Holding My Breath

It's been a tough spring.

I feel as though I've been in a constant state of waiting: waiting for spring to awaken, waiting for the next snowstorm to pass, waiting to feel that it was safe to put away the mittens (or at least that I was okay with the consequences if I did it anyway).  Every time I was offered a little sliver of hope for spring, I was holding my breath, waiting and hoping that this was it - that spring might actually be here.

Life outside the garden has been eerily similar this spring.  After a long "winter" that has been nearly three years of losses and waiting, I got to say the words to my husband that I thought I might not get to say again: I'm pregnant. What followed was even more waiting: waiting for lab results, waiting to pass certain milestones, and then, waiting to miscarry - again.  For the first few weeks, I was again cautiously holding my breath, praying that the good news continued, and then I held my breath a few weeks longer, but this time with concern, with deep sadness, and finally, with the hard truth that we were going to go through a fourth miscarriage.

And here you thought eight and a half inches of snow in May was unfair.

In the past week I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to address our most recent loss.  Yes, this is a gardening blog, but as we all know - each in our own (and sometimes equally unfair) way - sometimes things happen that spill over into the garden.  And yes, sometimes they are really sucky things, like miscarriages, or cancer, or any other number of things that shake us to our core.  In the end, it's how we respond to those things that defines us, and so I choose to give voice not only to my own experience, but also to my children, as well as to other women and their partners who are experiencing the same pain.

As we move forward from here, I can finally let out that breath I've been holding.  Spring always finds a way through even the harshest of winters, and now that it appears it has arrived, there's plenty of therapeutic digging in the dirt to be done, plants to be nurtured, posts to write, and even new deep breaths to take in - but not before taking a moment to pause and give meaning to the long winter.  Thank you for allowing me to take this pause.