1. Our dishwasher broke, sending us into an instant dishpocalypse that had me handwashing all our dishes for nearly a week. My husband and I kept trying to fix it after our daughter went to bed, which meant starting a complex home repair project at 9 p.m., wrenching the dishwasher into the center of the kitchen, removing and de-kinking its hoses, contorting our bodies into the awkward space between the wall and the sink. Five repair attempts and a shop vac full of smelly dishwater later, I am happy to report it’s working again.

   

2. Our child’s sandbox has been colonized by earwigs, which means whenever she wants to play in it, which is daily, I grab her plastic shovel and scoop up several dozen pincered insects, flinging them into the grass. I try not to be bugphobic, but earwigs strike me as the definition of creepy crawlers, especially the ghost white ones. I googled ‘albino earwig,’ and it turns out they are not albino earwigs at all, but rather the earwig equivalent of adolescents — growing nymphs who have recently molted and shed their exoskeletons. I found this to be a gross-but-cool fact that has made me only marginally more sympathetic to the insects crawling around my daughter’s sandcastle molds.
   

3. In June I spent a dreamy week at Storyboard, a generative writing residency organized by the St. Mary’s MFA program and the inimitable Lauren Markham, whose work I have long admired. What a glorious time it was. It was such a gift to be in community with fellow writers — to linger at the breakfast table, to learn from brilliant faculty, to listen to readings under the redwoods, to think deeply about craft. I’ve been energized creatively since, but my biggest takeaway is that I deserve to carve out time and space for creative work, even when it feels impossible. Writing needs structure, and life does too, and so I’ve been paying the neighbor kids to babysit two afternoons a week. What a difference it has made. These big kids are world-class humans and babysitters, my daughter loves them, I love that she’s learning from them, and I love that I get to step away from parenting for a little while and sink into art, stewarding some projects large and small. Of course, relying on children for childcare is tenuous —I feel guilty creating more emotional labor demands as I coordinate schedules with our babysitters’ mothers, who are my friends — and I don’t have a backup plan for when school starts in the fall. Oh well. For now, I’m glad for the time.
   

4. Parenting a toddler can feel at odds with creative practice — how am I supposed to write beautiful, moving sentences when I’m constantly wiping yogurt off the floor, or doling out pretzels and bananas, or reading the same inane kids’ books over and over again? But if I’ve learned anything from these long, sweet days spent at toddler speed, it’s that writing and parenting aren’t as contrary as I might have once believed. My daughter is constantly showing me details about the world that I wouldn’t have noticed — a flower filagree on a park bench. An artful dash of yellow on a package of coffee. A globe dangling from the ceiling of the supermarket. An earwig or two that I missed. Caring for her brings me into the present moment over and over again. The ferocity that I feel as her protector, the vigilance I brought to her early babyhood — these instincts have helped me distill what matters to me right now and what doesn’t, what I need to focus on and what I can let slide, and they’re showing up in my creative work. I care less about perfection and more about the doing.
   

5. A glance at the clock tells me our babysitter is only here for 15 more minutes, which means it is time for me to get this imperfect newsletter out the door. Know that I am wishing you joy and presence and creativity, wherever you may be.

NRM is tucked away in a giant office building off the interstate in Colchester, Vermont, and—get this—just down the hall from an FBI field office. I hated it the moment I set foot in the door. I hated the green and purple walls. I hated the plants and fertility-coded statues in the lobby. It was someone’s idea of hopeful and soothing, more med spa than doctor’s office, and eerily quiet. This place, I thought cynically, knows how to profit from longing. I wanted to run, but instead, I followed the medical assistant down the hushed hallway to an exam room. I took off my red square-toed Blundstones and stripped off my pants and underwear for a sonohysterogram: a transvaginal ultrasound to see inside my uterus.

“I like your socks,” the nurse practitioner told me as an image of my reproductive organs pulsed on screen. “And I like your shoes too. I don’t think I’ve seen those. I always like to see what combination of socks and shoes people are wearing. In the winter it’s Blundstones. In the summer, Birkenstocks.”

With two brands of footwear, she’d zeroed in on the clinic’s primary clientele: a certain type of well-shod Vermont woman. I felt sad, imagining this legion of would-be mothers, their identical shoes cast aside, their feet in stirrups. I didn’t want to be one of them. But here I was.

The nurse practitioner rigged up a catheter to inject saline into my uterus. I peered at the screen, unsure what to make of the grey-on-grey splotches.

“The doctor will call you with a reading of your ultrasound once she’s had a chance to look at it,” she said, “but I want to show you what I’m seeing. See how the stream of saline stops just there? It looks like retained products of conception—leftover tissue from your pregnancy. It’s taking up space in your uterus and preventing implantation. It has to be surgically removed in a procedure called a hysteroscopy. Your doctor will provide more details.”

I left the appointment angry, the diagnostic language grating against my ears. Retained products of conception—it was such a clunky and inelegant way to refer to the fragments of what could have been. It seemed so metaphorically obvious: my body had clung to something I desperately wanted. My uterus had become a junk drawer.

The hysteroscopy was scheduled for a few weeks later, in mid-December—the same day as the first big blizzard of the season. We left early to get to the hospital on time. The roads were slick; we hit a slippery patch of snow and our muffler fell off with an enormous clunk. I was groggy from fasting. Everything felt slow: the waiting room. The prep. The conversation with the doctor. Getting anesthesia. I remember rolling down the hallway and into the bright lights of the operating room, being lifted from the bed. And when I woke up it was done. The doctor came back in. It had gone well, she said. My uterus was scraped clean. They’d send the tissue to the lab for analysis.

“How big was it?” I asked the doctor, curious to understand what, exactly, had been removed. She pinched her thumb and index finger together. “About 5 centimeters.” I nodded. Maybe, with the last of that pregnancy gone from my body, I could finally begin to move on.

The lab results came back a few days later. “Degenerating chorionic villi consistent with retained products of conception,” the report read. “Abundant pink-tan rubbery to firm tissues.” In other words: a piece of placenta. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel about that. I had already felt so very much; the prospect of more emotions sounded exhausting. So I laid down and drifted off to sleep. And then the strangest thing happened: I heard a deep, disembodied voice.

“You really need to google Saint Agatha,” the voice said.

“I don’t know anything about saints,” I replied. “Is she legit?”

“Just google her,” the voice replied. “She can help you.”

I woke up with a start. Who had just spoken, and who on earth was Saint Agatha? I’d never heard of her. I wasn’t Catholic, or religious, or sure about god. The appearance of a Catholic saint amidst my reproductive woes gave me pause. But I was intensely curious. So I took out my phone.

Agatha was Sicilian, one of Christianity’s early virgin martyrs. When she refused to marry Roman governor Quinziano, he had her thrown in prison and tortured. Agatha’s breasts were mutilated, lopped off by tongs. That night, Saint Peter visited her in her cell. By morning, she was completely healed. In Renaissance paintings, Agatha is often seen holding tongs and proffering her breasts on a plate. Now, she is the patron saint of midwives, nurses, and breast cancer patients. On her feast day in early February, celebrants eat minni di virgini: breast-shaped cakes stuffed with ricotta, glazed in marizan, and topped with a maraschino cherry.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the dream for weeks. The symbolism—breasts, surgical instruments, pain, healing—was not lost on me. But I didn’t know what to do about it. Asking a priest didn’t feel right. And then I remembered that The Sisters of Mercy, an order of Catholic nuns, operate an ecospirituality center not far from where I live. Would it be weird to call them and tell them about my dream? I decided it would not.

I dialed the number and a woman named April answered the phone. She was not a nun, she explained, but a lay chaplain—a role the Catholic church allowed women to occupy. I told her about the dream. That it came following a surgical procedure due to a miscarriage. That saints were not really part of my rickety spiritual framework.

“Saints are people who’ve suffered greatly and are on a journey towards god,” April replied. “Their purpose is to let you know you’re supported. You’re not alone.”

I told her I found it interesting that this dream should happen this time of year, right before Christmas. “It’s also the solstice,” April said, surprising me. “The return of the light.” Her advice on what to do was simple: light a candle. Put a flower in a vase. Reflect.

I ordered a Saint Agatha icon on Etsy and placed it among fossils, crystals, photographs: a makeshift shrine. My friend and I went to the bakery and ordered the closest thing to minni di vigini we could find: round chocolate orbs topped in peppermint crumbles. I went for a long cross country ski, thinking about all that had happened: the loss. The clinging. The slow spin of the planet. Each day, a little more light.

Months later, after a strategically timed but messy vacation—car problems, a big fight, illness, and a missed itinerary that landed us not in Nova Scotia as planned, but in Maine—I noticed that my breasts were sore as I trotted downstairs. Could it really be, I wondered, after all this time, and all this longing? I waited another day, then took a test. Two lines appeared: pregnant. “Okay,” I said to myself. “That’s good. But you can’t get too attached.”

My friend and I went for a walk on the shore of Lake Champlain the day after I found out. “This one is it,” she said. “I can feel it.” I wasn’t so sure. The pregnancy felt tentative. I needed to protect myself from the possibility of hurt, to temper any joy.

We stopped at a beach to load our pockets with polished grey rocks lined with thin white veins—Iberville shale, formed from marine silt hundreds of millions of years ago, back when our lake was a sea. “Rocks to bind this soul to earth,” my friend declared. I’m probably going to need more than these rocks, I thought, collecting them anyway. At home, I put a rock next to my St. Agatha icon. I put one in my purse, another on the window sill. I kept yet another in my pocket for weeks. Stay with me, I thought, palming the rock. And so she did.

It is easy to approach pregnancy with the best of intentions—staying active! Exercising through the third trimester!—and then get derailed by embodied reality. Maybe, like me, you had placenta previa that caused several scary bleeding episodes and necessitated four months of pelvic rest. Or maybe, like me, you got gestational hypertension towards the end, leaving you foggy and lightheaded, grasping for words. Pregnancy, especially when it is medically complicated, or comes after loss, can feel like a tenuous, high wire act. And then there is the matter of birth. Yawning and cavernous, we open a portal to life itself. It’s transformative. And for me, it was not without cost.

Ours was a challenging birth: a surprise infection during labor, where I spiked a 102 degree fever that stressed the baby and drained her stores. Four hours of pushing, a vacuum assist, baby’s shoulder stuck on my pelvis, my body suddenly flipped and maneuvered to deliver. A low APGAR score, an umbilical stump IV. Baby and mom’s first—and separate—ambulance rides over the mountains in the middle of the night. A three-day NICU stay. Lackluster postpartum care. And finally, our true beginning: arriving home just before a blizzard. Those tender, weepy hours of learning to be together.

When the baby was six weeks old, all three of us got Covid, despite going nowhere but the pediatrician and the grocery store. Then my husband got shingles and had to quarantine away from us until his blisters healed. (Thank god for my heroic mother-in-law, who came for three weeks and cheerfully took on night feedings with me.) All this is to say that, for a while, I wasn’t especially focused on recovery, or bouncing back, or feeling organized. I was trying to survive.

Five months later, I’m happy to report that life is starting to feel a little easier. The baby (mostly) sleeps. I have regained (some) brainpower. Now, I’m taking stock of my changed body: a soft, cascading belly. Plantar fasciitis. Heavy breasts working 24-hour shifts at the all-you-can-eat buffet. “By the time this is done,” I tell my friend archly, “these tits will be on the floor.” I catch a glimpse of myself in profile and am surprised by this big, lumbering body.

And then there’s the leaking—oh the leaking! Baby is not the only one in this house with a soggy diaper. My underwear is damp by midday and sodden by evening. Coughing, sneezing, and lifting aren’t the only culprits: this leaking is random and ongoing, its cause unclear.

My mother and grandmother both struggled with leaking after having children: my mother gave up running; they both wore pads. I don’t want this to be my reality decades down the line. And so, each week for the past several months, I have dutifully reported to the back room of a drab 70s-style building, for pelvic floor physical therapy.

When I think of the pelvic floor, I imagine one of those netted French market totes: a hammock that keeps your groceries from spilling onto the ground. This isn’t too far off. The pelvic floor is a web of muscles that spans from the pubic bone to the tailbone and supports the uterus, bladder, and bowel. Peeing, pooping, sex—all these functions are governed by the subtle musculature of the pelvic floor.

My physical therapist is cheerful and chatty, a good teacher, which I’m glad for, because that makes it feel pretty normal when she inserts a gloved finger into my vagina, palpating the tight muscles around the edge, prompting me to squeeze and release. There is, she explains, more to kegels than just tightening everything up. She likens it to picking up a blueberry: a pinch, a drawing in, and then a lift.

And it turns out you can’t just kegel your way out of pelvic floor dysfunction. A healthy pelvic floor needs to be able to both contract and relax. Do too many kegels, as I did, and you can tighten already overtight muscles, which just makes things worse. So now we are working on relaxing the pelvic floor—low, deep breaths, a sort of unfurling—in addition to strengthening it. Recruiting the abdomen. Adding a cough. It is subtle work, this shoring up of the foundation. Progress is slow. But week by week, it’s beginning to get better.

Friends remind me that this is a fleeting season. The body will normalize. Postpartum will end. For now, I watch in amazement as our baby transforms before my very eyes. We each grow stronger, more alert to the wonders of our shared world. Organization, in time, will come. But joy is already here.

I am spending this sweaty girl summer (is a new mom a girl? Asking for a friend) launching job applications into the ether like paper cranes, each cradling a hope for the stability I have been fortunate to enjoy for most of my life. I can’t tell you what’s become of most of those fragile aircraft—crash landing into the jaws of resume reading bots, probably. In therapy, I discuss AI anxiety. For the first time in my life, I have needed help from the social safety net, while watching our social fabric crumble beyond recognition.

Why am I starting this newsletter, when content feels as disposable as my child’s diapers? (Just kidding! Most of the time we do cloth). To cement a regular writing practice. To do something besides baby care and applying for jobs. To share what I’m reading, thinking, and feeling. To catalogue life’s joys (today: bee balm, a storm, my daughter’s laugh). Everything you’ll find here is written by me—a flesh-and-blood human writer in an uncertain season. What I’m serving up is messy and full of feeling. We’re in a scary, lonely era. Let’s defy it by casting a line.

With love,
Sarah