By Kate C.

Originally posted at Makin’ Babies. Shared by permission.

Ten months have passed since losing my baby. The anniversary is approaching. My deadline for filing a grievance with my insurance company is closing in. Spring is blooming. Soon, I won’t have to count the seasons with memories of last year’s useless gestational milestones. Soon, I will get a fresh start.

I no longer feel broken. Wounded, healing, but not broken. I feel exactly where I should be with the infant loss piece of my tragedy. I am full of sadness and acceptance for my dead baby, the little handful of ashes on my dresser, the sad place in my heart. It’s starting to be okay. The other parts of me are poking up their spring-green tips after the winter, twining tentatively around the loss, setting forth this year’s buds, weaving everything together. Integrating the loss more than accommodating it. That is huge. It is progress.

Harder has been the abortion piece. Not the procedure. I can remember my procedure without any ill feeling. I reach out to my clinic sometimes, finding an excuse to call. They’re helping me with my paperwork, but there’s a good dose of conversation and support in every clerical interaction. I can even talk to my genetic counselor and high-risk OB again, an association that was traumatic for a long time.

It’s the cultural isolation and the fear of retribution that hasn’t left me. This sense of being marginalized and misunderstood. Still now, nearly a year out, I flinch at political yard-signs. Signs that have nothing to do with a woman’s right to choose. Signs for local school committee candidates. But signs mean elections and elections mean politics and politics mean stodgy old coots gleefully riling up popularity by vilifying me and smugly wiping out my safe and legal options — wishing a lonely, shameful death on me at the hands of some quack in the back alley.

Please visit Kate’s Blog, Makin’ Babies, to read the rest of Deposition in the Night.