Letters From Our Mothers
2021-2022
In November of 2021, I found out I was pregnant.
I wish I could say I typed that sentence confidently, unapologetically, and without shame - but I keep typing and retyping, rephrasing the sentence, trying so hard to make it seem like something less “bad”.
I had not planned on getting pregnant. I wasn’t with someone seriously. I was terrified, my body hurt like hell, and I had never felt so isolated from the world. Nothing made sense and no choice seemed like the right choice.
It seemed as soon as I let my guard down, finally allowing myself flirt with the idea of being a mother, as soon as my instinct to protect my baby and my body kicked in, as fast as it all had started - I miscarried, five days after first finding out.
As I lay in the hospital for the second time in two months, I started writing, not just about myself - but about the women in my life who I’ve loved the most. I wrote about my mother and her illness. I wrote about the death of my grandmother. And most of all, I wrote about my friends who seemed all too familiar with maternal loss in one way or another. Where one friend knew also the pain of miscarrying, another friend had experienced the heartache of her mother going missing. The stories continued complying, and each open conversation would create a dialogue with other women about their losses. I realized I knew what I needed to do to finally cope with this, to acknowledge my pain and make it all make sense - I needed to make a book.
“Letters From Our Mothers” is an exploration of maternal loss, the complexities of grief, and the life after. It’s a story compiled with archival imagery, diary entries, and handwritten letters from the women involved. The first copies I have made are hand-bound, by myself. The book's existence acts as a testimony to the women who helped me survive my miscarriage, and to destigmatizing conversations about loss.
