Holidays After Abortion

This episodes is for everyone who feels their emotions rise around holidays, special occasions, and or life events. You are not alone.

This episode is for everyone who feels their emotions rise around holidays, special occasions, and or life events. You are not alone.

The Post:

There are hundreds of thousands of women who don’t think about their abortion, or abortions, during the holidays, and there are just as many who do. This is for the women who do.

As the feelings bubble up around your abortion, allow them to come. Relax your shoulders, soften your face, loosen your hips. Resisting and or running for your feelings invites them to grow and to chase you. Allowing and leaning into them is scientifically proven to invite them to pass. 

Whatever you are feeling is yours, don’t let anyone tell you it’s right or wrong, just let it be. 
Take time if you need time, receive love if you need love, get help if you need help. As time passes quickly by the thoughts and feelings I have about my own abortion change and evolve. It’s not time itself that changes the thoughts and feelings, it’s my own growth and evolution. Time does not heal emotional wounds. That’s the job of the mind, and I am committed to my own mental health. 

With my abortion now almost 3 years ago my thoughts are much more curiosity based than anything else.

Who would she have been?

How would she have fit in our family?

What would she contribute to this world?

And the beautiful thing is that almost three years later I have answers to these questions. I have the answers, because I keep asking and I’m open to listening and evolving :

She is Grace.
She is brave.
She is quiet.
She is impactful.

She fits in our family exactly the way she was meant to,
In spirit,
In confidence,
In love.

She contributes more than words can express.
She has a voice bigger than most living beings.
She doesn’t need to be physically seen or heard to make her mark.
She is seen and heard in all the ways her story and her message ripple into the world.

The holidays are a seasonal opportunity to unwrap new gifts from your past experiences. Don’t be afraid to peel back a new layer every time you are presented with thoughts and memories about your abortion. 

Mothering Magazine published an article of mine in February of 2018, but I wrote it as we were getting ready for Christmas in 2017. As described, many of my feelings have changed since then, but the words here will ring true for many. I hope that my revisiting them here will help more people breath a little lighter in the knowledge that they are not alone. 

Published in Mothering Magazine, February 2018

I don’t know who she was, but I miss her.

Today I really miss her.I don’t know how I know she was a girl, but I do.

Today, as we prepared for a family celebration, I said to my husband,
“Imagine doing this with an infant?”

She would have been just about a month old today.

It remains the hardest and most important thing I’ve ever done.

I had a miscarriage between the girls — this womb has held and loved five babies. All five fill my heart, and shape my soul in different ways.

You’d think it wouldn’t hurt so much. You’d think the well executed choice and the lack of regret would be healing, but it still hurts. I don’t have any words to explain why, I only know that it does. The gift of being human comes with the full spectrum of pain and pleasure. Sometimes it’s hard to separate the two. In this case I am immensely grateful for our ability to make a choice, and also deeply sad that we had to. I thought I had an IUD. Placed three years prior, it came out without me knowing. I call it the immaculate removal, and sometimes I believe it miraculously disappeared so that I could learn some more lessons of motherhood.

We chose termination for our sanity, for our living children, for our future, but that doesn’t mean it came as an easy choice. In stepping through the process I learned how many other mothers like myself have made similar choices. Mothers who knew their homes were filled perfectly as is, and that adding another ingredient would not just stir the pot, but boil it over.

Through the termination and in the last nine months I’ve longed for resources, but there aren’t many out there. We mothers who choose fetal termination are still taboo in the general public. Thousands of women are not telling their stories, sharing their pain, or healing together, but we’re all out here hurting in waves of unexpected emotion. Too many of us are bottling up the tears as we walk the path with our living families.

I write this for all of the mothers who hurt, all of the mothers who silently grieve, all of the mothers who are so ridiculously proud of themselves for doing the hardest thing they’ve ever done.

Dear mothers,

You are strong.

You are beautiful.

You are enough.

Allow yourself to feel.

Allow yourself to grieve.

Allow yourself to receive.

You are not alone.

I am holding space with you,

Amanda

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If you are one of the 1 in 4 women who have had an abortion in your lifetime,
and you are not thriving the way you desire: