Everything Matters Under the Blood Wolf Moon

I thought I was pregnant around Christmas last year. Like, full on female intuition – I’ll be damned if I’m mistaken. And I knew exactly the night the child would have been accidentally conceived. I was lethargic, more than I’d been in a long time. Sleeping all day into the evenings and foggy in the hours that I was awake. We had a full moon around December 22nd, and I remember blaming that at first. Or maybe the holiday anxiety had kicked in early.

I didn’t take a test like I’d done before, because I think I wanted to be wrong but not knowing still left room for this flying chance that I might be right. It’s funny, isn’t it, the lengths our minds and bodies will go to when we’re operating from the belief that something’s already true.

I remember sitting in the passenger seat of my husband’s car and being so frustrated that he’d misplaced my good chapstick. He was the last to use it and now it was nowhere to be found. Amidst the scuffle, I felt an odd twinge in my lower back and abdomen. Not painful, just there. I requested that he buy his own tube if he couldn’t put it back in my purse pocket, and on the highway I thought, these are implantation cramps and I don’t have time for it.

Days would go by and I would sort of forget, but there was a general hum that reminded me each morning. We went out with a couple and I ordered my usual, a double gin and tonic. The ice rattled around in a lonely glass, and I wondered if I was killing my baby. A lot of time passed, and no one knew except for Ryan, only because I’d make jokes about a newborn sharing a kennel with the dog in our six-hundred-square-foot apartment. He loved those jokes.

We had family dinner at Mi Cocina one night, a place we frequent for fajitas and brisket. Two things you should know about me: I’m no sissy when it comes to Mexican food, and my order never changes. I sat looking at the menu, and the words went out of focus. Our waiter came around and got to me last. I said that I’d take the Huevos Rancheros and the whole table looked at me like I’d asked for a gun. I’d never ordered that in my life, and especially not at nine o’clock at my favorite place. My mom touched my arm and mouthed to me, and I said with a shrug, “Eggs just sounded good.” I knew at this point. 

A few days after that, my period came. I was relieved, I felt lighter. But I wasn’t just lighter, I was actually empty in there now and had been all along. No flying chances anymore, just bare, and I felt more sad than I anticipated. That same week, I encountered one friend who was expecting but didn’t want to be and another friend who can’t quit losing them. You stupid fool, people are really, literally, all the way losing their babies. At once, I was rolled over by shame.

Guilty for first being relieved – my friend who’s due in eight months didn’t get the luxury of relief. Guilty for being young, naïve, and probably fertile. How lucky I must be. Guilty also for being grieved over my complete non-pregnancy – imagine a verified life and the true, sudden absence of it, and then don’t pretend you even come close to knowing what that’s like. And hear me, I don’t. I don’t know one iota about how anyone else feels about any given thing. I only know what I feel, and sometimes it’s more than I bargained for.

I don’t even know why I chose to share this story, except for maybe that I was encouraged after sorting through all that shame. Encouraged that every emotion to the umpteenth degree is presented under that Super Blood Wolf Moon and that God knows every one of them. Holds every one of them. Spoke every last one of them into our being. Expectancy, relief, dejection, ecstasy, lament, and the ones of lesser severity.

If you feel it, let it matter because it matters to God. The tiniest sting of a life that was never in me matters to Him. So does the bitterness of a wife who’s now building a crib. And so does the misery of a woman who’s again disassembling hers. The grand scale of feeling is large, and there’s room, so I hope we’d feel welcome to let ours matter, too – even if it’s more than we bargained for. 

I want to hear people when they speak about joy and their pain, and I want to enter into them both without trifling through my own repertoire to try and come up with a match. Ultimately, we don’t have to come close to knowing, because being with people rightly only cares that we’re there.