Notes on Turning 34
A birthday post about Tarot, pregnancy loss, and going the hell forward.
I had three miscarriages in a calendar year. March 2022, May 2022, January 2023. When I found out about my third pregnancy this past December, the night before we flew to California for winter break, I cried hard and deep with anxious joy. I love you stay I repeated over and over to the little cluster of potential—my favorite line from Clare Pollard’s affecting novel Delphi—as I held my stomach. I wanted the universe to reassure me that I would have this baby. I pulled a Tarot card. It was this one:
We went to California, where I spent the majority of the time suffering from caffeine withdrawal and thinking about how to rearrange our life. I took belly pictures even though it was still too early to tell. I drank smoothies and herbal tea and sent my husband out for expensive prenatal vitamins and DHA supplements. Every time I went to the bathroom, I held my breath and checked for blood.
It bothered me that I didn’t feel pregnant. I wasn’t sick. With Silas, I was miserable, constantly in some sort of discomfort. But I felt fine. I was going about my life, which I thought maybe spoke to some type of maturation on my part. I had grown up, become more responsible, less dramatic. Maybe my body was following suit. I could handle everything that was being stacked on my shoulders. Get up every day and shine.
But no. The universe had other plans. The blood I had been afraid would come came eventually. The subsequent ultrasound showed an embryo that had stopped growing, no heartbeat. The bloodwork became more bloodwork. The space I had dug out in my heart for this child, now a gaping hole.
This happened three weeks ago today. I didn’t want to think about my birthday, imagine even having a birthday. I felt like I was in the ground. I took an entire week off work to lie on the couch and stare into space. I gave up and saw a psychiatrist. I finally understood that what I was going through was the climax of undigested grief.
But then at the follow-up ob/gyn appointment, some door closed in me. The doctor was talking about surrogates and progesterone and tests I could do if I wanted to try again, and I realized I didn’t want to. It was like when Samantha breaks up with Smith (and previously, Richard) in Sex and the City and says, I love you, but I love me more.
I would have loved a child, this one, the one I had asked to stay. But I wasn’t going to uproot my whole life in order to keep trying, and it was clear that something about this particular genetic cocktail didn’t want to gel. I already had a child, an amazing one, whom I would pull God down by the ankles for if he asked me to. Maybe the message here was not one of failure, but of regeneration. Of rerouting. Maybe, if I could pour all my love and sacrifice into the creation and care of a human child, as many times as was needed, I had it in me to consistently give even half of that love and sacrifice to my other creations. My art, my relationships, my ever-evolving self.
There’s a lot of talk about reparenting out there, in pop-psych land and holistic wellness Instagram. But there’s something to it, I think. Maybe when I drew The Fool, it wasn’t about giving birth to a whole separate child, as I had wanted it to be when I drew it. (That’s the thing with the Tarot—it doesn’t predict life, it reflects life, and all its myriad fluctuations.) Maybe, instead, The Fool was about giving birth to a part of myself that hadn’t yet seen the light. Of taking that first step into the unknown. Giving myself the yes I’d been waiting to hear all along.
So that’s sort of where Black Lipstick came from. I had to give birth to something, god damn it. The name and concept came to me, as all names and concepts do, in a flash of light within a depression. I wanted to create a living work that encapsulated everything I loved. I wanted writers and readers to feel like they were in it with me, like they had a seat at the table, instead of me just handing down words from on high. I’d been thinking about starting a newsletter for some time, especially after reading all of Sari Botton’s newsletters and Michelle Tea’s Dear Diary, and I missed editing and getting my hands in people’s work, which I’d been doing in some capacity for over a decade. I was feeling burned out on writing myself, after having spent over a year revising my second novel and submitting it to agents, worrying about making myself marketable while going through the cycles of self-doubt and reproductive trauma. The pleasure and fulfillment I got from writing itself, from starting a new project that felt incandescent, felt poisoned out. Until that moment in the ob/gyn office, when a different door opened up. It felt like permission from the universe to lay that particular work to rest, and focus on the other modes of creation that lit my heart up.
Welcome to my solar return.
I can feel your power in all these words--pulsing through the screen. We're lucky to have you and all your creations, human and otherwise <3 <3 <3
thankyou for starting this ❤️