Getting Kinley Here

I inhale: the sweet scent of a fresh new baby’s head. 

I exhale: a shushing sound that soothes this teeny body.

This rhythm guides me as I breathe in my baby and my role as her mother. Breath brings space to my belly; my organs relax; my stomach settles down. A smile finds its way home to my mouth as I bask in my ultimate truth: I love being a mom.

I loved it the first time it happened in 2016 with my daughter Willow. Despite being in the post-birth wreckage that was my body, I found so much joy in breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and eye gazing with my little human. She quenched an ancient thirst in me that had been nagging since puberty. When she turned two, that urge to conceive returned with such desire to replicate that joy. So when my husband whispered to me late one night, “let’s make a baby,” my heart did a cartwheel. 

We started trying like crazy to conceive that next little one. I treated my body like a temple- doing all the yoga and drinking all the water. I diligently tracked my ovulation on my phone and each month suffered those tortuous two weeks between ovulation and pregnancy test time. It’s so unfair that early pregnancy symptoms are exactly the same as pre-menstrual symptoms! Month after month I tried to protect my heart as I closed my eyes and prayed before reading another negative test. 

But I kept my hope going for almost a year until I finally got that pink plus sign I’d been waiting for! I collapsed in my husband’s arms and cried tears of joy. This little spirit I had been calling had finally arrived in my womb. Name lists and due date calculators flooded my mind as I glided through my life, where things made sense again.

Nine days later, though, it abruptly stopped making sense when I saw it- one single drop of bright red blood in my panties. I frantically called my obstetrician who explained the various scenarios, from “it’s literally nothing,” on one end of the spectrum to “here’s what to do if you start to miscarry.”

The constriction in my guts told me where I fell on that spectrum: I knew I was losing this baby. The next 24 hours felt like I was on death row just waiting for the executioner to call my name.

A nurse checked my HCG levels. Sounds were muffled. My arms felt heavy in the air, like it was quicksand. I was on my couch when the first wave of pain came, and I said to my husband, “I can feel it, the miscarriage is starting.” 

“What do you need from me?” he asked

“Just go to bed. I need to do this alone,” I told him.

See, my husband and I had hunted together in the Alaskan wilderness, fished in rivers alongside grizzly bears, field dressed our own wounds. He knows better than anyone my ability to brave and conquer wilderness. His gift to me that night was trusting my strength and honoring my request without doubt. 

I slid my body into the hottest water I could stand, the steam rising from my bathtub. I’d waited 30 years for this dream tub, jets and all, and it has been my refuge, a place to soak away pain. My zodiac sign is cancer; water is my element. So here, in my element, in my place of refuge, I surrendered my body.

The contractions came in waves, like a mini labor, and my body remembered how to push with each wave. I don’t know how long it lasted because time didn’t exist for me, but when the pain ceased, I drained the rose-colored water, along with my last bit of hope for that baby. I dried off and crawled my exhausted body to bed.

I did not leave that bed the next day, lying there with cramps, nausea, and a broken heart. The world had screeched to a halt for me, but it apparently kept turning for everyone else.

The engineering firm where I worked called to ask, “where are you?”

“Home. I… had a miscarriage,” my raspy voice replied. 

“Oh. I’ve heard that’s hard. I’m sorry, but you are out of sick time, so you do need to be here tomorrow. You can borrow your vacation time from next year to cover your time today.” 

Yes, because it’s been such a vacation over here. 

A boulder hit my stomach as I realized that they had no investment in my health- me! Their 5-year employee who showed up every day and worked hard and smiled while doing it. 

I didn’t have the energy to beg, so the next day I dragged my haggard body to work, my wound still open, still bleeding. I couldn’t see my computer screen through all the tears. I craved my bed, the blinds closed tight, white noise loud, a big heavy blanket weighing me down. 

Instead, I overrode my nervous system. I stayed in my cubicle. I billed more hours to the clients. Now, my value to my employer was clear.

At that time, my family relied on my income, so I was really focused on the fact that I couldn’t afford to lose my job. What I didn’t realize then was the thing I actually couldn’t afford to lose was this time to grieve and heal.

This became evident a few days later when I noticed a hot red lump in my right breast that I recognized as an inflamed milk duct. My breasts were making milk for a baby that would never even exist. I tried to massage it out as I had learned with feeding my first child, but that didn’t work.

By the time I went to the hospital the duct was so infected that the doctor had to cut an incision in my breast and drain the abscess. I watched pus ooze out from where my milk should be. Wrong white substance. The doctor gave me antibiotics for the mastitis and warned me not push my body anymore. 

Unsure how to “not push my body,” I forced myself back into my old rhythms. My body screamed at me to slow down. Infections appeared in random parts of my body, like my sinuses and ears, and I was on anti-biotics on and off for months. Not only did my overall health decline, but I was still failing to conceive, which I was now absolutely obsessed with. So I turned to science, in the form of a fertility doctor.

The poking and prodding began. Blood draws. Transvaginal ultrasounds. And ultimately, an HSG procedure, which is a painful procedure to locate potential blockages in the fallopian tubes.

Naked from the waist down, in a chilly fluorescent hospital room, I clenched my husband’s hand as the obstetrician forced imaging dye up through my tubes. She found my right side blocked, so going forward, only ovulation on my left side would be considered viable.

We decided with our doctor to try intrauterine insemination, IUI, to get pregnant. We set the appointment for March 2020. I counted down the days- I finally could see a legitimate light at the end of this infertility tunnel.

Then Covid hit. The hospital called, and the news flashed before me like the headline of a newspaper: All Elective Procedures Cancelled Until Further Notice. Then I really crashed. The pandemic effects knocked me on my ass. 

Along with losing my opportunity to make that IUI baby, I also lost childcare for my 4-year-old when her preschool closed. Her extreme asthma had previously landed her in the hospital the last time she had a respiratory illness like Covid, so I shielded her carefully at home, where I was now also working full-time. 

All these changes left me feeling detached from reality, like I was swallowed by a darkness and couldn’t tell which way was up. Sometimes I would peek my head up for air and see women all around me struggling to breathe too. We’re all drowning, and nobody knows which way is up, I realized. At least the rest of the world stopped with me this time.

My company had quickly lost a lot of business because of the pandemic, and so they slashed all of our salaries 25%. I was working harder than ever, with my kid at home, but making less money than ever. It made no sense. I was done sacrificing. And since it was still fresh in my mind exactly how little they valued me, I quit. 

Relieved but frightened at being unemployed, my depression worsened and led me to severely neglect my body. I apparently stopped eating as I shed pound after pound. When my weight dipped into the double digits, I realized I needed help. 

I felt compelled to reach out a woman I had met years ago, a shaman. An Irish shaman. In Bozeman. I went to her studio, which was dark and inviting and adorned with candles and crystals and tuning forks. Lying on my back on a warm table, I closed my eyes, and my journey began.

The shaman introduced me to an Irish Goddess. Together, we walked through a garden as the Goddess pulled dead plants out of the Earth and tossed them aside, preserving the soil for the live crops to flourish. 

In her style, I walked through the garden that was my own life.

What was I holding onto that was already dead? Where could I make space for the live parts of me to flourish?

Job, dead, discard. IUI, dead, discard. Miscarriage… dead, discard. I now felt permission to let it go, to let it flow out and away. Afterwards, at home I fell into a dark slumber as my body digested the experience.

Hours later, I woke on the couch in a pool of blood. I bolted upright in shock, my hands searching my body for injury, but not sensing any pain. What was bleeding? My vagina. 

At the damn hospital, again, the doctor performed a transvaginal ultrasound and a physical exam and reported that there was, “Nothing wrong,” What? “Yes, you’re fine; you’re even ovulating on your right side.” The blocked one. 

I never got a medical explanation of what had happened to me that day. Where did all that blood come from? The best explanation I have is my own, which is that through my shamanic journey, I finally found the space I needed to grieve and accept my loss. I felt permission to let go in a very literal way. I had to fully release that Death I was still holding inside me, let it flow out and away, like the Goddess said, so that my womb could have a chance at supporting new life.

Whew. 

The next week, my family and I left town to camp at a lake with some friends and decompress from all the stress. I took my paddleboard out on the lake with my flyrod and brought back a brook trout. I showed the kids how to kill it, thank it, gut it, cook it, and eat it. These young innocent faces watched eagerly and devoured every bit of it.

This cycle of life and death is so natural, that these young children are fascinated, not fearful. Isn’t there a young child in all of us that wonders what the guts of a fish look like? What the eyeballs feel like? 

On the way home, I grabbed my husband’s hand and said, “there’s hot blood flowing into my uterus.” I had felt this before, veins pulsing heat through my body. “I think I’m pregnant.” He inhaled sharply. He trusts me, but he’s also pretty good at managing hope. “Let’s get home and take a test,” he said.

At home, the test indeed confirmed it. Even though it was my blocked side, even though I had no medical intervention, even though it was only some hot blood, I already knew. I was pregnant. 

Nine months later the last bit of my healing arrived as a new life emerged from my sacred tunnel. I buried my face against her brand-new skin and murmured, “there you are,” as I finally breathed in my healthy, sweet, perfect little baby girl, my Kinley Josephine.

~Rachel Schmidt