Hi, Ghost Mothers.

I wrote this piece years ago—maybe over ten years ago—on a whim during a writers’ retreat, and Grief became a personified figure knocking on the door of my home. I imagined letting her inside and listening to what she wanted to tell me. Since then, I’ve considered Grief a…

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It’s my pleasure to introduce you to as this month’s Guest Ghost essayist. Her story is real, deep, and written straight from a mother’s heart after losing her child. Please welcome her and give her lots of love and affirmation in the comments.

Grief:
A raw painful feeling deep within you that yearns to escape.
A primal scream that manages to escape a little at a time when you are alone.
Misery that doesn’t love company.
Endless tears that threaten to drown you.
Sobs that shake you from head to toe promising relief but bringing none.
A baby who was dreamed about for seven years and was finally conceived but only held the breath of life for less than 48 hours.
A baby who wasn’t held despite having parents that wanted nothing more than to be able to do so.
A firstborn child created from so much love.
An infant son who was unable to fight the grip of death.

This is the story of a child who was so wanted and of parents with plans for his life that were never fulfilled, of their courage and faith, of their forever grief and of peace found later in life.

On a cold blustery January day in 1978, in the middle of a raging blizzard, I began my labor. My baby was at least two weeks overdue. This was my first baby, so I had no experience with which to compare the whole situation.

I called my doctor and was instructed to get some clean sheets, towels, and hot water, and sterilize a pair of scissors. They said to call back if help didn’t arrive, and the medical staff would guide me through childbirth. The father of my child was not thrilled and certainly not confident. But he held my hand and rubbed my back and assured me that all would be well. Help would come.

Help did come eventually. The blizzard was roaring outside. Snow had piled up higher than the back door. The car was buried with just a lonely antenna sticking up out of the snow. Some firefighters and EMTs hopped on snowmobiles and rode across the lake to help. A nurse who lived literally around the bend from us struggled through hip-deep snow with his fiancé to provide much-needed experience with delivering babies.

A doctor volunteered to take a helicopter to the scene. The first helicopter crashed after being buffeted by the winds. No injuries occurred, but that doctor hopped on another helicopter to try to reach me, now in distress. Because of overhead utility wires and high winds, the helicopter was unable to land on the blankets spread by helpful neighbors on the ground to mark the best spot. The doctor was dropped off in a cornfield less than a mile away and was guided by the pilot in the air via Walkie-talkie to the location of my home. He traipsed through waist-deep snow, and it took him three hours to reach me.

By this point, my labor had gone on for thirty hours. I experienced painful back labor with no pain medication. The doctor did all he could to deliver my baby, using forceps to no avail. He cut a long episiotomy, but my baby was not excited about getting out and greeting the world. He was literally stuck! The doctor then called the highway department and gave them instructions on how to get to the scene asap, or there would be a dead mother and a dead baby.

When the ambulance arrived, I was transported to the hospital, blood-typed in the elevator, and taken straight to the operating room where a surgeon awaited me. A 9-pound-2-ounce baby boy was finally born via emergency c-section. The little boy was in such obvious distress having been literally stuck in the birth canal for so long, and I was stitched up and transfused due to loss of blood.

I was then taken to a room and told my baby would be transported to the NICU at the big city hospital as soon as possible and that if I wanted to see him, I could. That was all I wanted. My baby boy was brought to me with an oxygen mask on and tubes coming from different places all over his body. When I saw him in such a state, I sobbed and requested they take off the mask so I could see his sweet face. They did as I asked, but he couldn’t breathe and was gasping for air, which frightened me even more. The nurses put the mask back on my baby, and he was transported to the NICU in the big city.

He died 36 hours later, having never been held by his parents.

Most of the next two weeks were a blur. Trying to recover physically and emotionally was so painful. Overwhelming grief set in. Days and days of immense sadness followed. A funeral was held two weeks later, because no graves could be dug until then. The snow was just too deep. I remember that day so well: not wanting to get dressed, or to go to the funeral home or the cemetery. Not being strong enough to wash my own hair. It was so, so cold that day—blistering wind and icy cold—but the sun shone brightly, and the sky was deep blue.

For many years after this devastating experience, the newspapers ran stories about the blizzard of ‘78. Every January from the 25th to the 27th, front page stories recalled the event. Every year I cried. On the 25th anniversary, there was a special section to the paper all about the blizzard, and again my story was included.

Such an experience was life-altering. In the spring of 1979, I birthed another baby boy via c-section. He had hyaline membrane disorder, which meant his lungs were not fully developed and breathing was not possible on his own. Even though he weighed 7-pounds-14-ounces, he was considered premature and was placed in the NICU for eleven days. Once again, I drew upon strength I didn’t know I had, in order to fight for my baby’s life. I talked the doctors into releasing me from the hospital after two days so that I could spend every waking moment with my son at the hospital. I hovered over him and held his little hand through the opening in the incubator. I donated breast milk to the hospital milk bank. I was determined to nurse when I got him home. It was a glorious day when he finally did.

Three years after his birth, an 8-pound-6-ounce baby girl was born who was perfect in every way. All the worrying during that pregnancy melted away after this birth. She was so beautiful with such amazing big blue eyes. She had a soothing personality and rarely cried. Her birth gave me a chance to be a mother unaffected by worries of my child dying. It was a blessing, to be sure.

Being traumatized by the birth and subsequent death of a child is a life-long journey. I have gone through so many stages of grief. I’m not really sure how I made it this far, except for the help of God. I know I am emotionally strong and I am strong in my faith.

There were times, especially immediately after the death of my firstborn son, when I was absolutely sure that God hated me. I must have done something in my life to deserve to lose a child in such a horrific way. I stopped going to church. I stopped praying. I stopped believing God was with me. I was sure he had abandoned me. I can’t remember how long that feeling stayed with me. I’m sure it was less than a year, because as soon as I realized that I was pregnant again I was back in church thanking God for helping me conceive so easily this time.

Over the years, my faith has taken many twists and turns. I was a Catholic for 50 years, having been raised in the faith. My two children were raised Catholic. There came a point when I felt that something really big and important was missing in my faith journey. I just stopped going to church altogether. I waited for God to show me what he wanted me to learn. The grief events were big, but the moment I realized that God loved me beyond measure and that he would be with me always, was the pinnacle of my life.

I have used my experience of losing a baby to comfort and console several women who had the same experience and didn’t know where to turn. The loss of a newborn is so devastating. Having had the experience myself, I could put myself in their shoes. I could say, “I know how you feel” and really mean it.
One of those people was actually my daughter-in-law. She lost a baby girl just thirty days after birth, due to an unrecognized brain tumor. I believe I was meant to help her, and over the years we have become closer because of this shared loss.

God has been with me through all stages of my life, from losing my firstborn son to the present day. I have two children and seven grandchildren, for whom I’m deeply grateful. The tragedy in my younger years helped shape me into the person I am today.

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Hi, Ghost Mothers!

What a powerful conversation with my friend Teri Leigh today. I was struck by her articulation of childbirth as a metaphor for spiritual mothering—the breaking open of the woman’s body and the blood poured out, but the child resting on its mother’s breast and the release of oxytocin that rushes through to heal the wounds of childbirth.

There is a way to hold both suffering and love, we agreed.

She spoke about “fierce love,” and the quiet bravery of men and women everywhere, who are rising up in their communities to literally hold people who are suffering and in pain—the effects of the collective trauma we are all witnessing and immersed in.

In Teri’s community of Minneapolis, Minnesota, she has walked alongside women who show up with food and the gift of their presence to the families who are being torn apart from the months of I.C.E. deportations happening in their area. One such story gripped me: A teacher who listened as a woman howled in emotional pain about being displaced from her native country to another country, only to find it was unsafe there, too.

“Where can we go?” she asked. And Teri’s friend said, “I’m here. I’m with you. There are 200 people out there who made food for you, who love you.”

That’s what it takes for the fierce love to penetrate through the walls of violence and division.

Teri and I believe that both men and women carry these feminine attributes, and that each of us—no matter where we are, or who we’re with—can respond from a place of love.

One of my daily intentions is this:

That’s it.

We don’t have to be perfect. We don’t have to perform or “get it right.” We’re not necessarily all equipped to protest or picket. All we have to do is be open to each moment, receive the invitation of that moment, and respond from a place of love.

The beauty of maternal gifts is how we spread them to heal the world, one person at a time, moment to moment.

Thanks for bringing your feminine genius to this space and in your corner of the world. We need your voice—and your heart.

I appreciate you.

With love,
Jeannie Ewing
Host of Ghost Mother and I Grow Strong Again

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Hello, Ghost Mothers!

May has been a popular month for Ghost Guests to share their stories of miscarriage and unseen loss. I’m grateful we are having these conversations, because even fifteen years ago when Ben and I first started our family, even mentioning the word miscarriage was taboo. It could silence a small crowd instantly.

Today, I’m honored to share with you Casey Gates Frey’s heart-wrenching story of being rushed through a D & C during a COVID-19 spike—and for which she had tested positive. During a day when, as she writes, Tender Casey needed to be nurtured, she had to keep Achiever Casey at the forefront, just to get through the surgery.

Please welcome her and her brave, tender story. Thanks for being part of this wonderful community, where we can all show up as we are and hold space for each other’s complicated and often painful pathways to motherhood.

As I sit in the ER bed, all of my defenses are on high-alert. The nurse begins the informed consent, and I’m left wondering, Did my doctor describe the risks associated with a D&C? Or did she just kind of prescribe it without my feeling like I had a choice?

“No. I was not informed about the possible risks of this procedure,” I tell the nurse. She peers over her clipboard, eyes wide. “Can you tell me what they are?” I ask, wringing my hands. This is the first time it occurs to me that something could happen in this procedure that could affect my being able to get pregnant or carry a child again. “Um, no, I’m sorry. You have to discuss that with your doctor. I can try and get her on the phone for you?”

I truly cannot remember if my doctor discussed this with me. But I don’t feel like I can back down now. I tell her, “Yes, I will need to speak with my doctor on the phone before I can continue with this procedure.”

Eventually, we get my doctor on the phone. She speaks with me professionally but also makes sure to say she already explained these risks, but is “happy” to do it again. But more than anything, I’m relieved to finally be having a direct conversation with the person who is about to perform surgery on me. I’m relieved this is actually going to happen today and that she hasn’t been sending me on a wild goose chase by making me wait in the ER instead of pre-op, because there are no beds in the hospital.

The reason: There is a spike in COVID cases, and I just tested positive.

I am hopeful that I will not be deemed a total leper, unworthy of medical treatment. That I do get to have all my uterine tissue scraped out of me after all. Sigh.

A transfer nurse wheels me over to a building across campus. Once we get out of the elevator, we go in and out of various rooms trying to figure out where I’m supposed to go. Patients aren’t usually brought in for surgery from the ER.

Then again, patients undergoing surgery aren’t usually COVID positive.

My transfer nurse speaks with one of the receptionists, both of them confused. The receptionist even asks her for my name, but the transfer nurse can’t find my chart. I narrow my eyes over my mask as they talk over me. Finally, I raise my voice and tell them my name, because Hello, I’m right here. I’m not asleep. I’m a conscious, verbal person sitting right in front of you.

From there I’m wheeled directly into the operating room—which feels like a surprise to everyone. “Your doctor won’t be entering the room until you’re under,” I’m told.

Because of the COVID.

“We want to minimize her exposure. And normally you would only need conscious sedation, but you’ll actually be fully asleep with a general anesthesia administered through a breathing tube.” This is the first I’m hearing this.

The anesthesiologist stands over the operating table, poised to administer the drugs. The doctor’s assistant pats the bed and asks me to “hop on up.” Even with the day I’ve had, there’s something about being a patient in a medical setting that makes me forget I have any autonomy or ability to question the system.

So my body begins to comply, but my brain stops me after I stand up. “Wait. Stop. Are you about to put me under once I get on the table?”

She says yes, they’re all ready to go, and indicates again for me to lie down. My face feels hot as I over-articulate through my mask, “No one has taken down my husband’s name and number. He needs to be contacted when I’m out of surgery.”

The woman’s eyes go wide as she looks around the room awkwardly. She mutters, “Oh! Um, here,” and scrambles to locate a pen and—I kid you not—a random piece of scratch paper from a nearby cart. She tries to sound casual as she asks me for his name and phone number, as if she was planning to do that all along.

The last thing I want before going under is to feel like no one in the room (or in this case the building) has their shit together. Standing next to the surgical table, I am frozen. The nurse is done jotting down my information, so there is nothing left to do but lie down and let my doctor finish the job.

I know this is what I have to do, but looking at it head on, I just don’t want to. I never wanted this pregnancy to end. I don’t want to be hollowed out and left empty. I don’t want to face the heartache that’s waiting for me on the other side. I can’t bring myself to submit. The nurse shifts, impatient.

For the last ten days, Achiever Casey has had to wake up and gently scoot Tender Casey to the side, ignoring her desire to curl up in the fetal position and do nothing but cry. All day, all week, I’ve had to function from this doer part of me. Today I had to show up to this cluster-fuck situation with enough focus and strength to advocate for myself and accomplish the goal of getting this surgery over and done with.

Striving, pushing, holding, lifting. Just to arrive at this moment when all there really is to do is let go.

Submitting should be the easiest thing, but for me it sucks. Achiever Casey looks around the room one more time, attempting to soften while slowly unraveling, until Tender Casey finally crawls up onto the table and lies back, tears rolling down the sides of her face, ready to count backward and just let go. Just be.

I arrive at a fork in the road I’ve seen a few times throughout my life now, when strength actually looks like surrender.

Casey Gates Frey is a screenwriter and essayist who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters. Follow her on Substack: theladybrain.substack.com

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Miscarriage is not a topic I’ve written about with great depth or frequency. I experienced two missed miscarriages before I was able to sustain a pregnancy with our first daughter over fifteen years ago. For some reason I still can’t explain, I feel unqualified to write about that—the miscarriages were never confirmed by pregnancy t…

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Please welcome Sam DeCosmo of the Substack publication, Beautiful Anyway. She is this month’s Guest Ghost, writing about the heartrending grief of losing a child to miscarriage—an empty room, empty arms, and not even the decency of a medical practitioner’s condolences. I know you will read her story with care and be gracious in the comments.

It’s been almost exactly two years since I read those two awful words on the ultrasound report: fetal demise. That’s how I found out. During the sonogram, I knew something wasn’t right. I could tell by the sonographer’s face. The scan seemed to take forever, and I’ll never forget the agony of lying there, knowing something was wrong, but the tech wasn’t allowed to tell my husband and me.

Then we had to wait while she discussed things with the radiologist. They told us to call my doctor as soon as we left the ultrasound appointment. I called, but he had left for the day. His office staff promised he wouldn’t leave me hanging until the next day and would call me back.

The doctor never called. And I couldn’t bear the wait, knowing in my heart that something was wrong with my baby. So I logged onto the radiology center’s patient portal and read the report. Although I was ten weeks pregnant, our baby was only measuring around seven weeks. No heartbeat was detected like it was at our six-week sonogram. Then I read those two horrible words that left me shattered. And just like that, I knew our baby was gone.

The following days felt like a nightmare I thought I’d never wake up from. I still felt pregnant with nausea and other symptoms, which is why I was so sure that everything was okay before the sonogram. But that is the cruel joke a “missed miscarriage” plays on your body. The placenta keeps growing, creating those hormones and causing your body to still feel pregnant, all the while your baby has silently died.

Your body doesn’t realize it, so you have to take medication to help pass the pregnancy. I’ve been through a lot of physical pain in my life: a cerebrospinal fluid leak, a ruptured disc in my back, multiple surgeries. But the pain of my uterus contracting to expel the pregnancy was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. And the emotional pain of what was happening was even worse.

That was the most awful night of my life. I felt like a piece of myself had died.

My husband and I tried to prepare ourselves for the possibility of a miscarriage. We actually talked about it a lot. But nothing can prepare you for how bad it hurts. I had no idea that the grief I would feel for a baby I never even met could be so deep. I always thought it was sad when I heard of someone having a miscarriage, but I never knew how devastating it could actually be. I think it may be one of those things you cannot fully understand until you experience it yourself.

It’s a club I never wanted to be in, yet here I am.

The past two years have been harder than I ever could’ve expected, and I’ve found myself getting frustrated that this grieving process has been so deep and long. I was only pregnant for ten weeks, so why does this hurt so bad? I kept asking myself.

But it’s so much more than those ten weeks, I realized. It’s the year-and-a-half that we tried to get pregnant, month after month, the hope followed by heartbreak when it just didn’t happen. It’s the ten-plus years I desperately wanted to be a mother but felt like I couldn’t because of my chronic health condition that made us wait so long to even start trying.

I wanted this baby for what felt like a lifetime. So it felt like a complete miracle when I finally found myself holding that positive pregnancy test. The second I saw those two lines telling me I was pregnant, everything changed for me. I became laser-focused on the new life that was growing inside of me.

I got books about pregnancy and parenthood and started reading them right away. I joined Facebook groups for expectant mothers and apps to find other new moms in my area. We began to clear out the office to turn it into a nursery, and I pictured exactly where everything would go.

I sang a special lullaby to the baby every morning in the shower. I bought “big sister” bandanas for our dogs and had our pregnancy announcement planned out. My whole world revolved around this baby and its future.

Maybe I got ahead of myself, I don’t know. I was just so happy.

All I do know is that in a second, all of it was taken away. So it was painful to try and figure out what to do with myself and how to move forward the first few months after our loss. The grief does come in waves, like they say, and it started to get a little easier with time. But I would think I was doing okay, when all of the sudden a song would come on the radio and I would fall apart while driving on the highway. Or I would think, “I’m finally moving on,” and a pregnancy announcement from a friend would trigger the tears and feelings of emptiness.

I can remember the day I thought I was finally ready to tackle the room we were turning into the nursery. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I was feeling stronger. Then I saw the pregnancy books that my husband attempted to hide and the bag of baby stuff his grandmother bought for us. It was sitting in the same spot that I had pictured myself rocking my baby to sleep and singing that damn lullaby that I just couldn’t seem to get out of my head. It had been months, but I instantly fell apart.

Miscarriage grief can be incredibly deep and complex, because it involves both a physical loss and the loss of so many hopes and dreams. It felt like the ground was pulled out from under me. One moment there was the quiet joy of imagining a future—planning names, thinking about how our dogs would be with a baby, imagining if he or she would look more like me or my husband—and the next it was all gone, leaving an emptiness that often felt unbearable.

Then there was the physical aspect of it all—the abrupt change in hormones from the ending of a pregnancy, causing everything from intense waves of anxiety and depression to my hair falling out like a postpartum mother’s does. It felt like a cruel joke some days, holding fistfuls of hair after a shower instead of a baby in my arms. And I’m still not sure if the anxiety was from fluctuating hormones or my brain bracing for another loss. All I know is that it felt like I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop; I worried for months about losing my husband, my parents, my older dog.

Miscarriage grief can also be lonely—it’s a topic that still feels taboo to talk about in our society. Many people struggle with talking about grief in general, but miscarriage seems to make a lot of folks even more uncomfortable. But I’ve never shied away from writing about hard things. In fact, it’s sort of what my blog focuses on: how painful experiences can ultimately serve to shape us into better versions of ourselves.

So I wrote about it. Both as a therapeutic outlet for myself, because this is what writing has always done for me, and to attempt to chip away at the stigma that seems to exist around miscarriage. I didn’t want to hide what I was going through. I wanted to open doors to have conversations about these things and help others struggling in silence.

I’m sure it has made some people uncomfortable, and I imagine there are those who are tired of hearing me talk about my pregnancy loss and struggles with infertility. But it’s been worth it for me. Because writing about it has connected me with so many people who have told me how much my story has resonated with them and thanked me for my words. I’ve met a number of other women who desperately needed to know they weren’t alone with their feelings.

Losing a baby that I wanted so badly and dreamed about for so many years has been one of the hardest experiences of my life. But it has taught me just how strong I am. I’ve gotten through an incredibly difficult season, and I’m proud of myself for that. It has shown me a different, softer side of my husband, and it strengthened our marriage. It has allowed me to help others who are hurting, which is all I’ve ever wanted to do with my writing and my life.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand why it happened and I have no idea what the future holds. Things feel very uncertain right now, but I’m choosing to trust the timing of my life. And if I can take my grief and somehow use it for good, I know my pain has not been wasted. That’s what keeps me going amid all the difficult seasons in this life. And that’s ultimately how I’m choosing to honor myself and my baby’s precious life.

Sam DeCosmo is a writer, wife, and old soul who believes in the power of sharing our stories. She’s found purpose and healing through the words she writes to encourage others living with chronic and mental illness. She shares her heart on Instagram @sam.decosmo and her Substack, Beautiful Anyway, where she explores how to create a beautiful life despite difficult circumstances. When she’s not reading or writing, you can find her exploring nature with her rescue dogs.

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This month’s Paradox Circle workshop was tough for me. As a woman who’s experienced the pain of infertility and missed miscarriage, I spoke from a personal place of pain—but also tried to expand my lived experience into the universal.

Two incredible women I’ve come to know—Teri Leigh and Emma Vivian—were this month’s Guest Ghosts, an…

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Hello, Ghost Mothers!

This month we’re centering around the theme of infertility and unchosen childlessness. I want to share that I’m personally familiar with infertility, so the fact that my Guest Ghost, Emma Vivian, so openly wrote about the complexities surrounding an infertility diagnosis deeply touched my heart.

And I know her story will touch yours, too.

Emma’s infertility was a secondary diagnosis related to an unexpected primary one: aggressive breast cancer.

She writes about the grief related to infertility and cancer, and I have to tell you, she is one of the bravest women writers on Substack right now, so please follow and/or subscribe to her ‘Stack if you haven’t already.

Please help me affirm Emma in her story, and I’d love it if you’d share it with others who may need to read her message today.

The Unexpected Pause

“Do you have children?” the surgeon asked.

I was flummoxed by her question, which was at odds with what we’d just been discussing: the plan to treat my aggressive breast cancer at age 29.

“I don’t,” I said, imagining she might want an idea of how I would cope with treatment.

“Getting pregnant after treatment can be difficult. It’s not impossible—but I think we should get you in to see a fertility doctor immediately,” was her reply.

Her revelation knocked the wind out of me: an unexpected consequence of an unexpected diagnosis.

The next day, I found myself in another exam room, listening to a fertility specialist lay out the plan to safeguard my fertility—shots to hopefully protect my ovaries from chemo; before that, a rushed round of IVF to freeze my eggs. I was lucky, because I had just enough time to complete one course before starting chemo–and before the fertility lab closed for the holidays.

For as long as I could remember, I wanted to be a mother. Even as a girl, I enjoyed helping out with the younger kids on the playground, drawn to the clear-cut rules children apply to life—their humour and simplicity. And I was good with kids. My jobs always revolved around them in one way or another and when I was 22, I completed a teaching degree. It seemed as if my life was on track in the ways I’d always expected.

When my college boyfriend got a place at a prestigious music program in Los Angeles, our plans changed. Yes, predictability was nice, but wasn’t adventure better? We quit our jobs, got married, and moved to LA. We were 25, and our lives were a lot less stable than they’d been for the last few years. We lived in tiny studio apartments and chased careers in the film music industry. There was no rush to start a family, we agreed, and, besides, a baby wouldn’t fit into our new lifestyle. Instead, we made a plan: We’d make something of ourselves and then start trying for a baby when we were 30.

Then, at 29, I’d found a lump in my breast. A breast exam turned into an ultrasound, then a biopsy, and finally, a phone call from the doctor: I’m sorry, your biopsy results are positive for invasive ductal carcinoma.

Life as I knew it changed again. My well-laid plans morphed instead into a game of waiting. Waiting to finish chemo. Waiting to recover from multiple surgeries. Waiting for clear scans. Waiting to weather five years of hormone suppression–drugs that would limit my chance of a recurrence, but that would also make it impossible to get pregnant.

It was an unexpected pause–one that had halted my plans in ways I couldn’t control. And I had already waited so long in favour of being ‘ready.’ I’d been excited about building our lives in LA before building a family. But of the delay that my cancer treatment created, I felt immeasurable grief—alongside a blistering anger at my body. It had let me down–in the one way I’d never imagined it would. While my friends were growing sons and daughters, I was growing a life-threatening tumour.

I was grateful, too, of course. My aggressive cancer was detected early: something that very likely saved my life. A decade earlier, my diagnosis would likely have been a death sentence. Now, I had access to the very best treatment protocol, developed at the hospital where I was receiving care. My oncologist was equal parts kind and brilliant, and right from the get-go, my doctors took seriously my desire to one day start a family.

And yet, all around me, it felt as if people were moving on with their lives. No one was trying to leave me out, but their lives were blooming in the ways they were supposed to, following the prescriptive order set out by modern society: partner, marriage, career, house, baby. Sure, sometimes people deviated from that order. But I felt as if I’d entirely fallen off the map. I was stuck in the unexpected pause—a still frame in a world on fast forward.

Infertility, I was learning, isn’t always a diagnosis. Sometimes it’s years of not knowing if you’ll ever get the chance to try. Cancer had already taught me that life didn’t come with guarantees. My cycle might never return after treatment. My frozen eggs might not take. Or worst of all, my cancer could return, and the possibility would be stripped from me for good.

Faced with this reality—and sick of feeling as if life were passing me by—I came to a decision: I could either stagnate in the stillness, or I could find a way to move within it. These movements might not look how I once imagined. They would deviate from the order I’d once expected. But that didn’t mean my progress would be a waste.

If my plans of motherhood were on hold for five years, what other plans could I make instead?

We took the time to visit my parents-in-law in Australia, and also to travel to Hong Kong, where my husband had grown up. We got a dog, then another, and took them on increasingly longer road trips up the California coast. I took up writing and attended craft lessons. I led trauma-informed writing workshops, learned how to pitch my work and landed my first national byline.

Slowly, I let go of the woman I was before cancer–and the person I’d imagined I’d be in my thirties–and got to know who I’d become instead. I was surprised to find that I liked my new self.

I wouldn’t have chosen this pause. And there is still a part of me that aches for my imagined life. A pregnancy not stamped with the label: ‘geriatric mother.’ A motherhood that doesn’t feel so out of sync with that of my peers. A relationship with my baby that won’t know the bond of breastfeeding. Grief cannot be washed away by gratitude, though I believe it can learn to live alongside it.

And that is the path I find myself on now–a path which wound through valleys I’d never imagined. But goodness, have I scaled mountains, too. My period returning after six years of treatment—a once tiresome monthly occurrence transformed into a miracle. A positive pregnancy test after almost a year of trying. Hearing my daughter’s heartbeat for the first time—a moment I once wasn’t sure I’d ever reach.

These blessings are all the sweeter for the waiting. For knowing that not everything goes to plan, or indeed, that some plans never materialise at all.

I don’t know how the next decade of my life will unfold. I can’t foresee the pauses, the peaks, or the valleys.

But I know now the power of patience.

Even—especially—when it was something I never asked to learn.

Emma Vivian is a writer based in Los Angeles. She writes Attempts at Optimism, a Substack about staying hopeful in a complicated world, and is currently working on a memoir about surviving breast cancer in her 20s and losing her childhood best friend to the same disease. You can find her at emmavivian.com.

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has generously permitted me to re-post this essay I originally featured as a guest post on my publication I Grow Strong Again, in May 2025. Here’s more about Teri Leigh:

Teri Leigh is a childless mother who spilled her nurturing into the world in other ways—mothering sensitive souls, HSPs, introverts, and self-proclaimed “weirdos” with heightened empathy who feel too much, think too much, and carry too much that isn’t theirs. As a writer with hyperacusis and synesthesia, she experiences the world differently—tasting sounds, sensing lies, watching auras collapse. Her hypersensitivity allows her to read chakras and feel energies others miss. With 30+ years teaching over 200,000 students and working one-on-one with 2,000+ clients, she’s a Chakra Expert, Reiki Master, A Shaman Elder, and Spiritual Mentor.

Here are her many Substack publications:

HUSH ~ Highly Unapologetic Sensitive Humans

The world is full of chaotic noise. The sensitive souls are the soothing antidote. It's time to own our sensitivity as our super-power!

By Teri Leigh 💜

The Creator Retreat

When creators get all caught up in the feelz and over-thinking, we need a little Retreat to turn within.

By Teri Leigh 💜

Abundant Money Mindset

Rewrite your money story because money flows where the soul feels safe.

By Dr. Axel Meierhoefer 🏕️🔥

The 🧙🏼‍♂️Hobbit & The 🦉Owl

Whimsy & Wisdom in 💜 Love Being Mindful in Relationship keeps love bugs buzzing.

By Teri Leigh 💜

Words are Spells 🔮

Words are Spells 🔮. Use them wisely. The magick of being mindful with your words.

By Teri Leigh 💜

My boobs hurt.

It’s that pre-period kind of ache, but far more tender. Last night, my dog Tosha stretched on me just wrong, and I yelped like her little paw had sliced me open.

This morning, as I get dressed, I hesitate. In that pause I almost remember what it felt like to nurse from my mother when I was a baby, and at the same time, I can imagine what it feels like to be a mother nursing a child…even though I’ve never been able to feel that. I never got to be a mother.

I thought I wanted children. I ended up having none.

I blink away the moment and finish getting dressed. But I can’t shake off the feeling for the rest of the day.

A half hour later, Tosha trips over her leash, and another tiny moment flashes through my memory. Twenty years ago, walking my four-month-old shiba inu, Sukha with my first husband. He has the leash, and doesn’t notice when she trips over it, and she didn’t recover. He keeps walking, dragging her by her neck, completely unaware.

“Hey! You’re dragging Sukha by the neck!” I holler at him.

“She’s fine. She needs to learn to keep up.”

I grabbed the leash from him. He huffed at me and continued walking. I let him go.

As I watched him walk away without looking back at us, I had a momentary existential crisis.

I cannot have children with this man.
I won’t ever be a mother.

But I swallowed the pain and grief of that loss, because that’s what mothers do. This was the best thing for my never-conceived unborn child.

Now, twenty years later, waiting patiently for Tosha to regain her footing, I get an odd familiar but physical twinge. How is it that I have never carried a child, gone through labor, or given birth, but somehow, some way, I know what it feels like?

Standing at the stove, waiting for my morning French press coffee, I catch my index fingernail on a hangnail of my thumb, and it rips. A tiny pain twinges through my thumb. A tiny death. Picking my cuticles. Something my mother does, too. I don’t know why I do it, except that it is a habit of hers that I couldn’t unlearn, just like how I stick my tongue out to lick my lips after every single sip of coffee.

I am my mother’s daughter.

That tiny death brings a flash memory to my mind: my second husband’s son getting out of our car, angry with us for refusing to drive him to his drug dealer’s home. How was I supposed to know we’d never see or speak to him again? Turns out parent alienation1 and adult child estrangement is a thing our society doesn’t talk about much. A secret treated as insignificant as my cuticle picking habit.

I pull off the hangnail and pour my coffee, returning that painful memory back in its tiny little box.

When I settle down to drink my coffee on this Mother’s Day morning, while reading a Substack article about Gloria Steinem, I notice my feet rubbing together just like my mom does when she reads historical biographies. Her father, my grandfather, did it too. An unconscious self-soothing technique we all employ when reading books and articles about the failings of society (subject matter that seems to have always fascinated my bloodline).

Grandpa Edgar was a good man, who upheld his patriarchal role in society. His three daughters, raised by his picture-perfect 1950s housewife, were to be seen and not heard.

As my feet rub against each other, I am not blind to the friction my mother faced to give me the things she couldn’t have. She took me to the bank to open my first checking account on my eighteenth birthday—a thing she wasn’t allowed to do herself until she was thirty. She drove me all over the Midwest to visit colleges, letting me choose freely, even though her own path was chosen for her. Her father told her architecture was a man’s job, so she earned the degree he picked out, then got married and became the stay-at-home mom she was expected to be.

Mom didn’t get her first full-time career job until her late forties, when I started college. She paid my tuition in full, in cash, with money she earned drafting blueprints for a local architect. She helped me move into my first house when I was twenty-five—just me, no husband, no co-signer. She scrubbed the floors with me, unpacked every box, made it feel like a home. When I opened my own business a few years later, she stood at the grand opening, proud in that quiet way she does. She never owned a home herself. Never ran a business. But she walked me through every portal—holding the doors she didn’t have access to long enough for me to step all the way through.

All the privileges she didn’t enjoy, she made sure I had.

And now, in this tiny moment as I feel my feet rub together to the words of Gloria Steinem’s speeches, I experience this whoosh of emotion.

I am my mother’s daughter.

She raised me to question everything, to speak clearly, to take up the space that she was never allowed to claim.

And I could not give her a granddaughter.

Does the foot-rubbing end with me?

Maybe, but the mothering doesn’t end with me. Because as the childless mother, I nurture the motherless children.

I was a stand-in mother for high school students whose own mothers couldn’t—or wouldn’t—be there. I’ve nurtured women who lost their mothers too young. I’ve supported lost, overwhelmed, over-feeling mothers to find their ways back to themselves.

Motherhood moves through me, not in one direction, but many.

Mother’s Day is a strange holiday to have birthed no children, but to have mothered so many.

Mom’s in her eighties. Still sharp, still steady, still doing her crossword puzzles in ink. I want to celebrate her.

I close my laptop and take Mom out to brunch, and buy her flowers at the local nursery. I give her whatever she wants, because it is her day.

And yet—I feel a grief so sharp it aches in my breasts.

I feel like a ghost mother. Real and present, but see-through.

At the end of the day, I curl into bed to watch TV with my husband and my dog, and the sharp edges of The Handmaid’s Tale don’t feel fictional anymore.

It’s like the world has forgotten who bore it.

Women have always been the ones to stretch and break and rebuild themselves so that something better might be born. We have mothered this society—breathed life into it, held it together, soothed its tantrums—and now we are being silenced. Again.

I turn off the TV before the show ends and roll into the warmth of my already snoozing hubby. He folds around me like a comma, and I lift his hand and place it gently onto my tender aching breast.

Because the mother in me—this soft, strong, invisible woman I’ve been all along—just wants to be held in the quiet, wordless way she’s always offered to others.

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I just want to begin by thanking you for being here—for your time, your support, your attention. I totally get how we are all being pulled in a million different directions each day, and the internet has made our time more valuable than I remember it being during the carefree days of my youth. But then again, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, an…

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The theme, “Blacklight Truths in Family Conflict,” wasn’t easy to define, but Serena Menken tackled it with grace by reflecting on how being a caregiver for her daughter influenced her self-perception and also impacted her ability to enter into new experiences, like the trip to Utah she took with her husband.

I’d love it if you’d check out her Substack publication and support her here in the comments, too.

I couldn’t stop worrying.

My husband and I had just landed in Utah, excited for our twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. With our older two kids in college and Grandma taking care of our youngest teen, we couldn’t wait to hike the mountains and have adult conversations.

But then our college daughter Ellie called, complaining of a high fever. We listened to her agony, soothed her distress, and prayed for her healing. Then, I struggled to let go.

Worrying about Ellie was nothing new. It was practically my second job. Ever since her mental health breakdown five years before, Ellie needed significant parental support. We’d walked through her depression, anxiety, and eating disorder. Then she contracted several chronic health conditions. Ellie’s health had dominated our thoughts, our bank account, and our prayers for years.

The next day, as my husband and I hiked our first mountain, I checked my phone relentlessly for messages from Ellie. It didn’t occur to me that I found it easier to focus on my sick daughter than the unfamiliarity of extended time with my husband. I told myself this is what it meant to be a good mom to a medically fragile teen. But there was more going on than I wanted to admit.

Blacklight Perception

As a child, anxiety colored my perception of the world, like tinted glasses. Growing up with an alcoholic father meant living with unpredictability. Alcoholism didn’t just threaten our family’s cohesion; it lurked constantly in the background, threatening our emotional and even physical safety. For me, it was akin to taking a master class in how to drive yourself crazy trying to rescue a loved one.

When I became a mother, I didn’t realize that I would unconsciously translate those same patterns into parenting. Managing the unpredictability felt familiar, even oddly comfortable. I’ve learned our brains develop neural pathways in response to trauma. Our thoughts become accustomed to circling around certain topics in the same way that our bodies are used to eating breakfast. During Ellie’s health crises, my brain became accustomed to hypervigilance. Clinicians, pharmaceuticals, ER visits, and hospitalization all became part of the everyday wallpaper of our lives. Crisis, or at least dis-ease, felt normal. I felt like I could never let my guard down.

In talking with moms of struggling teens, we’ve wondered if we’ve developed our own form of post-traumatic stress disorder. When you can’t trust your kid’s mind and body to function in ways that keep them safe, how do you calm your own inner alarm system, which screams for their survival?

As we zero in on our kids’ health conditions, it’s easy to overlook our own distress as parents. Just as investigators use blacklight bulbs to reveal what’s invisible to the naked eye, like a fingerprint, we can discover truth by looking beneath the surface of our actions. Sometimes what looks like conscientious parenting in daylight can cover up our own unhealed childhood anxiety and deep-seated grief, even the ways we’ve attached our identity to being needed.

The Hardest Questions

Admitting I needed to find a way to reset my internal alert system brought up new questions: Who am I if I’m not trying to solve my child’s problems? As Ellie heals, who am I if I’m not a caregiver anymore?

But the hardest question for me has been, how do I find my okayness, even if my daughter is struggling?

Years ago, I discovered the ability to detach from my dad’s alcoholism. It didn’t mean that I stopped caring, but instead I stopped linking my serenity to his choices.

It feels almost impossible to do that with my child.

But I’m learning that my happiness is not dependent on my daughter’s rollercoaster health journey. I suspect this lessens the pressure on both of us. I hope this kind of detachment paves the way for the relationship I really want with Ellie. Envisioning a new reality, even when it has felt unattainable, has helped me walk towards greater freedom.

New Identity

By day two, Ellie was better - stable and moving forward. I asked myself, to what extent would I give away these precious hours with my spouse in favor of another Ellie rescue mission? How have I chosen intimacy with my daughter over intimacy with my husband, without realizing it?

That week, I rediscovered my footing as a woman and a wife. My husband and I explored unique red rock arches and scrambled up almost-vertical boulders to reach a mountain summit. We agreed to stop talking about the kids so we could focus on our dreams, our marriage, and knowing each other better. I had become so accustomed to the tightness in my shoulders that I didn’t realize how much they ached until it lifted. While I didn’t forget my daughter’s illness, I asked God to help her manage it. I lost myself in the beauty of the desert landscape, without needing to keep tabs on her.

Returning home brought back reality, but I carried newfound realizations. Sometimes I need time with my husband and friends to remember who I am apart from being a caregiver. Play isn’t frivolous; it’s part of the prescription for my healing as someone who loves folks with health challenges. Lighthearted adventures in nature, plus authentic, mutual conversations, calm my mind and body.

Healing doesn’t just include therapy, sleep, and meditation; sometimes it means games and laughter. The result is that I’m not just a better mom, I’m a happier and more secure human.

Since that trip, I have listened to Ellie’s challenges without feeling my anxiety explode. When she’s distraught, I can offer empathy without panicking. While I once majored in anger and fear, now I’m experiencing joy and gratitude too. As I learn to separate my okayness from my daughter, I’m finding freedom. Sometimes it’s scary and confusing, but I’m discovering greater wholeness, for both of us.

Serena’s Bio: Serena Menken supports parents navigating the journey of raising teens with mental health challenges and neurodiversity. Drawing from her experience with her daughter's eating disorder and anxiety, she offers practical wisdom, honest stories, and hope grounded in faith. Connect at serenamenken.substack.com.

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Please welcome as this month’s Guest Ghost. We’re focusing on the theme “Blacklight Truths in Family Conflict” for March, and Sophie offers us a glimpse into the shifting dynamics between her and her teen daughter by beginning with a time when she sensed something was off before anyone said it out loud.

You can find Sophie here on Substack, and I know you will be gracious and generous in your support for her story here in the comments.

I turned my pointer finger on me, crossed my arms, and then pointed to her: Point—I, cross—love, point—you. I repeated this gesture infinitely while slowly retreating. Clara’s little face was pressed against the window, tears slipping out freely, testaments to her misery for missing me. I was also trying to hold back mine. Learning to socialize and bond with her peers is necessary, I kept reminding myself. Yes, even at four. Especially at four.

My heart bled in sympathy. But I had questions. Why was the daily drop off at daycare so difficult for her? My older son couldn’t wait to run inside. I had to trail him with his snack box and usually found him already deep into building a block fortress or experimenting with magnets. But dropping off Clara was a thirty-minute ritual. I had to pry her off my leg and assuage her with promises of my return. And there was the point-cross-point window ritual.

My ego enjoyed being her pillar, but it was draining. Going to bed was a forty-five-minute procedure that could only be performed by me. This meant that I had to be home for her bedtime every night. I loved her adoration but also often felt trapped. Oftentimes, I wished for her to grow up quickly, to feel the relief of her independence.

In grade school, Clara’s need for emotional support continued. She didn’t grow out of it, as others had assured. She much preferred being with me over being in school. At least once a week she had aches that required staying home. And on the days she did end up attending, I spent all morning motivating her. We tried after school activities: art, choir, and karate. But they were all blemished; the common denominator was always that I wasn’t there.

And then she stopped.

After starting fifth grade, she abruptly decided she no longer needed lullabies or hugs. A week later, my request to clean up the kitchen fell on headphoned ears. Glitter t-shirts morphed into black crop tops. Leggings transformed into baggy jeans. Princesses turned into Billy Eilish and North West. I was relieved by the new absence of responsibility. An emotional weight was transferred to societal shoulders from mine.

But then it got worse.

It wasn’t long before my presence repulsed her. On family hikes, she merely inched forward or simply refused to continue, thus coercing us all to return to the car. Clara sabotaged family celebrations by making disparaging comments. She spoke to her siblings with verbal daggers, but for me she saved sharp, razored Chinese stars hurled from a distance. She circumvented every rule that we had placed—from food in her room to screen limits. In short, she was pulling our family dynamic apart.

I interpreted her disregard for family cohesion as offensive. Predictably, each time, we both fell into the same trap: Clara violated a rule, I would hold her accountable, she felt victimized and retaliated by screaming, I shouted louder and she would run to her room and shove the door shut to claim the final word. Yell-slam-yell became our new daily ritual.

And then my son uttered the words, “She’s rage-baiting you.”

I stopped. Because I immediately knew he was right. He was speaking at a frequency that made my reactionary wrath shatter like crystal. His words gave me perspective.

I had assumed the role of the wounded mother, when I really needed to be a non-biased parent. In order for the cycle of conflict to end, I needed to rise above. And I could only do that if I knew why she was behaving that way. So, I did something I should have done much earlier. I talked to her. “Clara, why are you so angry a lot of the time?”

“I’m not angry,” she replied tersely.

“Ok, well what do you not like about me?”

Silence. I could tell she was thinking.

“I hate all your rules. You treat me like I’m a kid—”

“You’re only twelve!” I said.

“Maybe, but you still treat me like a kid. All the time. I hate that.”

“Clara, I don’t treat you like a—,” I started.

“See, you’re doing it again,” she replied.

“Yeah, but isn’t that my job? Aren’t parents supposed to set rules? I’m supposed to teach you right from wrong,” I said.

“But it just makes me feel so, so—I don’t know, sad, I guess? I hate it when you yell at me. And that makes me want to get back at you even more,” she said.

I had been a sensitive child. For a long time, I couldn’t bear anything other than perfect harmony. Someone had to simply furrow their eyebrows, and I immediately acquiesced. The mere thought of anyone holding a grudge made my stomach lurch and ushered physical pain. Putting myself in the subservient position made me feel safe. That is how, irrationally, I felt in control.

Clara, I realized, was no different. She too is exquisitely sensitive. However, her safe space is not approval-seeking; it is boundary setting. I had been too whiplashed by the sudden changes to notice. Over the years, life softened my need for constant agreements. I predict it will be the same for Clara. Through the years, she will learn to loosen her defenses.

We now work towards a common language. I wish I could state we have never fought since, but that is inaccurate. We do, however, argue significantly less. At least, there have been no more doors slammed. Our home has more peace when I treat her like an adult, rather than the child clamoring onto my leg not all that long ago.

I need to enter her world instead of asking her to stay in mine.

About Sophie Berghouse: Sophie wanted to be a writer at age four but got waylaid by life. Instead, she became a doctor and had four children (one with very special needs) but is now reattempting her first career love. She was born near Chicago, IL and now lives in Germany. You can find her on Substack here:

Sophie's Substack page

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This month’s 22-minute recorded workshop focuses on three main talking points, with two reflection questions inserted at the end of each segment:

1. What is the mother/creator identity split?

2. How does the cultural narrative of “you can pick your work back up again” shape our expectations of early motherhood, and how does our lived experienc…

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For February, I’m focusing on the theme of the mother/creator identity split, which is something I have personally experienced and am guessing that most, if not all, of you have to some degree, as well. I’m thinking about how motherhood fundamentally changed me. It was a crossover from who I once was and w…

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Please welcome of Motherhood Minute here on Substack. She’s our Guest Ghost for February, writing on the theme of the “mother/creator identity split,” which is no easy feat. She offers a glimpse into a typical day for her, juggling paid work with the unpaid labor of being a mom and where her creative energy fits into life, now that she is battling the guilt of defending a segment of time as her own. I’m honored to feature Chanel’s story and hope it resonates with you this month. Please be generous in the comments.

Find Chanel on Substack

I’m sitting in my work office thirty minutes before anyone else and I’m feeling the strain. A co-worker wanders in and breaks into conversation. In my efforts to disassociate—to write in a silent environment—I am forced to give someone else attention.

When I was asked to write a guest piece for Ghost Mother on the identity split as a mother and creative, I probably sent an enthusiastic “Sure! No problem!” What happened instead was a few weeks of starting and stopping, constant interruptions, and the guilt.

I feel guilt for not spending time on writing and guilt for resenting my blessings that interrupt “my” time.

The last few months of work have been particularly difficult in my attempts to be creative. For background, I am the head of marketing for a nonprofit and I just barely survived the last four months of the year (which are the biggest sources of revenue in that industry.)

I am also a mother to a pre-k kid, which rounds out my schedule like so:

• Wake up at 4:45 am to say goodbye to my husband for ten minutes before he goes to work;

• Hope for 30-45 minutes of reading the Bible, writing, and existing in silence;

• Struggling to get my daughter to school drop-off (on time) at 8 am;

• Working 8:30 am to 4:30 pm (unless I need to take her to gymnastics and work from the bleachers on my phone);

• Managing intentional time with my family, where I’m trying not to be grumpy;

• Bedtime routine for my daughter and me from 7 pm to 8:30 pm, where I fall asleep next to her in exhaustion.

There’s no way my chatty co-worker can know that this schedule allows for a constant negotiation of where my time will be spent. But I find myself thinking about their likeness to my child in this moment—my child who will use me as a living jungle gym while I try to spend five minutes reading or working on my book.

I love her. I want to give her the most time I can give, but I also struggle with the fact that my time is not my own.

I will sometimes manipulate our schedule so I can show up to work thirty minutes early to write and, therefore, pay for a little extra childcare. Why must I also pay for this grown man’s forced social time?

Does my time belong to me?

Do I still have that right by becoming a mother?

The question becomes more complicated when I consider my creative energy. At work, my employer pays for my time and skills.

How do I do my best as a parent, as a worker, and still retain my creative spirit for myself?

Can anything be done?

A lot of us have this image of creativity where we see ourselves with the perfect setup. For a writer, this could be a desk well-lit by a window and a hot cup of coffee or tea, our fingers tapping away at a keyboard full of inspiration. For an artist, this could look like a canvas that we have time to paint on with slow, easy brush strokes. Above all, these idyllic moments are uninterrupted.

But for many of us, when we have children, we find that this idea of a “productive” creative time is disturbed with the messy and inconsistent reality that is parenthood.

And I’m not just talking about messy as in: there are clothes all over the floor and your workspace for creating art is now covered with books and toys and graham cracker crumbs.

I am referring to messy, as in: I have this guilt that eats away at me anytime I desire to step away and not help my family so that I can try to create something in the way that I used to.

I think an excellent place to start, for someone struggling to find time to be creative, is to sit down and journal (or use the Notes app on your phone) and write or type out some narratives you’re believing:

• What does your ideal creative time look like?

• What appeals to you about this ideal scenario?

• Are you letting this ideal get in the way of flexibility when it comes to being creative?

Second, I think we need to ask ourselves if we are being assertive enough about how we spend our time. I can tell you right now that I often am not prioritizing myself because I don’t like push back. I don’t want to explain how frustrated I feel or how depleted I have become, because it’s often going to require the self-admission that I haven’t said “no” enough.

There are no perfect solutions to this problem, and anyone who says otherwise is either not a mother or they’re selling you something. I pray you know that you’re not alone in the conflict and that you deserve time and energy of your own.

Chanel Riggle is a writer, mother, and builder of community. She lives in Bremerton, Washington and prefers small family outings over social events. She manages the marketing for a nonprofit by day and fills the gaps of time by drinking coffee, reading fiction, and writing. Occasionally she has been known to organize big mental health and motherhood summits.

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For this month’s Pillar Post, I decided to share a poem I wrote in mid-2025 that poured out of me. It emerged after I received a flood of comments on Substack from well-intentioned people who wrote variations of, “Wow, your kids are great. Good job, Mom!”

Afte…

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Here’s the video replay from our first Paradox Circle. It’s a little under 40 minutes, so if you pause—whenever you can—and slow down to listen to your inner voice, my hope is that this may guide you through a bit of internal processing about the ways you feel invisible or erased.

We explored, through reflection and journaling:

• …

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I continue to be amazed at the powerful, beautiful stories emerging from my guest “ghost” essayists. This month it’s and her message about the complexities of midlife transitions and identity shifts. Please welcome her and be generous with your comments, as I know you will be.

It’s been more than six years of unlearning, untangling, undoing.

You know how sometimes there are moments in life like a timestamp that forever changes how you view something? It’s so profound that it takes months of unfolding, and the next thing you know, you are on a journey that you would never trade?

In the summer of 2019, I turned 40. My 40th birthday was a timestamp, because for the first time in my life, I asked myself what I wanted to do for my birthday and didn’t worry about who would be left out or whether my plans fit with others’ expectations. Plus, I didn’t wait for someone to plan it for me. I decided that I wanted to paddle the river that day. I invited a few friends, and if no one could join me, I was prepared to do it myself. Thankfully, this was not a solo birthday float, and I had a great time.

But already, the ghost of myself was vanishing. I was coming into my own and setting boundaries along the way. These were big changes for me. Most of my life I had been a habitual people-pleaser and rarely-to-never did anything alone.

These were two minor timestamps that prepared me to accept the monumental one.

Since getting married in 2003, I’ve felt a freedom to be myself that I had never known my whole life. So, by 2019 at age 40, I felt certain that I knew myself. That self proved to be a construct of upbringing, societal views, and self-expectations. This isn’t to say I was sad and depressed, I just knew a variation of myself that I liked, and I did my best to maintain it.

In late summer of 2019, I had put together a mom’s night out to meet up with mom friends and catch up, chat, vent, laugh, and anything else that came up. While standing in line to order a Thai dish, my sister-in-law’s cell phone was handed to me. “Watch this video,” she said. “It’s short.” Looking at the long line ahead of me, I obliged and watched the video.

I’m not sure what I expected, but I read the subtitles at the bottom of the screen while a public speaker laid out The Four Phases of the Menstrual Cycle. I knew of basically one phase of the menstrual cycle, and it sucked. It was the only few days I put on the calendar to try not to plan big events, because I was very aware that I would feel like garbage and be in pain.

This one warm August day would set in motion my curiosity to understand if I indeed had four unique phases that changed dramatically throughout each month. My understanding of myself was curated by the birth control pill that I was on for about seven years before trying to get pregnant. I was the same person every day, except when I was bleeding, and then my shell was thin.

Being in pain, I would crack. But it was short, and I would return to being the same person everyday. But at 40, I had been off hormonal birth control for a cumulative eleven years. During these years, I remember how often I tried to stuff certain emotions in order to try to present the “same me” everyday. In my late thirties, my periods became more intense, more painful, and more erratic. It was getting harder to work behind a retail counter and smile through the contraction-like cramps and do life as usual.

And so, I began to track my cycle daily. I wanted to know if this was a thing. Do our hormones change us this much every week? After a solid two months, I knew this was true. After three months, I knew it was not only true, but there was a pattern. To the day, I could begin to predict energy levels and moods and shifts in inward and outward energy. After several more months, I began teaching, researching, continuing to track—and then the pandemic hit.

Using my phases, I could optimize my time and energy. I realized that my hormones were very wacky, and I began to listen to my body, honoring it’s needs, which sometimes went against my upbringing, my past self, and my self-expectations of my role as mother, daughter, sister, wife, and employee.

The tension that I felt holding these different parts of me shifted. Where before, I ignored my own needs in order to keep things going, I could no longer do this. Tracking began to show me that it was the source of my endometriosis. I began to allow rest during my premenstrual days and into my period days. Sometimes this meant three days, other times, seven days. I was dropping the ball left and right and was sometimes at odds with myself, feeling guilty for being in bed while my husband shouldered the load.

As I stayed true to working with my cycle, slowly I began to heal in big ways. In my menstruum I rested, in my follicular phase (after menstruation) I made lists and tackled projects making up for lost time that I spent resting. In my ovulation phase, I scheduled social events, date nights, and outings with my son. In my luteal phase, I scheduled “alone time,” something I had never done in my entire life.

Making alone time happen was sometimes a feat of strength against my own guilt, my own “shoulds,” my own internal pressure. In my luteal phase, I allowed for extra time between tasks, worked on creative projects, and researched and edited my work. I allowed myself to pull back from social settings. I had a mantra to help me in those moments of PMS-awkwardness: “You don’t always have to respond.”

So I allowed for silence instead of reacting.

In the midst of pandemic confusion, I felt more grounded than ever. As I began to wonder if I should pull my son from public school and homeschool him, I put this question through my phases, listing pros and cons, researching options, talking with friends, and then letting it go. By the next menstrual phase, I had my answer and I decided from an informed, settled place.

I pulled my son out, and we’ve been homeschooling since.

A beautiful effect took place in my family. As I began to live life in harmony with my flow, I designed my weekly phases as seasons and hung my seasons on the family refrigerator calendar. Across the top of the weekly schedule I wrote in big letters on our dry-erase board, SPRING WEEK.

“What is that?” my son asked. I taught him that women have energy phases similar to the seasons, and my spring week would be possibly energetic, a faster pace, and meant I’d be ready to explore or try new things. He liked hearing this news, since the week before was mostly spent at home and with a more grandma vibe to it. My husband responded to my expression of seasons in the most supportive way. He was on board from the beginning when I first saw the video and told him about it.

He knew me better than I knew me. He knew I had phases, but he didn’t know what they were and which one was coming next. Guys tend to walk on eggshells when they don’t know their partner’s cycle phases. During my Spring (follicular) phase, he would give me space to tornado clean the house, and during my Fall (luteal) phase, he would see that on the Google calendar I had written “alone time day 21,” and made sure to do something with our son.

I went from feeling like I had to ask my husband to take on childcare when I wanted a break to knowing that I had his full support to get my time alone. Much later, I realized that my husband “babysitting” was never the case. I just treated it like that. He could go and do whatever, whenever, but I felt like I had to ask permission.

That didn’t come from my husband, that came from me. The ghost of me.

Like coming through a metamorphosis, I can hardly remember who I was before cycle awareness. In much smaller moments, I can feel the ghost trying to bring me back with small lies about getting alone time or getting caught off guard taking a comment in the luteal phase too personally, and then I remember that getting alone time is healthy, and that personal attack is actually my cue to go inward and stop feeling out so much.

Anytime I teach this cycle-awareness practice to women who have never heard about their phases, I inevitably hear, “I wish I had known this sooner.” I have said it, my grandmother said it, my friends say it. And yet everything happens at the time it should. Maybe I wouldn’t have believed it if I’d heard about it before I did. Maybe I wasn’t ready to listen to my body until the moment I watched that video. Whatever the reason, God knows.

And He chose to unveil my cyclic nature at a time when I needed to let go of the ghost I had created and live in a way that honors my design.

A little bit about Jess:

I am a menstrual cycle advocate, mentor, and writer. I am an avid nature lover, so it comes natural to observe the outer seasons and see the intricate connection to our cycle phases using the seasons.

Using my life experience of natural cycling for decades, not cycling while on “the pill” for about 7 years, suffering and healing from endometriosis, and now 5 years into perimenopause, I’m here for your whole journey.

I am an avid research enthusiast and when my curiosity kicks in, I go deep into medical journals, books, podcasts and more looking for evidence of ways the cycle changes, foods that support each phase, exercise methods geared for cyclic women and wherever else the rabbit trail leads me. I care deeply about my research and about sharing it with anyone that wants to know more about how their bodies work for them every day. I care about women. Gone are the days of jealousy and competitive thinking. Gone are the days of labeling along with everyone else that women are just “crazy”. I am finding deep connections within my relationships with my women friends and with my husband and son, all because I know me better than ever before and they know me better too.

I have been practicing cycle awareness for over 5 years and in that time, mentored and taught many women how to navigate their inner seasonal weather map to enrich their lives— learning to live with instead of against their cycles.

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We create in fragments. There exists a quiet ache of lost continuity between our thoughts and between seasons of care. But even when we believe we’ve fallen behind, something ancient in us is still stitching the threads of that tapestry, though the floss may be thin and frail and fra…

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