An introduction to "When Resurrection Weeps"
Announcing my new poetry collection!
1 in 2 women experience birth trauma. 1 in 4 will lose a baby through miscarriage. Most won’t talk about it. Many will grieve in silence. And too many will believe they are alone in this grief. I am both 1 in 2 and 1 in 4.
Over the last two years, I’ve heard countless stories from other women—stories of heartbreak and joy, longing and fulfillment in motherhood. I wouldn’t have heard these stories if I hadn’t lived through my own.
I imagined motherhood with a naive hope: fertility would be easy, pregnancy would be relaxed, birth would be natural, postpartum would be cozy. But what actually happened was far from my hopeful vision.
A traumatic pregnancy. An emergency delivery. A NICU baby. Postpartum depression.
When I finally felt like I was coming up for air, I was longing for another baby. Longing for the kind of redemption story I know deep in my bones God writes. But again, we were met with a new heartbreak. My second pregnancy showed my sweet baby’s heartbeat on an ultrasound screen, but later on, my baby passed away in my womb.
These wounds are deeply personal, and yet they aren’t mine alone. Our grief is layered—it’s an individual experience but it’s also collective.
My story is uniquely mine. The loss of my second baby cannot be understood in isolation. The whole story makes up my individual experience with it’s unique layers of grief. Many reading this have those stories too—the ones that can’t be understood or explained by a diagnosis or a label but have complex layers of hope, longing, disappointment and pain that make those stories uniquely yours.
But my pain has also brought me into the collective grief of other mothers across space and time. When I say, “I lost a baby,” I’m often met with the heartbreak in another woman’s eyes who whispers, “I’ve been there too.” When I share about my medical trauma, I often hear stories from other women who say, “they didn’t believe me either.”
In the aftermath of my son’s birth, I turned to poetry. When we were longing for another baby but facing my new health diagnosis—I wrote poems. After we lost our second baby, poetry felt like a release valve on my anger and sadness, letting me breathe again.
The result is this collection: When Resurrection Weeps
It is a story told through poems of longing, losing hope, and learning how to lament. These are my words and they are my individual story, but they also carry the weight of a collective grief that many women share.
Even if you haven’t faced loss or birth trauma, I hope you’ll stay awhile. I hope these poems help you bravely look around with compassion toward what too many women endure quietly. I hope they help all of us be a little more tender, a little more soft.
I’ll be sharing When Resurrection Weeps in three parts over the next few weeks right here on Substack and through my weekly emails. Once the collection is fully published, I’ll send a table of contents so you can read it and return to it at any pace you like.
And if poetry isn’t for you right now, or this topic feels too hard, I understand. I’ll still be sharing a link to our usual nonfiction each week so you can click on that and proceed to nonfiction essays instead of diving into the poems. After this collection is shared, we’ll return to our regular weekly content rhythm.
But if you’re holding grief, or carrying a story that’s heavy—if you’ve ever found yourself asking, where is God in all this? Or if you simply want to bear witness—then I hope these poems feel like a little space to release a breath you didn’t realize you were holding.