My Body

I loved being pregnant, and I know how fortunate I am to be able to say that. We had a straightforward fertility journey, and whatever mild annoyance I felt over the cycles it took disappeared as soon as I saw the positive test.

I was in good shape prior to getting pregnant: mentally, physically, emotionally, and environmentally in the life and home we had built around us. I worked remotely, had routines at home and in the gym, and knew we were in a good financial and physical space to raise a child. I trusted my body and felt ready for it to change.

My first trimester brought by-the-book symptoms. We were on a Schwartz family vacation when I had my first bouts of nausea. We laughed about how sensitive I was around the kitchen smells. We announced that I was pregnant very early, at five weeks, promising that I wasn’t just trying to get out of helping take out the garbage or lifting our toddler niece and nephew. I also wasn’t being dramatic when I saw a rotting cactus on a walk and gagged… My pregnant brain didn’t like the look of it, and my pregnant body responded!

In my home office, I kept a bucket beside me while I worked, thinking about former managers who had talked about the challenges of working through early pregnancy. I learned my lesson the first time I puked a little into my hand while running to the bathroom.

Despite all the new quirks, I welcomed the changes. Even the unpleasant ones felt purposeful. I was changing for my baby. I was changing to be a mom.

I was working on a scrapbook during my pregnancy. Week by week, I tracked the fruit that matched the baby’s alleged size, and I collected items that reflected what I was doing: restaurant receipts, workout wristbands, and cut-outs from boxes of food I was craving.

I took notes on my phone so I could later handwrite the additions that I wanted to include as commentary: “This week, Shrek transformation was complete - ‘better out than in, I always say!’” I had corresponding photos for each weekly section, including ultrasound photos and flatlays of the gift I gave Jordan to celebrate my pregnancy and the reveals I did for our family.

I worked on the scrapbook in two big bursts before giving birth. The first was when I organized the items that had piled up, reassuring Jordan that I wasn’t just collecting garbage, and put together the layouts for my first 27 weeks. The second was during our babymoon at the end of March, when I put those layouts in the book.

On December 15th, we heard our baby’s heartbeat for the first time, so I decided it was the perfect time to crack open the scrapbook. I started with:

“Dear Baby, you are going to be my favourite and very best thing I’ve made yet. Thanks for an excuse to be a little bit extra + stay a lot me in this process.”

On May 15th, I wrote:

“Dear Baby, we named you Nathan George Schwartz. You came to us too early, and we didn’t have enough time with you.”

Five months separated the letters I wrote to the baby. In the first, I was documenting what my body was making. By the second, I was searching for a way to understand what had happened to us.

In the early days of grieving my baby, I felt completely empty: mentally bereft, physically without his movement, emotionally consumed by sorrow, and environmentally surrounded by his absence. Our whole house pointed to what was missing. We had an altar for him, and we packed away the crib and baby things in the garage. The scrapbook sat unfinished. 

I felt my grief acutely in my body in those early days.

For the longest time, I couldn’t sleep on my right side because that was where our baby would kick me the most. When Nathan was in the NICU, he already showed a preference for sleeping on his right side too and would get fussy otherwise. I missed feeling connected to my baby. I missed feeling his movement just as much as I missed the one and only time we were able to cuddle skin-to-skin. 

But I couldn’t sleep on my left side either. In those early days, it was too hard to face Jordan on his side of the bed, both of us either crying or completely crashed out from the wreckage of our loss. So, I tried to sleep on my back. During pregnancy, I had avoided that position because I worried about the compression and what it might do to my baby. After Nathan died, being able to sleep that way became another physical reminder that there was no longer a baby inside me to protect.

I had so much anger and blame for my body in those early days.

My self-talk was all about how this was obviously my fault. I searched endlessly for reasons why I had screwed up and why my baby was dead because of me. Even when my medical care team reassured me that this was a random tragedy, I tried to find a reason. 

At our baby shower, we played a game and asked our guests to guess what I would be anxiously searching at 3 a.m. once the baby was born. On my first night home after being discharged, I asked ChatGPT for tips about pumping and maximizing what I could do to help my milk come in. On my first night home after Nathan died, I asked ChatGPT to scour Reddit and every internet hole for something that would prove I had done something wrong and explain why my baby was gone.

My medical team kept telling me there was nothing I could have done differently to change our outcome. Still, I kept trying to find a reason that would make me responsible. When I couldn’t find an answer medically, I started to think karmically about why my body had betrayed me. Who had I wronged? What hex or curse had I crossed? What promises or prayers had I broken to upset a higher power? With this interrogation, my mind moved into darker and less rational places. I wondered what I had done to deserve this and whether I was being punished for something I could not identify. Grief made me desperate for an explanation, ideally one that condemned me, because accepting that something so horrific could happen randomly felt impossible. 

It has taken multiple direct conversations with my doctors, friends, family, counsellors, and husband to begin putting those thoughts away. I know that the blame is neither productive nor true, and no amount of fear or shame will bring Nathan back.

My body had gone through pregnancy and was now changing through postpartum while I grieved my baby. My sleeping position mattered less when I could actually fall asleep. My hair began falling out. I needed to pack away my maternity clothes and pull out the non-maternity summer clothes I had not expected to see for a while.

I am in an in-between body. The maternity clothes were too big, but my body has not returned to its previous shape either. Some of my old clothes fit. Others are still too tight, squeezing the breath out of me while grief does the same. 

Before Nathan was born, I had donated some clothes, expecting that by the next season I would treat myself to a "new Mama style.” Instead, I ordered a haul of clothes that fit the body I have now. Having clothes that fit did not change my grief, but it has made the physical in-between a little gentler and more comfortable to live in.

Meanwhile, my medical team and practitioners have reassured me that everything is healing well. My organs and abs are back in place, and my C-section scar is healing. I’m so grateful to be back in my exercise routine for my physical health, but more importantly, for my mental health. I returned to workout classes to sweat out some of my feelings. Jordan and I enjoy our neighbourhood walk-and-talks that began once I was cleared following my C-section.

I have slowly found ways to feel present in my body again and to actively care for it instead of only questioning or criticizing it.

Every day, I take the same prenatal and daily vitamins that I took while pregnant. I have added “Mommy’s special vitamin,” my mental rebrand for the birth control my OB recommended while my body heals. I resent the pill that creates more distance between me and trying again, but I made this choice because it felt like the safest way to give my body time to recover before another pregnancy.

Caring for my physical health gives me back some of the control I lost. I can give my body time to recover, begin rebuilding my relationship with it, and prepare it to be a home for a future pregnancy. I am not back to the uncomplicated trust I had when I first saw the positive test, but I am trying to stop treating my body only as the place where something went wrong. This is the body that made and carried Nathan.

Nathan’s funeral in mid-May marked the end of to the three days we had with him in April, but nothing had marked goodbye to the baby we had spent months expecting to bring home in June. To honour my body and my pregnancy with my expected June baby, we framed photos from our maternity shoot around the house, and I finished my pregnancy scrapbook at the end of May. It felt right to say goodbye to the “June baby” by revisiting the scrapbook. I marked all the fruits for each week until we got to week 31 (coconut) and did end up writing my handwritten commentary in hindsight with notes and wishes for my baby, my Nathan. I’ve mostly finished the scrapbook now, with the final pages focused on our baby’s birth at 31 weeks and how we met and named Nathan.

My hope is that my body will safely and healthily carry another pregnancy, and that one day I’ll be able to share the scrapbook with Nathan’s future siblings. They will know that their big brother was carried and loved in this same body before them.