part of the reason why I felt relieved, that I wasn't going to continue to be pregnant, because I knew that if I had not had that miscarriage, I probably would have stopped going to school and continued to work. In order to sustain another family member, it would require me to keep working in that grind.

I don't think that I could have made the choice to end my pregnancy. I would have continued to stay pregnant and it would have shaped my life in a different way. That's where I felt the guilt of gratitude. I was grateful I could keep doing this thing that I felt I was supposed to do: teach, research, write about history, and do some public work. I felt like all of those things were in my hand just as much as being pregnant was in my body.

CM: How was the process of emerging out of this miscarriage and holding those feelings? How was that for you and your partner? 

YH: We've never said it out loud to each other, but I think we both felt a great mix of sadness, grief, and relief. Both of us asked, “What do we need to do to nurture each other, nurture these moments?” One thing I love to do is lay in bed. I laid in bed, not only because I didn't feel great, but also because it feels great to lay in bed. My kids would lay with me. I have a picture that I cherish of my kid who came and laid down with me to cuddle–he was about 10–I don't think he knew what was going on, but he knew something was up. Our older girls had some understanding of it. 

A at age 10 and Yesenia while she was recovering from her miscarriage back in 2012 or 2013.

Ellah, A, Yesenia, and her husband James.

We had family members and friends who knew. It was strange to tell people because when you tell people you're pregnant it's usually exciting. It was like, “Oh, I was pregnant and now I am no longer pregnant. I'm relieved, but I'm also really sad.” To invite people into your life with that kind of news means to be super vulnerable. To expect them to grieve alongside you in this way is a whole other level of grieving. Usually when you're grieving, it's a public grief, right? Someone was alive and now they’re gone. With miscarriages, it's a private grieving time, and it's so hard to explain. People who haven't experienced it don't know how to put their finger on it.

Your body's engaged in the process of healing and recovering. Then, there’s that weird public piece where people who know you are like, “Something's wrong, but I don't know what it is, and I don’t want to say anything.” I can't explain it other than suspension. Everything's just on hold: feelings, thoughts, food, coffee. Everything's on hold. A body having a miscarriage can be similar to contractions doing the work of pushing a baby out. It's not quite like going into labor, at least for me, because I wasn't far along, but it was similar. All of those familiar physical feelings leave this residue of suspension and emotions.

CM: I feel the suspension. I'm going through the experience of being pregnant and preparing for birth. There are a lot of unknowns. It's a gift to hear your story. As it related to this miscarriage, or even more broadly, you were talking about postpartum. I think that's something that not a lot of folks are aware of beforehand. What was your personal relationship with your body in that process?

YH: I would start with how important it was for me to learn about the physicality of labor. I did a lot of reading. I read every book that I could to find out exactly what they had to say about labor. I was so anxious about it, but also just wanted to know. The first time I labored, I was too medicated to understand the whole process. It was a hard first delivery. When I had my second delivery, I was like, “I'm gonna do something different. I want to feel in charge of this because my body is in charge of the process.”

I fell in love with laboring. It might sound crazy to people, but I would rather go through labor than be pregnant. Pregnancy was hard for me. In labor, I felt I connected with my ancestors and connected with my mother who had 17 children, a lot of times on her own. I was born in a clinic, but the other children that she had were born at home with a midwife or a friend. If I could connect with the strength of my ancestors, I could stay in front of my contractions. I knew that if I could stay within that mindset, then the contraction would do what it was supposed to do. As a contraction was coming, I would engage with this ancestral strength, this great company of women is how I thought about it. 

There's a scripture in Psalms that says, there is a “great company of women (1).” I thought about these ancestors, these women who have birthed before me, who know how to give birth. Within this capitalistic, settler colonial world that we live in, historically white women were sent out to teach Black women and Indigenous women how to give birth. As if Black women and Indigenous women haven't been giving birth since time immemorial, right? 

If I thought about contractions as pain, I would get under the contraction and would feel so much pain. My body would cramp up rather than staying with my body. My body was designed to do this. It knows how to give birth. Let it give birth. Let it bring life. Let there be light, you know, “¡Dar a luz!”

In the case of miscarriage, I knew immediately when I had the pain it was a pain that something was up. I recognized that form of pain, the dullness, depth and heat of it. I understood it and recognized it, not quite like full labor pain, but I knew that that's what it was. Being in my body and listening in to the rhythms of my body, I knew immediately that it was a miscarriage, because I had experienced beautiful moments in labor where I welcomed contractions. I welcomed the work of my body to bring forth the light. I knew that my body was doing that same work, even though it wasn't life, because I was only a few weeks in.

CM: Even your description of the contractions and having the built-in ancestral knowledge, the awareness when this miscarriage transpired, there's so much power and tenderness wrapped up in that in. Emily, is anything coming up for you that you'd like to share?

EL: This topic of miscarriage, it brings up such a complexity of emotions. Anyone who’s gone through pregnancy loss is going to experience it differently. With the miscarriage that I had, I really wanted the pregnancy. There was a moment before I knew what was happening where I had some light bleeding. I had been painting. There was a moment where I questioned, “Could my painting cause this child to have disabilities? Have I harmed them permanently? There was a moment where I spiraled. I was so ashamed and convinced I had potentially harmed the baby, and that I had failed as a mother already. I considered terminating in a panic at that moment because I couldn't live with myself. I didn’t, but I considered it. The next morning, the blood increased dramatically and the doctor confirmed it was a miscarriage and that it wasn’t my fault. It all happened so fast.

In that first pregnancy, I was not fully in my body. I was not connecting well with the child emotionally. I was so afraid of being pregnant at the time. But then when it was stripped from me everything changed. It broke my heart and in my second pregnancy–I’m pregnant again now–I'm so obsessed. I will do anything to protect what is growing inside me. I totally align with the complexity of emotion, whether it was desired or was not desired, the grief and in some ways relief. I would give anything to still be carrying that first child, and there is this nagging mystery of just not knowing the why. In miscarriages, most of the time it’s not the person's fault. They just happen. The body knows. The body knows and is so wise. 

I wrote this poem that’s too devastating to share publicly, but the title is “We Don't Know Why, But We Wonder.” That experience is something that will always live with me. The questions, but also the process of learning to let go of the unknown, forgiving myself, and relieving myself of the guilt that I had done something wrong, or had failed.

CM: I wish we could have a sister hug right now. As you were sharing, I was reflecting again on this artwork. The roundness in the gourd and seeing the complexities of the emotions in this piece. I’m imagining the inside of this gourd is dark and hollow, perhaps the shape of a womb. Part of this human experience is bringing forth life, being pregnant and giving birth, or experiencing miscarriage. I love this one side of the piece with the blurred light, the dimmer, subtle, sweet lights around the body of the child.

YH: I think that's a good word, it's so sweet. This little growing being. It’s being stitched together. The word tejido in Spanish is something my mom does. It's one of her crafts. She crochets. I wanted to use that word as a way of invoking her craft in my process of mothering and not mothering. In so many ways, I was pregnant and I was no longer pregnant. I was happy and I was not happy. I was sad and grieving, there was life, and then, it wasn't there anymore. It's so complex.

The other pieces in the series were more about my process of going to the hospital afterwards and being treated a certain way, which is another conversation. I knew what I was going through and I went to the hospital and the doctor said, “No, it's probably nothing.” It was very dismissive. This is something we don't know how to do well in America. We don't know how to grieve with each other. I remember this so starkly in the 2020 uprisings. We don't know how to lament. We don't know how to be with somebody when they’re having a hard time. This doctor was trying to be nice, it wasn't like he was a jerk and kicked me out, he was just like, “Well, you know, it was probably nothing.” I think it was his way of trying to help me forget. As if my body could forget what I was experiencing at that moment. 

(1) Psalms 68:11

Desafinado, unfinished linoprint. Image courtesy of Yesenia Hunter.

One of the other artworks is called Desafinado, which means to be out of tune. When you're in tune as a musician, everybody's on the same page, you can play together. I remember being in a workshop and a friend saying, “If somebody is out of tune, it's okay to go to them and say, “Brother, you're out of tune, take a moment to tune up.”” That piece helped me realize that I can be out of tune and work on getting tuned in again. 

CM: Our western, modern medicine forgets. It forgets that body wisdom and spirit that we come from. I believe we come from God's source. That wisdom is embedded in our bodies and you're talking about attunement. Rest is to attune to our bodies. Even in your story, you share that so beautifully, even though it was not pleasant at all, there was sensitivity to become aware and to know what was happening.

YH: To believe myself. If I could walk away with something from this conversation it is that our bodies, we wonder, like Emily said, there's wondering, but you can also believe yourself. Following that gut, that intuition, that ancestral knowledge, the whisper, the Holy Spirit, whatever you want to call that sense of wisdom and understanding that we carry, just believing yourself. I think that is important.

CM: A powerful message especially as it relates to our relationships with our bodies and what we carry.

YH: Thank you, Charity. It was beautiful to let me talk about it in this way.

CM: I'm deeply moved holding this with you. The Higher Council continues to speak to me.