Happy After All

by Maisey Yates

I’m not naive enough to believe my life would have been perfect if he’d stayed with my mother. It would have been weird and bitter in a different way, that’s all. Like I said, he tries. Sometimes I just can’t bear to be something he has to try quite so hard for.

which is weird because I’m a goddamn delight actually, and his options are limited either way.

“I think it’s a thing that takes time, gray hair, wrinkles, heartbreaks, and all kinds of moments when you cared too much. Then one day you realize . . . it never got you anywhere you wanted to go. The people who only want you when you bend and twist to suit them don’t stay anyway, and the ones who want you as you are settle in, and so do you.”

It’s true. I’ve never realized how true that is. I can remember clearly one of my friends saying to me afterward that she would never have been able to be as strong as I was. It didn’t feel like a compliment, even though I knew she meant it as one. I had no choice but to keep breathing. To keep going. I didn’t feel strong; I felt weak and broken. I still do. That’s the real tragedy of it. You go on.

I’ve experienced loss. I understand grief. I know that it comes in waves that you can’t anticipate. I know that it tries to drown you sometimes. I get it.”

About grief, about processing this. I haven’t learned a damn thing. Except that it’s not the same for me as it is for some people.

Alice does something I don’t expect. She smiles. “Oh, it’s amazing to think, it’s been so many years. So many I don’t count up how old she would have been.” She lets out a gentle sigh. “Because there is no would have or could have, only what is. I do think, though, about how long I’ve loved her.”

“I lost two pregnancies before I had my son. You feel so alone sometimes when those things happen. Ashamed.”

“Yes. Especially in our time. Women were supposed to be mothers. I failed at that. It made me useless for a long time. I didn’t want to feel different, I didn’t want to be different. What was the point, after all?” She sits in silence for a moment. “But I am. I’m different, and my life is different than I planned for. Different doesn’t make it wrong, or bad, or failed. When I accepted that, I found a lot more peace.” I

“It changed me,” Alice says. “For a long time I resisted that. I wanted to pretend like none of it happened. I went to the hospital thinking I would come home with a child, and instead I lost my dreams. I wanted to forget. I wanted to go back to being myself.” She lifts her shoulders, as if she’s shrugging off a weight. “I couldn’t. It wasn’t until I realized that I could keep her with me, and I could let it hurt, and I could let it heal, that I actually began to find myself again. I’ve had a beautiful life. That loss . . . It wasn’t beautiful. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. I don’t think loss like that is meant to be. I don’t think terrible things are so easily explained. Her life was real, a momentary thing. It was up to me what I decided to do with that love I had for her. I decided . . . slowly, over the course of time, that I could let that love be a gift. That I could remember it well.”

“A child is a promise of a whole world,” she says. “When you lose a pregnancy, a child, you lose that world. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. It doesn’t mean it didn’t matter.” That

This, I realize, is something I was missing. Sitting with women and asking them how they live. How they love. In spite of everything. Because of everything. I am in awe of the fierce strength in these women. It makes me see a strength in myself I haven’t seen before. It makes me see the real truth of what Elise and I were talking about earlier, that life is made up of pain and loss. That the happy endings happen between the unbearable. And we keep going, until we find more happiness. However it looks.

It’s my pain, which means it’s up to me to try to decide what to do with it.

This is my first time trying to honor that world while I’m living in this one. It’s given me a good place to put it. Sometimes I think that is maybe the best thing you can do with grief. Because you’re going to live with it. It’s going to be with you. How do you carry it so it doesn’t get too heavy? I don’t want to forget her. I don’t want to believe that the loss was meant to be. I can accept that there was the potential for a life, for a world, that there is no longer a potential for. That I live in a different world because of that loss. I can honor that while living. While I write myself a new story, while I put myself into a new world, full of new possibilities.