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pure white stars, a wild navy sky

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People often ask, when I share that I lost another baby, how many is it for you, now?   I try to explain quickly, to get up-over-and-through the place where sharp shards of sympathy rake across the nothing that's left of my rotten and ruined heart. It's easier to speak lightly, to smile and change the subject, to pretend there's really no difference between losing three or four or five babies, as if at some point I can simply roll them all up together into one massive, tremulous loss, where the pain is no longer exponential but eerily familiar, the tick tock  of the grandfather clock, you're alone, you're alone, you’re alone, everything, always, on your own. I don't know how to talk about it; hell, I don't even know how to write about it anymore, my bothersome passion for snarky compound sentences and adverb abuse has completely deserted me. For months, there's been nothing but a cursor slowly blinking on a wretched blank page, because what could there p
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a garden that’s bursting into life

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Here’s to jeans with a blazer, to furry barking happiness, to something in my life finally working out just a teeny tiny bit the way I hoped it might. Here’s to moving forward. Here’s to being brave enough to try, to leap, to love as deeply as I do. Here’s to getting back in the classroom, here’s to Annie sneezing sand in my face until the end of time,  here’s to a garden that’s bursting into life. Here’s to eternal sunsets over the ocean, here’s to letting the world change you, here’s to doctor Katie. Here’s to joy. 
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it was worth all the while

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Graham spent the first year of his life as an 'only child' dog. He didn't know how to bark until Molly showed up, fourteen pounds of absolute chaos that tried to pull his ears off and stole his toys and collapsed on top of him panting after romping madly and muddily through the backyard. In truth, I was afraid to bring her home, because I thought my love for Graham had taken up all the extra space available in my heart. I was worried that the only way to love her would be stealing some away from him. But what I've since shared with everyone who seeks out my counsel as the unofficial Should I Get Another Dog spokeswoman, and more importantly, what I've learned from the decade I've lived in Colorado, is that love doesn't work like that, boneheads. Love is an infinite resource, it is the most durable power in the world. It sounds overly simplistic, but it's true. Share it freely and more will twine up around you, love beams back, a joyful boomerang of plent
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a cold and broken hallelujah

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Most people didn't even know that I was pregnant. In theory, that should have made it easier, when my baby died. Easier than when I miscarried my first, just shy of a year ago now. When I found out I was pregnant again, how I felt was complex. Lucky. Hesitant. Optimistic. Terrified. But it wasn't the fear that threatened to crush me. Anyone who has lived within this loss understands that it was the sudden and unnerving blaze of hope, swiftly followed by the immediate urge to stamp it out before Lucy could yank the football away. So I squashed down (most of) my gleeful blabbermouth tendencies. I had recently read something saying we should wait six months before sharing big news: a new job, moving across the country. Having a baby. I generally try to ignore random internet recommendations as I prefer to create my own senseless and complicated rules for life, but this one stuck. I'd keep it to myself. I'd nestle into cautious contentment and carry on carefully, carefully,
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