Earlier this year, I wrote in an application for a asian american arts festival about my essay:
“The ways we choose to protect ourselves can create unseen chasms, revealing what we cherish only through profound loss.”
At the time, I meant it as we don’t know what we have actually lost, until we experience profound loss and that loss reveals so much. The things that we have done to ourselves. The things that we have done to others. The things that we have done that have led to other things and other things that cycle over and over again causing unneeded pain.
I meant it in that way, focused on my inability to express grief for my grandparents’ deaths—particularly of Po Po. Maybe because it was so slow and that I had become distant—she was just a presence in my life, nothing more.
But I look back on it now as I help Chris write a social media post—not even an eulogy—so that it can counter his mom’s friends posting about his mom. He is the only one that should post. And I wrote it from the only way I could—careful, authentic (as best as I could pretending to be him), and thoughtful. This is only the day after I finalized the text for the memorial service invitation.
What does it mean to have all these words capture someone? What does it mean that I have this gift (maybe?) to express myself? What is it all?
And the thing that I really should talk about is that I am literally 5 weeks exactly since I last had my period. And it has been about a week since I tested positive on the pregnancy. And a day or so since I started bleeding. It would be my third miscarriage, if it was one.
Why am I always pregnant in September? Why didn’t this happen in other months? I don’t believe in forces, but is there something?
Every time I write about miscarrying, it’s easy. I am not really that afraid. And the urge to share it is so great. But when I share it, especially in front of so many people, I am suddenly afraid and tearful. The world can hear my pain and suddenly I feel the pain that I have in my words which is a bit more numbed when I share it in very intimate settings.
I am devastated the pregnancies don’t complete. But I am also struggling with the feeling that sometimes I am not ready, I am unsure. That I am selfish that I want to live a life without a child—mostly in the pursuit of my own granduer goals of writing. Yes, I know that you can still have that. But even at the short-term, I am upset that my body becomes stolen from me—that I just become a vessel for birthing and will be treated as such by the medical community. That my decisions are taken away from me to be decided yes by healthcare professionals and the government who can dictate what they want.
How privileged I am to have choices and direct my fate. How privileged I am to be Asian and not be discounted on the account of how I look like. How privileged I am to be highly educated, ingrained with a masters degree and work experience, which means that I am not in worry of falling in dire financial straits and most of all, have the ability to advocate for myself in the broken healthcare system of the United States. How privileged I am to have the stability in my childhood and ability to built resilience during moments of adversity. So much.