Pilgrimage

Something broke inside me after my third miscarriage. This time, I had gotten pregnant after a frozen embryo transfer with a genetically viable embryo. At the time, I knew less than a handful of people who had failed frozen embryo transfers and no one who had ever miscarried after IVF. I felt that my body had played the cruelest trick on me. I felt that God had too as I spent my whole life wanting not only to be a mother but to birth children and I could not even manage to with loads of medical intervention. I could not face going back to work in a church and preach resurrection when celebration of new life would fall falsely from my mouth and my entire being felt empty.

So I ran away.

My story just drips with privilege, I know. Being able to do IVF at all let alone then dropping money on a plane ticket to Europe is probably the very definition of class privilege. I was able to use my money to escape, but the place that I chose was not a resort but a place that had spiritual significance to me. A place I had seen resurrection before I knew that's what I was seeing. A place where I had seen how new life was possible even when the wounds were still tender. Now, my friend *had* invited me. I had told her I was pregnant and something was wrong, and she reminded me I could come stay with her anytime I needed to. I bought tickets hoping it could be a celebration but suspecting I would lay on my friend’s couch, watch dubbed over Turkish and American television shows, eat too much candy, and cry. (I really am a joy to have visit.) I thought nothing (consciously) of the place's spiritual significance only of the distance from home.

But that's the thing about running away. I went 4500 miles from home but didn't get far from what I thought I wanted to run from. One of the friends I stayed with runs a preschool and day care, and I went with her to work and held a few of the fussy babies for the teachers so they could have their hands free and give their attention to actually teaching. Another two friends I visited had young children who either insisted on playing hide and seek or tried (in vain) to work on my accent when attempting to speak the little Bosnian I know. My failed body still managed to help care for children I loved even though I didn't birth them. And God? God was there too. In the patience of my friend who hugged me when I cried on her couch. In the baby who quieted when his mother handed him to me. In the buildings that were newly renovated after bearing scars from a war twenty years earlier. I was still broken. Am still broken. I went back to work far too soon and didn't see my therapist nearly often enough. But I felt a little less empty. I begun to believe that maybe my body and my life were more than just a cruel joke. That even though the wounds might not heal for a long, long time, and even then might become still-tender scars, that maybe new life was possible even for me.

I ended up referring to this trip as a pilgrimage. Pilgrimages are spiritual pillars from many faiths, including Islam (the faith of my Bosnian friends) and Christianity though many Protestants have fallen away from the practice. Pilgrimages are journeys in which we step out of comfort to make space for the divine to speak to us anew. I did not intend to have any kind of spiritual journey. I wanted to drink coffee in a beautiful place with beautiful people and try to forget about my problems. But I made a pilgrimage just the same. I realized it when I was walking around a town called Mostar by myself one day. This place, the people I visited, this was not running away. This journey was a way to make space. A pilgrimage to wait for a word of possibility to whirl around my brokenness and whisper that this sorrow was not the end. It was a pilgrimage to remind me to keep moving, breathing, loving, so that one day new life in some form or another would seem possible again.