What it means to make something - #140

Art, loss, and growth.

I wanted to give myself a gift today: time. I wanted to step into the season’s first snow fall with nothing but cocoa and curiosity, no looming deadline, no panicked sentences. So today, I am sending you an essay you may have missed, because I wrote it for someone else.

In September of last year, before the pregnancy test, I wrote an essay for my friend and writing peer,

Jessy Easton

. It’s about art, loss, and growth. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed finding it again.

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August 31, 2023: three weeks before I found out I was pregnant

I’m in a book club that’s reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, an interactive how-to on reigniting your creativity. It functions like a 12-week program with tasks, homework, and thought exercises. In Chapter 8, Cameron talks about failure and creative loss. 

“If artistic creations are our brainchildren, artistic losses are our miscarriages. Women often suffer terribly, and privately, from losing a child who doesn’t come to term. And as artists we suffer terrible losses when the book doesn’t sell, the film doesn’t get picked up, the juried show doesn’t take our paintings, the best pot shatters, the poems are not accepted, the ankle injury sidelines us for an entire season.”

The group seemed to bristled at this, both to the idea that investing creatively meant potentially suffering pain as great as a miscarriage, and at the idea that any creative loss could even be as painful as a miscarriage. 

I had a miscarriage a couple months ago. It was an early one. When you search the internet for “is a chemical pregnancy a miscarriage?” one of the alternate questions it offers that people also search for is “does a chemical pregnancy count as a miscarriage?”

Does it count?

I found out I was pregnant and then I very soon after found out I wasn’t. I was annoyed. We had been trying for months. I huffed around the house yelling at various indignities, and then I signed into a Zoom meeting discussing various design elements for a new project. So did it count? Did it count when I brewed another cup of decaf and smiled sincerely at seeing my coworkers? Or does it only count if your heart is set? Must you find yourself on your knees, crushed, for it to count?

I’ve found myself in that position before, crushed, a year after I sold my first script to Hollywood and they’d workshopped it and me to death before firing me but keeping the idea. I spent months unraveling my self-esteem from the tightly wound ball of links it had become, buried at the bottom of my gut. I couldn’t talk about the project with anyone, feeling such shame and depression that the only relief was running until I couldn’t breathe. 

It wasn’t until the book club, two years and change later, that I talked about it at all. 

“I would rather have a chemical pregnancy every month this year than ever go through that again.” Even I paused after I said it. Was that true? Was that just years of disappointment finally being given a chance to breathe? I knew that I considered getting pregnant more a science than a magical gift. My mother is a biologist. My church was only ever the wildlife clinic she worked at where I watched life give way to death every day. Getting pregnant was merely these days at this temperature with this motility, and then you wait to see if the dough rises. Art though… art feels like magic, a great mystery that runs through you like a rogue electrical current that you either harness or lose forever. 

It felt like I’d lost something forever in the script. It felt like nothing had even started with the chemical pregnancy.

I still don’t call it a miscarriage.

Where we live, this far into the mountains and the woods, there is no ambient light. I was driving home on an empty moon not yet risen and I could barely see the ridgeline, more memory than monument. All that was lit was the low box built by my headlights, moving along the dirt road in front of me, illuminating the gravel and little else. If anything waited in the ditches, I didn’t see it. 

Sometimes, when the moon is high and fat and the gravel feels like the little chops of a sleepy sea, I turn my headlights off — the closest I get to being bad these days is just being in the dark.

I was thinking of the book club. If a creative loss was so much worse than a physical one, would that match the joys? In the depths of a moonless night, the road would only give away so much. Of course I knew when it would turn and bend, but the darkness always gives it the opportunity to do something else, to surprise me. I could drive straight into one of the other countless realities that could’ve been or maybe is somewhere else. 

But I pulled up to my house all the same, no new turns on the road revealed, not yet pregnant, novel not yet published. Same as I was — trying to make something beautiful. 

That should be one of those turns, pregnancy, the kind that changes the course. Instead, it feels like it’s on the course, up there on the syllabus with college and taxes and bosses and death. An eventually. 

I was the one who wanted it, to have a kid. It was a surprise to me and again to him. When I was little playing House at a friend’s place, I always played the husband. I would make a little tape handle and attach it to a piece of paper like a two dimensional briefcase in a two dimensional life. Honey, make my coffee, I have business to do. My friends had dolls and I had teachers calling my parents.

“She’s behaving strangely during play time.”
“What was she doing?”
“She sat in the Fisher Price Phone Booth the whole time, pretending to talk on the phone.”
“What were you doing, sweety?”
“I’m a spy, calling in suspicious activity.”

I was 5. 

It was three years ago that I started wanting to have a kid. I can’t bring myself to call it a child — it feels too precious and saccharine, too sacred and pathetic. Or maybe it just doesn’t feel like me, a woman who said in her vows how important it was to her that her groom would make a competent stunt driver. We’ll have a little yahoo, a sprite, a pain-in-the-ass. We can’t have a child. 

Sometimes I picture the photo I’ll post on Instagram, one I’ll have taken myself because my husband hates taking photos so much that he’ll never have the patience to keep taking them til I like it. It’ll be me in our bedroom, standing in front of the floor length mirror in short shorts and a crop top, making a surprise/grimace face, but not so much it obscures my clinging good looks, and the caption will say, “Full of fear and progeny.” Because that will be the truth. I can’t imagine feeling hashtag blessed. I can’t imagine feeling like my life isn’t going to turn to absolute shit. Too many people have told me the truth. 

I’m a secret keeper. People can smell it on me. They corner me at the end of the bar and tell me the worst things they think because they can tell I am a vault. The truth is I am a sieve — too self-involved to carry secrets with me. I leave them on the floor of the bar, left to be buried by sweat and beer. But I carry the ones that resonate, or the ones I worry will resonate later.

Tara, mother to a 7-year-old, admitted she only just started to enjoy being a mother. That until her kid developed a personality of their own, she found it tedious and boring, like an artistic succubus. She resented her bigwig husband. He had to travel, you see, and her art was a hobby. So he had to, don’t you see?

Anya, with her baby. Sick to her stomach with anxiety. She hadn’t done anything, she said, anything. Her life was a joke and now she was trapped in it. Her body hadn’t been hers in years. It was her fourth baby. 

Or Mickey. “It fucking sucks, dude. No one will ever think you’re hot again. You can’t do shit. Don’t do it. I am telling you: don’t do it.”

And here I am, doing it, and doing it, and doing it because I’m ovulating — honey! It’s time! But I’m doing it because I want to. I hear their warnings ringing in my ears, ricocheting off the words I’m desperately trying to get down before it’s too late. Before years are lost to sleepless nights and feedings and I thought you said you were handling daycare. Before art is something I squeeze in when the baby is doing art. Or is that sleeping? Before the melody of my mind turns from jazz to lullabies. Before love for a child becomes more potent than a love for art. 

Therein lies the problem. I am bursting at the seams with wanting to love. Four animals and a husband isn’t enough for how verdant the valley of my heart feels. That is, after all, where you keep a baby. Not in the hollows where your demons lie, not in the crags breeding your anxieties, not in the spires where the clouds of dreams weave like cotton candy. The baby grows in the valley. 

I just have to remember that the novel grows everywhere else.