Two years ago I was driving to the ball fields, pregnant and swollen. My children were in the backseat, and the song "Hey Jude" played from the stereo. I listened to that song many times in my pregnancy, as we planned to name our baby Jude; it only seemed right that he should become familiar with his eponym. The kids bounced along with the song as I cried in the driver's seat. Behind the wheel, I have found, is my favorite place to cry. My emotional response in that moment was complicated; I was joyful to be pregnant with a healthy baby, excited to meet Jude, and worried about a freak late-term pregnancy loss. There was nothing to indicate that anything was going to go wrong, but I'd learned with the last baby that it hurts to love and lose.

Flash forward two years, and you'll see an ornery, beautiful, 23-month-old blue-eyed boy named Jude. He is an instigator and a clown, a verbal champion, a hugger, a nudist. He completes our family and is adored by his three older brothers. I wish that present-day Jenny could reach back in time to the ball-field Jenny and tell her, "Relax. Take a few deep breaths and enjoy. He's fine." He's fine. Jude is here now, and worry was never necessary.

As I look back, it seems obvious: what 'Ball-Field Jenny' was crying about was the ache of a hole deep down inside her bones, a Jude-sized hole that only Jude could fill. It was a hole that was created the moment I learned I was pregnant with his little life.  The first shovelful was dug when I closed my eyes and smiled with relief at his positive pregnancy test. The more I learned about him as time passed, the deeper the hole got.

Due date: October 23rd. Deeper.

He's a boy. Deeper.

His image on the ultrasound screen. Deeper.

He has all of his vertebrae and fingers and toes. Deeper still.

We gave him a name. Deeper.

"He's going to make it," the doctor said. "He's going to be fine." Deeper.

Fine. Fine. He's going to be fine.

Deeper. Deeper. Deeper.

By the time I was singing "Hey Jude" on my way to the ball fields, I had myself a very deep Jude-sized hole going on inside me, and I was positively aching with it. Don't most moms feel this when longing for their babies? And the instant that he was born and placed onto my chest for my very first Jude hug, every inch of that deep hole was filled. It was utter, instantaneous relief. He has been filling it every day since then. Isn't this what life is for most of us? We create child-sized holes, and then we spend the rest of our days loving the children who perfectly fill those holes.

The pregnancy before Jude's was a different story. My son Hjarta was my complicated little wonder.

Beginning with that September afternoon when I saw the word "Pregnant" on the Clearblue stick, Hjarta's hole was there. The only one in the house, I jumped up and down in my bedroom, literally whooping aloud with joy. Deeper.

I knew it just had to be a boy.  I only make boys. Deeper.

Due date: May 26th. Deeper.

We shared our joy with our family and friends. Deeper.

Morning sickness and fatigue. Deeper.

We chose a name for him. Deeper.

I loved him harder every week, and that hole got deeper every week.

And then the bleeding began, and the ultrasound revealed my one lonely heartbeat, one extinguished life, and one invisible, deep hole. When Hjarta flew away, he left a hole that he was never allowed to fill. That is what miscarriage feels like. Miscarriage is a hole that you created to be filled, a hole that splits you down to your bones and makes them ache. It's a hole that's shaped exactly like your baby, and it lays waiting until the end of your days for your baby to come fill it. When that baby doesn't come, that hole does not go away.

After I had my miscarriage, it became immediately apparent to me that my loss was nothing more than conceptual to most people. In fact, the loss was really only real to me. It wasn't other people's fault; they never saw the baby, and they never felt him like I did, so they never understood the gravity of what had been taken from me. I quickly realized that if you've never been the mother of a miscarried angel, you can never comprehend how real the grief and loss actually are. The hole, my friends, is what every sister-in-grief carries. Some days we feel it more than others. Some days we hardly feel it at all, and some days we can hardly get out of bed because of its oppression.

The hole that was meant for Hjarta to fill has done a lot of things to me over the last three years, but the one constant thing it has done is make me yearn for him. Jude's life brings me inconceivable joy; he has done everything he can possibly do and been every wonder to me that he can possibly be in his two years. He cannot, however, fill Hjarta's hole. How could I expect him to? Plenty of people do expect this, which explains why I've heard hundreds of times, "Hey, at least you have Jude." The people who expect Jude to be two babies are the ones who least understand my grief, and that's okay. Maybe they aren't meant to understand it. Of course, at least I have Jude. Thank goodness I have Jude.

But I also have an invisible hole shaped exactly like Hjarta. And that ache, I know, will be one that won't be filled.

I once loved a little boy named Owen. I loved him from his first breath to his last, and I loved him for a million little seconds in between. I have never known how to talk about Owen’s death, so I mostly don’t. Trauma wrapped its claws around every last one of us in a dark room that early morning years ago, and my mind-- for its own protection-- does not venture back to it often. When I do reflect, I can see my silence surrounding it is normal. On her album folklore, Taylor Swift wrote a song called “epiphany,” which she explained is about events that happen in life that are so terrible, we cannot formulate words for them. “But you dream of some epiphany...to make some sense of what you’ve seen,” Swift sings. The October morning that Owen died is the scene of my “epiphany.”

The first time I ever held Owen, a year and a half before he died, it felt like both a beginning and an end.  He was tiny and sleeping, red curls sprouting from atop a head with a furrowed brow. I put my lips close to his ear and murmured,

“Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night sailed off in a wooden shoe--

Sailed on a river of crystal light, into a sea of dew.”

Owen’s face flickered as the knot in my throat grew. Earlier this year, I was almost sure I would never get to kiss his face.

I remembered the day, just four months before I first held Owen, that my husband BJ and I received the email that began and ended it all. It was entitled simply, “Owen.” Too broken by her devastating news to speak it aloud, my closest friend Sommer had composed a message about her baby and disseminated it to a small group of recipients. The lives of every name on the list shattered that day as we each read the news: a routine two-month checkup had taken a horrible turn. After realizing Owen was probably blind, doctors admitted him to the hospital for related testing. He had been in a lot of pain the first two months of life, but it was previously thought to be reflux issues. Now, doctors believed that Sommer and Pete’s infant son Owen had a “devastating and life-limiting condition.”

My mind was reeling as I read the email. How could this be possible? Still in denial, my thoughts turned to summer vacation just a few months before, when our families played on a New Hampshire beach together. Sommer and I were both pregnant, laughing aloud at our one-year-olds as they explored the surf and smeared wet sand onto each other’s arms. We never saw this-- whatever this is-- coming. How could we have? And yet, I felt a wave of foolishness wash over me as if I should have known that something was grievously amiss.

I spent the next couple of days in a cold sweat of sorrow; my ignorance about what exactly was going on in Sommer’s life consumed me, but I didn’t want to pry. Instead, I sent encouraging texts (“The Potters heart the Marshalls!”) and waited until she called. I didn’t have to wait long. A few days after the foreboding email, she called me on my commute to work. I pulled into the parking lot and left the engine idling as I listened. I could tell she had had a couple of days to digest the news, because she spoke with few tears.

“Owen has some form of leukodystrophy. Doctors think maybe Krabbe disease,” she calmly told me. “We’re waiting on tests.” My mouth fell open in shock; she need not say much more. I’m a psychologist with an armload of neurobiological classes under my belt. By strange coincidence, I had selected leukodystrophy as the topic of an extensive research paper just two years before, and I knew what it meant, especially at Owen's age: an abnormality of white matter in the brain, an unraveling of the myelin sheaths that insulate precious nerve cells, a horrifying condition that results in death at an early age. In the course of one brief meeting with a team of Boston physicians, Sommer and Pete had gone from thinking their baby had acid reflux to realizing he would not reach childhood. It was an agonizing reality to bear.

BJ and I took the news terribly. Until now, crippling pain had always felt far-off, something we read about on glowing screens before turning our phones to sleep mode. This time, there was almost no distance. The lightning strike was in our own backyard. My closest friend’s son was dying of an exceedingly rare brain disease? Who says this? We were grappling with an unimaginable truth.

Over the past few years, our family’s threads had woven together with the Marshalls, growing in tandem like a pea plant that entwines with neighboring forsythia. Sommer and I had shared the joys of our first pregnancies, delivering babies four days apart-- and then became ever closer as our babies transformed into toddlers before our eyes. We were exhausted, but we loved it. Eager for more punishment, we both quickly became pregnant again, our second pregnancies overlapping in our continued glee. In the wake of the Marshalls’ tragedy, BJ and I both cried daily for at least a month, hugging our only son tightly at regular intervals. We resolved that we would make the trip as a family to Massachusetts as soon as our baby George was born, and I would travel additionally with babies so that we could all see Owen at least twice a year, hopefully more-- always wondering if each goodbye would be the last.

Care packages, daily texts, and phone calls seemed like pitifully inadequate means of reaching out in the wake of such catastrophe. Daily, I felt as though my best friend was getting the living daylights kicked out of her in a dark, locked closet, and I was helpless on the outside. All I could do was lean my tear-streaked cheek against the door and scream.

“I don’t think I can ever be happy again,” she forlornly mused.

“I’m here!” I would howl. “I’m here and I love you! I’ll never leave you, no matter how hard!” I hoped my voice reached her ears as she faced a beast that methodically plucked away every shred of joy she knew. And so I cried and I screamed for two years.

By the time I met Owen for the first time in early April 2012, doctors had found a pharmaceutical cocktail to relieve some of his neurologic agitation. Owen was seven months old and my son George had just turned ten weeks (though it felt hideous for me to not meet Owen straight after his diagnosis in November, my obstetrician had advised me to not travel late in my pregnancy). Our families spent a cherished five days together, playing at playgrounds on beaches under grey skies, consuming large quantities of iced coffees, and cuddling babies. Because Owen could not see books, I had memorized a few to whisper in his ear. During our visit, Sommer played songs from Sesame Street on loop for the kids. To this day when I hear the tune of “Sing-- sing a song!” I taste brownies and yellow, salty grief at the back of my throat.

For the next year and a half, our families laughed, cried, and experienced life together. Despite a 1,746 mile distance between our homes, we were often within reach, seeing new places and tackling new challenges. We watched the ships at Rockport, visited zoos and museums, and trick-or-treated on Halloween night. Owen even traveled to our home in Oklahoma on the one-year anniversary of the awful email. During our time together that weekend, Sommer and I ran a five-kilometer race in white shirts designed by Pete (“One Year Strong: Peace, Hope, Answers,” they read); we crossed the finish line high on emotion, holding hands and reflecting on all that the past year had flung. That day, like so many others in that time period, felt like mining for gems: I hunched and labored in a cold, pitch-black cave with no guide, ill-equipped, and miserable with the anticipation of a total collapse at any moment. But sometimes, rarely, I triumphantly excavated diamonds.

Days before Owen’s second birthday, Pete and Sommer met BJ and me for a long weekend in New York City, where we laughed endlessly at Kama Sutra wallpaper in a hidden speakeasy BJ had found (can humans really bend like that?), and strolled through Central Park on sunny days. I was pregnant again, and Owen was hanging on, though life was incredibly tough with significant seizures, respiratory distress, profound irritability, and round-the-clock needs. Each time we thought it was the end, Owen pulled through and it all became a new beginning. “That O-ster! Our turkey tricked us again!” Sommer would chuckle. Owen’s disease was an extreme rarity; doctors had never been able to give Sommer and Pete a parameter for his life expectancy, in part because even his geneticists never discovered exactly what was going on with Owen, except to say that it wouldn’t be long. The end felt always around the corner, but it never showed itself even as we all braced for it.

Far too quickly, the end came. For a week or two, Owen stopped showing signs of his previous functioning. Though he never gained skills like sitting, speaking, or feeding himself, his unwillingness to engage or even digest food had become apparent. Puzzled, Sommer called on Owen’s palliative care physician, Dr. K, who came for a home visit.

“He’s telling you it’s time,” she gently told Pete and Sommer. “I think it’s time to ramp up his comfort levels and bring in hospice.” Dr. K had been there from the beginning, a trusted voice of reason in an insane reality. They calmly agreed with her, amazed they had not seen it for themselves any sooner.

“I can be there in two days,” I told Sommer on the phone when she called me with the news.

“I hadn’t even considered you would actually come. But, yes, we want you here. Please come-- we can use you,” she sighed, totally spent. Arrangements were made for Pete to pick me up at the airport in Boston. It was perhaps our shortest time ever between visits, as we had been laughing in New York less than two months before.

“This time,” I told my obstetrician, “I’m not messing around. Thirty-three weeks pregnant or not, I have to go. I can’t stay home.”

“You always have your big ideas, don’t you, Dr. Potter?” Dr. Brown mused wryly. He agreed I could go, as my condition wasn’t risky.

I arrived on an October Sunday at what felt like chaos: lots of visitors in the small living room, one of whom was in the rocker, holding Owen to his genuine unhappiness. Two nurses were bustling, clergy and extended family had come to visit Owen, and I was uncomfortable with a large belly after a long flight. Sommer didn’t have to observe this situation for long to realize it was too much: Owen needed to be laid into his bed and held no longer. This is exactly what he seemed to prefer, and that is where he remained over the next few days. We held vigil by the giant bean-bag bed in the dining room, table shoved aside as a medicine cabinet/nurse workstation. We took turns sitting on Owen’s bed with him, looking out the window toward Clinton Street, where the autumn leaves were brilliantly red and falling.

“It doesn’t even make any sense,” I told Sommer’s mother Marylou, whom I had come to know fairly well over the years. “How can it be so beautiful out there? He should be playing in those leaves! It’s like the world doesn’t even know.” Marylou agreed.

We all took shifts with Owen that last week, and there was always a hospice nurse present. Even in the middle of the night, I loved being with him.

“And you shall see the beautiful things as you rock in the misty sea,

Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,”

I whispered into his face. “Owen, your mom and dad said you can go now. You can go be free!” I breathed in his red curls, often watching his throat for breathing movements. Aspiration was a very real fear, as his breathing was erratic and loud. Sometimes he paused for 20 seconds and I stopped breathing too, resigned to the end, before he fooled me by inhaling noisily. “It’s okay, buddy. Go run on your legs! Go see what ice cream tastes like,” I murmured. “It's your mom’s favorite. You’ll love it.”

On the day Owen died, we were up long before the sun. Marylou and I agreed that iced coffees and donuts were going to be the only way the rest of us survived the day. Our souls and brains were fried, mangled by the back-and-forth of life and death that had not ceased for two years; a short respite to gather sugar and caffeine promised the gasp of sanity I needed. As she drove, I absorbed what felt like a foreign scene around me in the passing streets. The sunlight was too bright, the day far too normal-looking. It felt like every person out there should know that we were enduring real-life hell back on Clinton Street while they commuted to work and went for their morning jogs.

Back home with coffees in hand, we all converged in a five-minute meeting in the kitchen to discuss the plan for the day. I looked at the faces around me; along with the exhaustion, I could see determination and resilience. For the first time in a week, I could sense some kind of strange beginning. We were going to be dragged into it kicking and screaming, but we would not keep it from happening. I left the informal meeting first as the others gathered breakfast, and wandered into the dining room to tell Owen’s precious, sleeping face that I would be back after a short nap. I curled up with him momentarily, counting and watching his throat for movements that didn’t come, before looking at last up to his eyes and realizing he had pulled one last great trick: he was already gone. In the course of our brief meeting, alone in the room, Owen slipped away to heaven to play in the leaves and eat ice cream. Though we had expected it for days-- years-- it was somehow a shock. I sharply inhaled, and felt the nurse approach behind me and lay a hand on my shoulder. She confirmed what I had realized as the others scrambled in at her announcement.

The last time I held Owen, his still head was tucked tightly under my chin, and his long, thin body draped over my very large belly. Pete and Sommer had stepped away and gifted me a precious moment to say goodbye. The hearse was on the way to take him; my minutes were few. I sobbed and rocked him, wracked by the injustice of it all, until I fell silent with the realization of the divine enveloping me in that dining room.

Through my tears I looked down to my lap in awe: the weight of a baby whose time had just ended lay physically wrapped around the form of a baby whose time had not yet begun. They were both not quite with me, and yet, they were both very much in my embrace. I closed my eyes to the vision of these two boys in another realm, briefly together: in this moment, my baby was with Owen in some other dimension, crossing paths on a journey that I cannot see or understand, but press my faith into nevertheless. For one small moment in time, the two babies in my arms played together. I was the witness.

What really is the end? For all of humanity’s achievements, we know nothing at all about beginnings and ends. There is a definitive first breath and a definitive last breath, but could there be a million beginnings and ends in the before and after, in the in-between? What if life really is just this transient, tiny tip of the iceberg? Before we arrive on this planet, could we possibly have already lived a thousand journeys, crossed paths with souls who meant everything to us, but which we would be blinded to during our brief stints here? What if this frail, beautiful life we have is just a green and golden-beaded chrysalis, the tiny holding cell between life and more life? Maybe, in this moment, Owen was a monarch butterfly alighting next to my caterpillar son, who would soon be in the chrysalis himself. Maybe they were two boys in another dimension, playing in the leaves right there, and the scales that normally cover my eyes fell for just a brief moment, an epiphany-- as Taylor Swift writes, “just one single glimpse of relief to make some sense of what you’ve seen.”

It is the only way I have ever made sense of it.

The dining room in the home on Clinton Street is once again a dining room, but it doesn’t belong to Pete and Sommer. They moved long ago, but the walls of that colonial-style home whisper a family’s love for a redheaded boy, with no beginning or end. Owen would be turning ten this year if he was still alive. Much has happened since he passed: Sommer gave birth to another baby, a healthy Maisy, who is now in kindergarten. She and her big sister Ellie keep Sommer and Pete on their toes. The Marshalls’ favorite nurses and I remain friends, sharing cards with handwritten notes at the holidays. Two months after arriving home in stricken grief, I gave birth to the baby who was one-third of the divine hug; his middle name is Owen, and he is now seven years old. Perhaps once all-knowing, he is now unaware that he ever crossed paths with Owen. Was his birth a beginning, or was it an end? Perhaps an in-between?

Owen’s scent is still a discernible phantom for me; even now I can feel his satin cheeks when I close my eyes and try. I sometimes think of him when I see children playing in colorful October leaves. Sommer, Pete, BJ, and I still gather and reminisce, crying and laughing, about the beautiful boy who never grew up. We were the witnesses. His life was an epiphany-- an end without end.

The leaves outside my bedroom window were turning red and gold. My annual October feelings of wretchedness and grief had begun to stir already; it was the end of October when I lost my son five years before. I had a tough personal challenge to face: it was time to open the lid of a black, cardboard box filled with selenite crystals. What appeared to be just an innocent jumble of amber-colored, angular rocks was, to me, a nauseating wave of crushing memories. The crystals were mementos gone all wrong, the antithesis of concert-ticket stubs and fortune-cookie messages that I keep after happy occasions. Still, I opened that box for the first time in years. As I did, my breath caught audibly in my throat as I thought about why I was doing something so hard for me. For a moment I closed my eyes in a dramatic self-protective gesture, as the scene of my family gathering those crystals hung before me, practically visible as I allowed my memories to come.

Five years nearly to the day before, my family had been on a camping trip to the Great Salt Plains, a giant slab of land in northwest Oklahoma covered in salt from an ancient inland sea that has long-since evaporated. Standing on the edge and looking out toward it, one could easily believe she is facing a flat, white tundra that stretches for miles. Six months out of the year, visitors can walk out onto the crusty, treeless salt plains and carefully dig for selenite crystals, which can be found just a few inches underground. It is the only place in the world to find hourglass selenites, and permission is granted to keep what you dig.

Our family of five-- my husband BJ, my three small boys, and I, pregnant with a fourth boy, arrived at the eerie-looking plains in jubilant fashion, sporting shovels and ready to get dirty. In my fuzzy memories, there was laughter, salty peanut-butter sandwiches, cool September weather, and a fabulous adventure. The five of us dug small holes all over the place looking for crystal treasure as the heavy, grey skies threatened to open and pour at any moment. The place was deserted. Before we were truly ready to leave, the rain began to fall. Scrambling to the van and laughing as we got drenched, we piled inside and carefully arranged our dozens of delicate, salty crystals amidst tufts of paper towels in a makeshift box. Afterwards, I would see the storm as a metaphor for all the misery that came next-- a crystalline moment in life terminated prematurely by a thunderclap.

The boys slept on the way home as BJ and I quietly dreamed of the future. We named our baby on the drive home.

“I like the name Clarence,” I admitted with a shrug.

“Clarence?” BJ asked skeptically. “Where did you come up with that?”

“You know, like the guardian angel from It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s just a sweet name. Clarence,” I repeated.

“I don’t think so. What about Alton?” he suggested.

Back and forth we traded, each insisting on certain middle names and arguing our ideas until we settled in the middle, satisfied, on Jude O’Neil. During the last half of the conversation, I tried to ignore the rising nausea within me, attributing it to pregnancy hormones and motion-sickness. By the time we pulled into our driveway, I was so sick I ran straight to the bathroom.

The vomiting and intense stomach cramps did not remit for nearly two weeks. Two weeks of a stomach virus that prevented me from nourishing my unborn baby, two weeks of losing everything I put in, losing ten pounds on a frame that was already thin. Two weeks of urgent care and emergency room visits, blood draws, IV fluids, medications to ease my pain. In the end, I lost my son anyway. My beautiful baby had lost his chance at life.

In the autumn months that followed the salt plains and the miscarriage, BJ painstakingly cleaned many of the crystals we discovered, and he stored them in a small, black box that was easily accessible to the boys, so they could peruse their treasures when they wished. He managed his own grief on a back burner, experiencing it in bouts much later even, as he put his focus on seeing me through the initial aftermath. As time went by and my grief bent me in half, I began to feel physical disgust for that box of crystals. BJ had done a marvelous job of removing the physical reminders that I could not bear to see at the time-- the medical bills, flowers we had been given, the positive pregnancy test that I couldn’t make myself throw away-- but somehow those crystals were just the worst. The camping trip, I felt, had been the beginning of the end. I was furious, and I was broken. Looking for something to blame, I settled on the salt plain and its crystals.

Eventually BJ hid the black box of crystals on the highest, left-most shelf of our eleven-foot, built-in bookcase. Stuffed alongside gardening books and a few well-worn sketchpads, it was meant to never be seen unless one went purposely looking. I never looked. The box gathered a film of dust for five years until the autumn of 2020, when I finally went purposely looking. I had a challenge to face.

As I slowly ran my palms across the smooth wood of the blue ladder leading up the bookcase, I silently cursed my stubborn nature. In recent months, I had become unsettled by my resentment toward these inanimate keepsakes. My children had asked time and again to return to the salt plains, and I had refused. When I thought about the situation rationally, I could see the salt plains had nothing to do with my son’s death-- yet I had given them the power to affect me anyway. The negativity surrounding them had claimed free rent in my soul, but it was never the salt plains’ fault. My hatred for the crystals had been my own doing.

The psychologist in me knew this overarching truth: facing head-on the anxieties that rob us of our serenity can often yield huge feelings of accomplishment and peace. It was time. I needed to face this box of crystals and reclaim the pieces of myself that had, in essence, crystallized from blame and hatred. Heaving a sigh, I appealed to the universe for good vibes and climbed the ladder up to the godforsaken box.

This, I thought, is going to suck.

As I pulled the small box from its shelf and opened its lid at my desk, my breath audibly caught in my throat, and I felt a thud in my chest. Congregated to the left side of the box in one big sleep-pile, the crystals almost looked afraid of me, as though they had gathered under the mantra of safety in numbers. I found this scenario to be unexpectedly amusing, and I nearly smiled; if only they knew I was far more afraid of them than they were of me.

Nauseated, I pulled them out one by one and studied them closely until my hands found a crystal that felt comfortable: heart-shaped and with a glassy smoothness. My fingers were irresistibly drawn to it. It boasted a translucency that many of the others lacked, revealing a pocket of earth under its surface. Under the light, I hovered over my chosen crystal with the magnifying glass from a “Junior Scientist” kit as my son George walked in.

“I can’t believe I actually found one I like!” I exclaimed to him.

“Cool,” he said in his stylish eight-year-old manner, peering over my shoulder. “It looks like a weird-shaped heart. Or a shark tooth!”

I scarcely believed the next words that tumbled from my mouth, though they had been bubbling under the surface, unwilling to be admitted aloud until now.

“I wonder if we should go back to the salt plains. What would you think about that?” George’s eyes widened with the possibility.

“Sure!” he exclaimed. “You mean like, next week when we have fall break?”

Whoa, I thought. Now it’s out and real. Next week?

“I guess we could do it next week,” I replied slowly, gears in my head turning as George whooped and ran to tell his brothers. A sense of adventure was slowly gaining speed on the nausea I felt; within just another moment, it was outweighing it.

So it came to be that we found ourselves loaded in the van the following Thursday morning, headed to the abominated salt plains. Sandwiches were packed, road-trip entertainment for the boys was prepared, towels and shovels packed neatly in the back with an ice chest, a playlist of inspiring songs queued and ready.

I was loaded with support and well-wishes, and a vehicle full of my boys and husband. I wasn’t alone. Though I was apprehensive about how painful it might be when we arrived at the plains, I knew facing them again was something I needed to do. The drive there was calm and sunny.

The wrench came flying into our glorious plan three hours later as we rolled to a stop in front of a closed gate at the entrance to the park. The gaping, ivory plains lay in full view just beyond the forbidding, white sign that read in all-capital blue letters, “AREA BEYOND THIS SIGN CLOSED.” Adjacent to it was a sign eight times larger shouting, “Report Trespass into Closed Areas to Sheriff!” with a phone number listed.

BJ moaned loudly. “You have GOT to be kidding me!”

“Um, no,” I emphatically stated. “It doesn’t actually mean it’s closed.” BJ quietly disagreed, knowing the reality was not what I wanted to hear from him.

“What’s going on?” the boys began chiming and clamoring from the rear of the vehicle.

“Just… give me a minute! I can’t!” I said in exasperation as I flung open the door.

I stepped out and breathed in the fresh air so I could mutter expletives as I walked up the ramp of a nearby platform overlooking the plains. A frustrated family at the top had an apologetic park ranger on speakerphone. A quick eavesdrop told me all I needed to know: the plains had closed for the season yesterday in order to assist bird migratory patterns, and would not reopen for six months. In all my preparations I had overlooked the simple act of checking to make sure the place was actually open. We had missed the digging season by a mere day. As I grappled with the reality of this massive foul up, tears began forming. I thought about the news I was going to have to deliver my children-- tidings they had probably already received in the van from their father.

Credit to those boys for their sweet acceptance of such a disappointing outcome. They stood on the lowest rung of the metal gate, arms draped over the edge and looking out to the plains as BJ and I set up a blanket and our meal in the long grass to the side of the road. Our family made conversation about what a weird year it was as we ate our sandwiches and watched numerous cars approach the gate, read the sign, and drive away.

The irony of our situation was not lost on me. After years of avoiding any mention of this place at all costs, there was suddenly nowhere else I’d rather be but beyond those gates. This paradox sat in my craw for the next half hour as we ate, explored the legal side of the gate, and packed up for the long trip home.

I don’t even know what made me do it. I’m usually a rule-follower. I may look slightly alternative with a facial piercing and visible tattoos, but I was the girl who cried in first grade when my name got written on the chalkboard for whispering to Meredith Prykryl during quiet time. So I surprised even myself when I announced to my family,

“When that car drives away, I’m going out there. Anyone else want to come?”

"Yeah! Can I go?” six-year-old Van asked eagerly, joined quickly by George. Their newfound respect for me shone in their nearly-identical brown eyes.

“Seriously?” BJ asked, turning to face me. “What are you going to do out there? Not dig!”

“I’m going to run and dance and laugh. I’m making peace with this place today,” I told him resolutely. Getting caught trespassing didn’t seem like my favorite way to round out the day, but neither did not running out to the plains to shake out my demons.

My oldest son Silas is the least likely of my children to buck the system; not surprisingly, he stayed behind with BJ. My younger three sons (we welcomed one more after our miscarriage) were positively delighted to skirt the rules and join me. When the last remaining car pulled out of sight, we squeezed through the horizontal pipes of the gate with broad grins, feeling like thieves in the night.

“Hurry!” I prodded, unabashedly encouraging minors in the gross neglect of state mandates. “We may not have much time before the next car comes!”

We wasted not a moment, skipping the hundred yards through the tall grasses along the gravel walkway to make our way to the plains. And when our tennis shoes at last touched the salty crust, we hit the ground running. The feelings of lightness and freedom were instantaneous for us all. I ran with my face to the blue, cloudless sky-- no chance of rain this time. Laughing and whooping, we circled like airplanes, zigzagging through each other with arms held aloft, soaking up all the warmth that the sun and white earth had to offer. We danced and skipped, closing the cover on a book that desperately needed finishing. And when we were done, we lay down on our backs, spread-eagled, relishing our feelings of smallness on this vast plain under an endless blue sky.

"I release you," I whispered to the bizarre landscape surrounding me, pressing my cheek against the salt. My children danced around me as I gazed back up to the blue beyond. The sun shone warm on my face, a light-hearted reminder to me that things can go wrong, and then go wrong again, and keep going wrong until suddenly they become right.

Having kids was for schmucks; I was sure of it. I never wanted to have children. Raising kids seemed like a ceaseless babysitting job to me, and I was never the babysitting type. My sister and friends reveled in caring for other people’s children. I was the babysitter who counted down the minutes until the headlights pulled into the driveway after a long night of feigned enthusiasm. Why would I want that to be my whole life?

My husband BJ knew this about me when we got married, and he was supportive. He hoped to have children someday, but it wasn’t a deal-breaker. He never pressured me to change my mind. As the years rolled by he seemed content, and I convincingly laid out my arguments.

“We have spare money, spare time, hobbies, travel interests, “ I argued, counting the reasons on my fingers. “All of these would be compromised by small, screaming humans.” And so we spent the years binge-watching college football, baking Julia Child recipes, and playing tennis at the park along the banks of the Mississippi River. Life was predictable, and I very much enjoyed our freedom. When we wanted to meet our friends for dinner after work, go canoeing in the boundary waters of northern Minnesota for the weekend, or take a last-minute trip to South Korea, we could.

Fast forward 15 years and you’ll see that I am now a mother to four little boys. If ‘2021 Jenny’ could have a chat over coffee with ‘2008 Jenny,’ it would be a riot. 2021 Jenny would arrive for the meeting in her minivan, toting what she calls her “Mary Poppins” bag filled with everything from Matchbox cars to splinter-removal kits. She is tattooed, pierced, and her bobbed hair is shaved short on one side, a representation to her of all of the worlds she has walked in as a mother. 2008 Jenny, with her minuscule purse and pressed chinos, definitely has opinions about what she sees, but holds them close as she flips her waist-length hair over her shoulder and convinces herself she probably knows what’s best.

“You’ll have FOUR kids one day. Boys!” 2021 Jenny would declare with a straight face and one raised eyebrow. “And you’ll think it’s amazing!” Past Jenny would freeze for a moment in panic, and then wave her hand dismissively.

“Pfft. Is that before or after I win the Pulitzer?”

“Girl, get this,” 2021 Jenny would go on, ignoring her past self. “You’re even going to own a sewing machine!” She would proclaim it in that annoying manner that elders sometimes take, usually when they know exactly what they’re talking about even though youths don’t want to admit it. The Jennies would have a stare-down and then they would both dissolve into fits of laughter. 2008 Jenny had absolutely no clue what was coming.

It all seemed to happen like one giant boom. After the dust settled, I realized it all began at the used-book sale hosted by the public library when I was 28 years old. Newly-graduated with my doctoral degree and care-free as a lazy Sunday matinee, I browsed through the small, sleepy trailer that held the 50-cent paperbacks. The hot air hung heavily with the scent of old pages as I absentmindedly thumbed across faded spines. My eyes came to rest on Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone, and in that moment, Life threw me a knuckleball straight from the Boston Red Sox playbook. Into the cart went the creased, cerulean paperback, and out went my heart and my sanity.

I read She’s Come Undone that summer, and life was never the same. BJ describes that June as the month his wife “turned on a dime.” Throughout much of the novel, the protagonist, Dolores, longs for a child. As I became increasingly immersed in Dolores’ journey, I suddenly comprehended the ache for children within myself. In the span of mere days, I went from full-tilt relishing my independence to dreaming about life with a child on my hip. What was once expansive freedom now felt like a throbbing, joyless exile. It happened practically overnight, and yet I sensed it had been there a lifetime. As the pages turned, my ache intensified.

“What in the sweet hell is happening to me?” I whispered to myself again and again, wracking my brain. Throughout the course of just one week I cried a bucket of tears for a fictional character, realizing as the days went by that some of those tears were really for me. I pitied myself for the sudden emptiness I felt without a child. Excitement, terror, love, and relief coursed through me simultaneously, which as it turns out, is a nauseating cocktail. The night I finished the novel, I sat on the hill in our backyard and watched the sunset, crying for an hour from the sheer overwhelming feelings of this turnabout. I wanted a kid? This had to be my worst scheme yet.

I began planning the conversation I knew I had to have with BJ. By the next evening, I could no longer contain myself. I knew from observing him that he would be a fabulous father, and that this would be joyous news to his ears. Even so, I wanted to have this conversation about as much as I wanted to skydive into the Everglades. Somehow talking about it would make it real, and real can be very scary.

“BJ,” I began shakily. “We need to talk.”

“Okay,” he said, visibly becoming nervous. He was used to my wily ways, knowing full well that my ‘talks’ often led to ploys like us joining a recreational soccer league (we had played zero days of our lives, and it showed) and co-leading a group of hormonal high-schoolers in a year-long community service effort (I felt convicted). Marriage with me has never been a walk in the park, but he has always buckled up for the ride. “Go on,” he bravely granted.

“So…” I paused, my back against our back door, my hand on the knob in case I decided to turn and bolt. “I was thinking maybe we should try to have a baby.”

He laughed, which is a fabulous indicator to the ludicrousy of my turnabout. When he saw I wasn’t laughing also, he became somber.

“Are you serious?” he asked incredulously.

“I know, right?” I squeaked, before bursting into tears. “I don’t know what happened, but there’s this awful and wonderful ache, and I think we should have a baby. Like, maybe even three babies. Or maybe even five!”

“Okay, whoa,” BJ interjected, touching me on my shoulders and settling me as I drove headlong into mild hysteria. “Let’s talk about this.” But I could see he was already smiling, and we both already knew where this was going. We talked, we cried, we threw my birth-control pills in the trash, and we laughed about the absurdity of this abrupt reroute in our life plan. That evening, he and I opened a bottle of wine and began dreaming of possibilities as we attempted to let nature take its course.

Within three weeks, I changed my mind again. Obviously, I reasoned, I was being an impulsive fool. What if we hated parenthood and then were stuck with it? I may never again have a free moment to myself! Commitment, as we all know, can be a terribly frightening nip in the ass. Luckily for BJ and me, however, I’m apparently the most fertile of the Myrtles that ever lived. It was already too late. Before I could say, “Wait, what?”, there were two pink lines on a stick and my pants didn’t fit anymore. Our first boy was on his way!

As the months flew by, my shock wore off, and I warmed considerably to the idea of being his mother. By the second half of the pregnancy, I was in love. Just thinking about holding him was the most enjoyable daydream I had ever imagined.

“Okay, this is actually going to be amazing,” I murmured to him in confidence as I protectively rubbed my tummy. My singular goal in life became figuring out how I, an historically-underwhelming babysitter with the parenting know-how of the McCallisters from Home Alone, was going to keep a tiny human being alive and happy. How was I going to succeed? BJ and I had no earthly idea what was in store for us.

                * * * * *

My son is almost eleven years old now. We are still learning, and he is still alive and happy. One child was not enough; we couldn’t stop before four. 2008 Jenny is still marveling how it happened, but she never loved carrying small purses anyway. I laugh now to think that my children are everything I thought I never wanted. They are responsibility, long hours, physical toil, and frequent worry. My index finger smelled of diaper creme for nearly a decade. The songs I hum in the shower have lyrics like, “The horse says neigh-- neigh, neigh, neigh!” A concerned policeman once rang our doorbell in the middle of the night, ascertaining our safety because we left our garage door up, all four car doors flung open, the keys in the ignition, and the diaper bag forgotten in the front seat. The officer apparently didn’t realize that we had a newborn, a one-year-old, and a three-year-old, which newly entitled us to transfer our sleeping children and then collapse into bed ourselves, forgetting to do little tasks like, you know, locking up the house after returning late from an evening with BJ's parents.

In spite of all this, my children are my beating heart walking around outside of my body, as Elizabeth Stone once wrote. Each night I tiptoe into their barracks to smear Chapstick on their lips-- unconsciousness is the only time they will allow me to do it-- and I breathe in their little boy scents one by one, from two sets of bunk beds crammed into a small room. In the darkness, I give silent thanks to the universe and to Dolores for nudging me to realize that motherhood was in me; it was just a yearning that materialized belatedly and without warning. My children, I have decided, are infinitely better than the babysitting jobs that my past self couldn’t wait to end.

There is just something about being mothers, about wanting to know where our children are and that someone is looking out for them. Checking on the whereabouts of one's children equates to solace and safety– especially when they are young– and knowing they are secure means life can continue. For mothers whose babies and children are on the other side of eternity, the missing and 'not knowing' is the hardest part. If only someone could give us a report every now and then, assuring us the babies we love are thriving, even if we cannot hold them ourselves.

Since the miscarriage of our son, Hjarta, four years before, I had come to believe my baby’s spirit wandered in the wilds of Iceland. My conviction of this was born upon his death, at which time I gave him an Icelandic word for a name. During his pregnancy and my subsequent recovery, I was heavily affected by the Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men, whose music I had loved for years. Their songs gave form to my otherwise indescribable grief, and this led me down a rabbit hole of all things Iceland. In my anguish, I seemed to keep my sanity by reading all that I could about Icelandic culture, history, music, and travel. What began as a single song had, over time, morphed into an all-out, swirling certainty that being in Iceland would help me connect with my lost son. Such are the eccentricities of grief.

It was for this reason my husband BJ and I found ourselves in Iceland– a small, frozen island where the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans converge– one perfect, grey November morning. The first day of experiencing Reykjavík had been pure bliss; the second day would take us on a journey outside of town to the Golden Circle, whose sights included Þingvellir (where the Vikings began gathering a thousand years before), one of the world's most famous geysers, and a waterfall called Gullfoss, where I particularly believed Hjarta's spirit might be.

BJ knew exactly how much this day meant to me. Touring the Golden Circle was something I had my sight on for a few years. Traveling to Iceland and seeing the northern lights were the top two items on my life’s bucket list, and so he had suggested this journey. We both knew through the calamity of losing our baby, my road to healing led straight through the heart of Iceland. And so we waited, bellies full of warm croissants, coffee, and Icelandic cheese, outside the Hótel Klettur for the bus and our tour guide, who would make the journey with us through the Golden Circle.

At last, the white luxury bus turned onto the street and whooshed to a stop in front of us. We stepped forward as the doors parted, and I half-held my breath with the anxiety of being a confused foreigner. The instant that I glimpsed our guide’s warm, inquisitive smile from the top step of the bus, though, my rigid uncertainty melted into relief, and I exhaled my white cloud of breath into the cold air. Instinct suggested that she was not a stranger.

“Jennifer?” she asked, calling me by my formal name from our registration.

“Yes!” I replied enthusiastically. “Góðan daginn!”

Her mouth opened in surprise and her eyes widened as I wished her a good day in the Icelandic language. Instantly my anxiety returned, but only for a moment, as I worried that I had inadvertently offended her.

“You learned some Icelandic! Nobody ever does that!” she said with a bemused smile as she beckoned us onto the warm bus.

“Oh,” I replied, surprised and a little disappointed in my fellow foreigners as I climbed the stairs. “I think that’s kind of sad. It seems important to at least try.”

“My name is María. I’ll be your guide today," she responded. "I want to talk more with you,” she continued as she quickly introduced us to the driver and then pointed us to an empty row on the left side of the bus. I settled happily into my soft seat with its huge window, and shivered in giddiness as I listened to the accents around me. This excursion was going to take me places I had dreamed of for so long!

To my surprise, María followed us back to our seats, making clear she actually did want to speak more with us. She was approximately 40 years old, with long, auburn hair and a kind, round face. Her relaxed eyes seemed to convey the joy of years' worth of adventuring around Iceland, which I would soon learn is one of her personal passions. She expertly donned a brown and olive green lopapeysa, the traditional Icelandic wool sweater. For the first ten minutes of our ride, María sat in the seat opposite the aisle from BJ and me, her legs facing into the walkway, and she asked us about our lives. She wanted to know where we were from, and what it would be like for her if she was to visit.

“I’m from a small town in northern Iceland,” she explained. “Reykjavík is big, and it took me a long time to get used to it.” Internally I observed that Reykjavík is fairly unpopulated, even compared to my hometown in Oklahoma; how small must her hometown be, I wondered? María conjectured aloud how she might feel in a place like New York City, which I mentioned to her as one of my favorite places in the United States. I remember instantly feeling trepidation for her, as though her untarnished Icelandic heart could not bear to beat in the pollution and din of a place like New York.

I felt at ease with María as she spoke. Her curiosity about my life flattered me, and I could tell that she genuinely cared. Since we were the last ones to board the bus, I am unclear if she behaved this way with everyone or if she took a particular interest in us because I greeted her in Icelandic. Either way, I broadly grinned as she taught BJ and me new words in Icelandic, some of which required repeated practice. I didn't feel embarrassed when she corrected me.

As our bus left the city and made its way into more rural parts of Iceland, María returned to the front of the bus, where she referred to herself as “María the Guide” throughout the day. Though her words were beautifully accented, her English was fluent. She spent the hour that it took for us to reach the first destination of the Golden Circle serenading us with facts about Iceland, and making us all laugh with her easy-going nature. She joked about how easily Icelanders can pronounce the name of the volcano “Eyjafjallajökull,” which the rest of the world referred to simply as E-16 (16 letters in its name!) when it erupted in 2010, causing worldwide delays in air traffic. For good measure, she flawlessly pronounced it another seven times as we guffawed in merriment and fascination.

Our day was packed with stops at beautiful places. María patiently guided us on how to negotiate the icy walkways of Þingvellir National Park in extremely windy conditions; unlike most of us, she maintained her patience as two French tourists arrived back to the bus twenty minutes late, from the opposite direction in which she had gone into the bitter wind looking for them. María arranged for us to feed Icelandic horses at a nearby farm, which was unexpected and exhilarating for us. All day long at every stop, María found a warm balance between guiding us foreigners through new experiences and letting us explore the novelties for ourselves. Like securely-attached children, we set out independently on small adventures, knowing she was a reliable base to which we could return.

We stopped for lunch at the geothermal Geysir and its sidekick Strokkur, which faithfully hurls scorching water high into the air every few minutes with a giant hiss. The English word for 'geyser,' we learned, was derived from this original source. María accompanied BJ and me into the restaurant across the street and strongly recommended we try her usual, the daily fish special with curried vegetables. As we waited in line for our food, she and I swapped stories about motherhood.

“Sometimes my son and I are like yin and yang,” she mused. Though María wished her son joined her for more outdoor activities in lieu of video games, she pointed out that nothing was better than motherhood. BJ and I reflected on her words as we inhaled the delicious fish and vegetables.

The afternoon proved to be even better than the morning. Our first stop was Gullfoss, which, more than anything, was the reason we had come. When I saw my first photograph of Gullfoss a year before, some motherly intuition clicked within me: my fervent hope in visiting Gullfoss was to set foot in a place where I could feel the baby I had never had a chance to meet. I had come to believe that my son’s spirit wandered in the cliffs over that waterfall.

María told us we would have 25 minutes to explore Gullfoss before we needed to return to the bus. The lowest viewing point was closed off by a chain; Icelanders are wise enough to not buck such guidelines, knowing that a "closed" or "beware" sign in their home country means that the field beyond is probably boiling or some such atrocity. Foreigners, we were told, sometimes need it spelled out to us: "If you duck under that chain and try to view from the lowest viewing point, you will encounter an icy chute that will deliver you to your certain death in the falls." Noted. We proceeded with the others to the middle viewing point.

As we approached the roped area, my hands instinctively pressed against either side of my head; I could hardly contain the explosion of love, relief, and gratefulness within me. At Gullfoss, meaning "Golden Falls," the Hvítá river plunged in two heart-stopping stages, creating a rising, white mist that perfectly harmonized with the icy, craggy scenery surrounding it. Between the deafening roar of the water and the intensely high winds, BJ and I could barely hear one another speak. I inhaled deeply the cold air as it rushed against my face, knowing that this is my son's playing field. He lives and wanders happily here as a wild spirit--as a mother, I simply knew it.

Crying and smiling, I took photos of the falls while holding a heart-shaped quartz rock that was gifted to me by my close friend, Nicole. Nicole's idea was to have my loved ones hold the stone before I left home, so it may absorb their individual energies which I could then share with Iceland– a conveyer of hearts, so to speak. Conversely, while in Iceland, I could absorb the energies of Hjarta and my soul's homeland to stay forever within the rock once it was back home.

After absorbing the sight of the waterfall itself, I began taking in the details of the place. The grey and white sky seemed to hang just overhead, and I observed a small cliff at the upper left of the falls. Something clicked in my heart, and I knew without a doubt that this cliff was Hjarta's haunt. I could sense it was sacred space. Tracing back with my eyes, I could see that the cliff was accessible via a staircase behind us. There was no chain restricting us from the upper cliffs, and I could see other brave people milling about high overhead. I told BJ that I had to go, and he said he wanted to come with me.

The stairs were numerous and icy, but the real test was the path out to the cliff; the winds were unbelievably high, and twice they blew me completely off the icy walkway into the snow.

Short on time, we hurried on to the cliff, though, and I made my peace in the three minutes I had to spare. Sinking to my knees on the bluff overlooking the deafening water below, I felt more complete than I perhaps ever had. I pressed my rose quartz into the gravelly snow to absorb a fraction of my son's spirit, and to share with him the spirits of his brothers, who had all warmed the rock with their own soft hands. Its toasty, pink, smooth surface blended exquisitely with the icy, wet, volcanic black gravel it absorbed: a yin and yang for all time.

Our experience at Gullfoss was brief, but it was enough. We hurried back onto the bus, our entrance feeling like an emotional burst into an otherwise quiet, warm scene of serene people. We were the last to arrive, but no one seemed to mind. María greeted us warmly.

"Did you enjoy Gullfoss?" she asked with a smile, not knowing the significance of the last 25 minutes upon my heart.

"Yes! So much!" I replied with a smile, too choked with emotion to even apologize for being the last ones back to the bus.

Our final stop was at the Secret Lagoon, a geothermal spring of intensely hot water, which was a thrilling contrast to the freezing air temperature that we sprinted through wearing only our swimsuits. María circled the perimeter of the lagoon, bringing Scandinavian ciders and snapping photographs upon request. We and our small busload of comrades passed the next hour in solid goosebumps, with frozen noses and pink-hot bodies, as dusk fell into night.

I relished the experience, but was ready to leave the lagoon's waters before BJ. After showering and cozying back into my warm, fleece sweater, I wandered into the recreational room, filled with long tables and refreshments. María was seated across from a British woman, whose self-deprecating humor had me frequently chuckling throughout the day.

"The flight from London to Reykjavík was only 50 pounds!" the blonde, British lady exclaimed in wonder. "I thought, for three hours I can go through just about anything for that price. The space was so tight that my knees were pinned to my chest, but hell! There's plenty of duty-free wine to buy in the airport once you arrive. I reminded myself of that every minute!" she chuckled merrily, a half-empty glass of wine in her gesturing hand. I liked this woman.

The seat beside María was empty. My temperament on any other day would have been to take a seat alone and contentedly observe the others, but this, I knew, wasn’t any other day. I bravely asked María’s permission as I slid in beside her, and she warmly said yes, inquiring about my day.

María wasn’t what I had come to expect of Icelanders. She took away every ounce of intimidation I felt about being an imposition. Experience and research taught me Icelanders generally keep to themselves around strangers; I had read somewhere Icelanders think Americans talk far too much. I had steeled myself to not be that foreigner– the one who just won’t shut up. When María looked at me, though, her entire demeanor seemed open. Her face always folded itself into an easy smile, and there was never tension around her eyes.  I drew a shaky breath and asked,

“Can I tell you something?” She turned her body to me in response.

The words poured forth from me as María and the British comedienne listened intently.

"A few years ago, I miscarried a baby," I told them. Their eyes both immediately showed concern, and I felt it safe to continue. "When I lost him, it helped me to hear music from your country," I looked to María. "It was soothing to hear songs from Of Monsters and Men in my head all the time– especially the song "King and Lionheart," a song about a sister separated from her beloved brother.

"My baby was my little lionheart, so I named him the word 'heart' in the Icelandic language." I showed María my hand, the side of which is tattooed with 'Hjarta.' "I felt him at Gullfoss today. He was there, I believe. I think that's where he always is now. It helps me to know that."

To my surprise, María’s eyes spilled over with tears. She did not tell me I was an American who talked too much. She did not seem embarrassed or overwhelmed by my personal story. I could tell that my experience meant something to her.

“If ever your path comes again to Iceland," she said, "You have to promise me that you will contact me, even after ten or 100 years.” She seemed pleased for me when I told her BJ and I planned to attend an Of Monsters and Men concert the following evening, and we talked music until it was time for our return trip to Reykjavík.

The bus ride home was dark and quiet. I reveled in the glory of the day, giddy to find myself in Iceland– relieved at having connected with my baby. In the pitch-black of the early evening, I scrolled through my phone's photo gallery again and again, reliving the moments spent in the Golden Circle.

At last, the bus pulled up to the curb of the Hótel Klettur once again, this time to release us with full hearts. María made her way down the steps in front of me.

"Today was good!" she said with grin. "But tomorrow will be even better, don't you think? Of Monsters and Men!" And with that, she pulled me into a tight hug, confirming to me her comfort with the intense joy and relief I had experienced and shared with her that day. Mother to mother, I hugged her back and thanked her. She had been far more than a tour guide to the Golden Circle that day; she had personally escorted me to peace and freedom.

Upon our return home, I told everyone I was close with about María because I couldn’t get her off my mind. The day we spent with her had been a salve to my long-aching wound; in many ways, she had enabled my healing. She was like the medic who had skillfully and kindly guided me to the hospital, never comprehending that her routine shift had meant so much to my existence.

"How can she know this if I don't tell her?" I asked my friend Nicole, who had given me the rose quartz. She and I were having one of our frequent heart-to-hearts over coffee.

"I think you should contact her," Nicole said in her usual peaceful tone. Nicole's relaxed rhythms remind me of María in many ways, often soothing those around her without ever knowing.

"Is that weird, do you think?" I asked, once again feeling the insecurity of over-sharing.

"She deserves to know the impact she has had on you," Nicole concluded. In the end, I knew Nicole was right. This world is filled with people whose strings cross and pull all the time, leaving imprints on others constantly. When we create a lasting impact on another person, wouldn't it be nice to know? Thus, I found María's email address and gathered my grateful, jumbled thoughts.

"It's kind of funny, the idea that you can never really know what another person is experiencing unless they tell you," I wrote. "To anyone who was on our bus that day, I looked exactly like a tourist on a bus having a great day. And I was... but there was so much more to it than that." Beneath my surface, I wrote, was a woman in a desperate search to connect with her son at a specific Icelandic waterfall. Sometimes, for a mother who has lost her baby but still must carry on, self-protection is essential, and so we throw our faith into things.

“I could not be content with the vagaries of "heaven”-- whatever that is,” I wrote. “Believing that my son is in heaven was not enough for me. If I press my belief into him being in a wild and beautiful place like Gullfoss, I can rest much easier for the rest of my days. And you, María, were so very important in facilitating this for me. From the very start of the day, your warmth and encouragement were obvious; I felt so comfortable with you. I knew you were there to help me, and your heart--hjarta-- was so kind. You played a significant role on one of the most treasured days of my life. I will never forget you or your kindness.”

I did not hear back from María for some time. The purpose of opening my heart to her was to share her importance, and as long as she knew how much she had helped me, my mission was complete. Six months passed, and I thought of her daily, always with gratitude. Just knowing that María's peaceful presence was in the vicinity of my son's spirit was a consistent balm to me; they were both half the world away, but at least their paths crossed with one another sometimes. It was enough for me.

One hot afternoon at the end of May, a return email unexpectedly arrived. My heart must have skipped a beat when I saw she was the sender.

“Hello dear Jenny,” it began. “I have thought of you and Hjarta so many times… My biggest regret is that I should have given you more time to absorb and sink in at the beautiful place Gullfoss. I just might have a point with Hjarta spirits gliding over Gullfoss... At least my mind always travels to you when I am there. All my best to you both, and I hope I will meet again.” Signed, “Warm hugs,” from María.

I wept in relief all the tears I didn’t even know I was holding in. There it was, all laid out for me: our tour guide had done far more for me than sign up to guide a busload of us around the Golden Circle that day. In her infinite kindness, María had implicitly pledged to join her heart with my son’s “gliding spirit” each time she visited his resting spot.

I still miss Hjarta every day, but I no longer struggle with the "not knowing" of where my son is. My head hits the pillow at night knowing the exact view from his cliff. María is my perfect surrogate, and my soul rests easier knowing she is there, too– a warm, reliable guardian from which my son’s spirit can venture and return.

When people describe what the year 2020 was like for them and how it makes them feel, it seems generally agreed-upon that it was a year unlike the rest. For me, 2020 was a swirl of unpredictability, victory, challenge, boredom, grief, intimacy, and isolation. It was each of these, and yet it somehow was also its own agitation--as though I illustrated the events of my life this past year and then ran my hand across the wet ink, leaving behind a smear containing real but unnameable building blocks.

Though I don't talk about it with most people, I am a synesthete, which means my sensory experiences sometimes get cross-wired. People with synesthesia experience all kind of strange sensory phenomena, but what we all have in common is a blending of one perceptual sense into another. I hate seeing blackbirds en masse on a power line because I taste the abhorrent crunch of their delicate bones in my mouth when I look at them. The color schemes of a painting have literally made me ill. The stifling heat of a summer afternoon is, to me, an umami aroma, much like inhaling the scent of miso soup. This is not to be confused with late-evening summer heat, though; when the setting sun is behind the trees on hot evenings, the heat I feel on my skin smells sour, like pink lemonade. In my world, tastes are sometimes colors, and the music I hear becomes irrelevant, vibrant visions.

I hardly know how to write about what I am only beginning to name. I have only recently come to take interest in how synesthesia affects my perception of the world. Until lately, I have just taken it for granted. The fact that the '2020 swirl' is difficult to define in language doesn't make it any less real, though. What I can articulate about where we all are in this unique place in time, this hopeful transition from 2020 to 2021, is that it smells very much like a peppermint stick, and it resembles a snowy day where the white, swirling clouds are hardly distinguishable from the fields below them. In recent days, my brain's backdrop is a photograph I took of the Icelandic countryside from a moving bus. My favorite photo has become my current existence.

I know we aren't all synesthetes, but I'm willing to bet that most of us have some commonalities right about now. Some of us are feeling hopeful. Some of us are stretched so thin, one more mishap feels like it may shatter us completely. Some of us are eager, and some can barely get out of bed. Some of us are inundated by the volume and energy of the homes from which we can't seem to escape, and some of us are lonelier than we have ever been before. Sometimes, you might be most or all of these, competing fragments put together--and if you are, then you know the swirl, too. I don't think I'm the only one.

What are we to do when we feel a whirlpool of sensations that we can't even fully articulate? How do we take hold and ground ourselves?

Lately, I have been thinking about a particular still hour that my husband BJ and I experienced in Iceland a year ago. We had been steadily moving from one side of the world to the other for a day and a half, and we were exhausted upon arrival in Reykjavík. Our flight the night before had been pure magic: just as we passed over the eastern banks of the Hudson Bay at midnight, we spied the aurora borealis from our plane window. All night I watched, like a baby mesmerized by a glowing Christmas tree, as the green and white lights bent and spiraled high over the black ocean and the craggy shores of Greenland. The sacrifice of sleep had obviously been worth it, but I felt it when morning came.

After our plane touched down at 6:00AM, we took an hour-long bus ride to the city, all of which did nothing good for my motion sickness. By the time we stepped off the bus, refreshed ourselves, and found a place to store our luggage for the day, I was struggling. I had no idea what reserves I was going to draw from so that I could get through the day and actually enjoy the time I had been aching to experience in Iceland.

"We need some caffeine and food, and you need some Zofran," BJ said, steering my sluggish body in the direction of a fabulous-smelling bakery. Fortunately for us, two curveballs were thrown our way: the first was that the bakery did not sell coffee, so we decided to take our cinnamon croissants to go. Coffee was a Must. The second curveball was the coffee shop we found down the street did not allow us to bring our croissants into their establishment, so we had to get our coffee to go, too. For ten seconds I felt total defeat: there I was in the place I had been dreaming about for years, but I was nauseated, exhausted, had nowhere to recharge, and it was dark outside even at 8:30AM.

I sighed and looked out the coffee shop window... and that was when I spied the life-saving red table.

The outdoor table belonged to the Drekinn (Dragon) Grill across the street from the coffee shop; at this early hour, the restaurant was closed and the table abandoned. As we exited the warmth with coffees in hand, I grabbed a free newspaper covering the Of Monsters and Men concert we planned to attend later in the trip. We felt as foreign as could be in our chosen refuge as we sat down on the icy cold bench and opened our bag of croissants.

In the end, what seemed like an inconvenient, alien respite was actually a bone-deep recharge for both of us. It didn't even matter that it was 30 degrees outside. We had come to Iceland prepared for the cold, and the chilly air felt good on our faces. Slowly, we drained our coffees, raved about our warm croissants, and my medicine helped my nausea subside. We examined the unfamiliar language of our foreign newspaper like schoolchildren, took in our immediate surroundings as day began to break, and laughed about our amazing fortune at being in my soul's homeland. By the time we stood up 45 minutes later, we were ready to tackle our day. I walked away from that table with gratitude, breathing into my lungs the salty air of the city that would steal my heart in the days to come.

Iceland became not only a journey to explore a land I had wanted to see for so long; it was also a journey of self-discovery. On a larger scale I learned more about who I am as a mother and what it means to be a global citizen, but I also absorbed sanity-saving lessons along the way. The red table has served as a reminder to me to ground myself and breathe in the air wherever I am, even if the circumstances require acclimation--even if it feels far inferior to what I had imagined for myself. I thumbtacked that Icelandic newspaper to the wall of my closet, and every day it reminds me that I might need to readjust. I never saw the likes of 2020 coming; I can only hope that 2021 holds more promise.

As it stands now, a contagious sickness will kill more Americans than World War II did. My children no longer attend their beloved school, and I have become their teacher. I miss my family and friends. I am ready for all of us to have this vaccine. I am turning a page to a new decade, becoming 4o years old this week. My eyes are leaking multiple times a day. I feel guilty about how my personal world has shrunk, about the people and roles that I was once so invested in and now have left behind. What was previously unimaginable has become our new normal.

Right now, I feel overwhelmed by my senses. The swirling, white clouds are meeting the snow, and I can't tell the sky from the ground. I can hardly pull basic words from this mess, much less explain how I perceive all of it to people whose brains don't equate sound as taste. I can tell you this though: I smell peppermint in it, but I also smell promise. The swirl of emotions in your brain almost certainly doesn't behave in the way mine does, but I'm guessing your swirl is at least sometimes there, disorienting you and sometimes even threatening to defeat you.

We might be nauseated, and we might be sleep-deprived, but Iceland taught this synesthete a thing or two. Curveballs are happening all around us, but it doesn't mean we will swing and miss. It just means we have to think outside the box. It turns out that sometimes the best seats in the house are the frozen, red benches out front in the dark. The best photos sometimes can be taken from a moving vehicle. The best recharges can happen in the midst of a global pandemic. Find a still moment and breathe in that frigid, January air: I wager it's filled with peppermint and promise.

I turned my head toward my son’s voice as he walked slowly across the field toward me.

“Mom, look what I found! It’s a monarch caterpillar!” Shielding my eyes from the sun, I spied my son holding several stalks of milkweed, and on one of them crawled a glorious yellow-and-black caterpillar, seemingly perfect in every way.  “Can we keep it and watch it become a chrysalis?” he asked. The hope in his voice mirrored the longing on his face.

“Yeah, I definitely think we should!” I answered, a sense of adventure rising within me. I had long wished to witness firsthand the metamorphosis from caterpillar to monarch butterfly. Our family began concocting a plan as we watched the caterpillar move about and devour milkweed leaves. My four boys and I collected a supply of milkweed for its food source, while my husband BJ engineered a makeshift vessel from a coffee cup, complete with some natural furnishings. My mother-in-law Susan, who is a warm and integral part of our family, purchased a large glass vase for its temporary home on our kitchen counter. Carefully, it was all arranged: a family project that absorbed our energies.

We checked on our new charge constantly. In less than 24 hours, it had begun its metamorphosis, arranging its body into the telltale hook shape that all monarch caterpillars assume for several hours before shedding their final skins. By complete coincidence, I was sketching it the following morning when it began the brief transformation from caterpillar to cocoon. Our internet sources had warned, “Blink and you’ll miss it!” I could see how.

Fortunately, because I was right there to see the first wiggles, I was able to corral the entire family in time to witness the miracle of nature. In less than five jaw-dropping moments, our caterpillar had wildly transformed into a tight, secure cocoon with a beautiful, bright-green finish. As expected, golden beads began developing on its surface just afterward in gorgeous rows and patterns. A ring of brilliant sprinkles formed near the top, resembling some glimmering version of a dissent collar.

“Its golden necklace,” observed our six-year-old son in wonderment.

For one long October week, I feared our chrysalis would not survive. My nervous eyes darted excessively toward our little treasure as it grew. I found myself spending long, uneasy minutes looking through the glass, earnestly searching for the smallest changes. BJ would sometimes come stand beside me and watch too, putting his arm around my shoulders. At times, his presence was reassurance. He knew I was nervous; October generally is difficult and worrisome for me as I tend to dwell on past sorrows.

It was an October afternoon five years prior when the bleeding started, and I feared with the crush of my soul that I had begun to lose my baby. Sometimes our hopeful nature wins out for a while though, so even though there was definitely blood, I steadied my breathing and pleaded as we drove to the hospital. I wanted this baby badly. Maybe he was okay.

For reasons I still can’t explain, I had worried about losing him the entire pregnancy. I had three healthy boys already, had never miscarried before, and had not experienced indications that anything was wrong. Still, I had half-expected to see harbingers of death for weeks--blood and cramping that had never come. Perhaps my soul felt the fallout long before my body did. Foolheartedly, just days before, I had concluded that worry was no longer rational. But as the bleeding intensified at the hospital, my outlook grew increasingly bleak. Sitting with BJ in the emergency department waiting area, I felt a gush of blood---the surest sign to me yet things were not going to be okay. I trudged to the desk, openly sobbing.

“I need a maxi pad, please.” I paused. “I’m having a miscarriage!” The words felt foreign coming from my mouth, as though someone else should be speaking them. The desk attendant had sympathetic eyes, but she was busy with tasks; this was a normal day for her, and my pain was unremarkable.

Ultimately, the ultrasound would confirm what we already had begun to accept: one lonesome heartbeat, and it belonged to me. The tune of our gleeful pitter-pattering duet had become a solo so mournful, I could practically hear the ache reverberating through the room. We were left with a permanent hole that our son was never allowed to fill. His life was extinguished before his actualization, his metamorphosis forever incomplete. He was a chrysalis frozen in time.

Brokenhearted, BJ and I began grappling with these horrible, new truths as we gathered our coats to leave. We both felt years older since I discovered the blood just hours before. We would always be different now, and we knew it.

I was sent home to pass our baby on my own. Events beyond my control were all wrong though. The rush of blood began in earnest before midnight the following night, and I sent BJ to bed despite his protests, knowing I would need him rested for later.

“Promise me you’ll shout when you need me,” he implored.

The blood seemed like it was everywhere; I sat on the toilet, losing my life steadily at three drips per second. When I grew desperate to change position after two hours, I crouched on the shower floor until long after the water ran cold, and returned to the toilet. By the time I passed my tiny son into my hand, I had lost enough blood to alter my sensibility. I studied him in deep grief, said goodbye, and did what now feels unthinkable: I flushed him down the blood-stained toilet. I have regretted it ever since.

The nightmare continued, but BJ was there every step of the way. We suspected medical intervention was necessary, so I talked to BJ on the phone as I drove myself at 3:00 a.m. to the emergency room; we felt it best for him to stay with the kids and not disrupt their sleep. Neither of us can recall a single thing about our conversation. We were disheartened when the physician dismissed my concerns and quickly discharged me, even as I continued to heavily bleed. BJ roused the boys and came to get me.

We neared home at sunrise. BJ momentarily left me in the car with our sleeping children while he dashed into the pharmacy to get me adult diapers, in the hopes that I could finally rest in bed. In his absence, I violently dry-heaved and suddenly felt overwhelmingly hot. Fear for my life felt like it washed over me. I rolled down the window and thought, "Maybe I can scream for help." But in that early hour there was no one to scream to, and my mouth didn’t work anyway. I looked at the phone in my hand and realized I needed to call BJ, but I couldn't figure how to push the buttons. I dumbly stared at the screen as it turned to nothing but stars.

BJ found me slumped over and unresponsive when he returned one minute later. Terrified, he drove to the nearest hospital, holding my forehead steady against the seat with his right hand and talking soothingly to me. He remembers looking for a pulse at a red light and not finding one, but not really believing I was dead either. I remember none of this.

As the day wore on and I was transferred from one hospital to another, I regained consciousness and then lost it again. I went temporarily blind for long minutes and eventually lost the ability to move at all. Even the basics of lifting my head were more than my body could manage to do after so much blood loss. When my blood pressure dropped too low, I lost consciousness, and it became increasingly harder to reawaken. My monitor readings became my obsession while I was cognizant. Each time the cuff tightened on my arm, I sent a hawk-eye to BJ, who religiously read me the numbers. He never left my side.

“It’s okay, Lucy,” he said, calling me by my pet name. “You’re going to be fine.”

“Tell the boys I love all three of them so much,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure I would survive.

“No,” he emphatically replied. “You tell them yourself when we get home.”

In the end, he was right. The surgery to fix my problem was simple and painless, albeit quite belated. An additional transfusion helped me regain some of the blood I had lost. In the middle of the following night, BJ gently carried me into the front door of our home; it was time to begin the long road of physical and emotional recovery.

I wasn’t thinking about any of this past pain, though, as I studied the chrysalis on the eighth morning--the morning it died. All I could gather was that it had a long strip of goo descending from it, and a maggot was crawling around the floor of the tank. My heart tightened with despair as I puzzled.

‘Does this mean it’s dead?’ I fretted, increasingly feeling ill with dread. ‘But it was doing so well! It was hitting its milestones!’ I argued with myself. Indeed, as the chrysalis had become transparent the day before, revealing its lovely wings through a clear cocoon just as it should, I had finally exhaled the last of my tension away. The first flutters of anticipation had stirred within me. I had mistakenly believed the course forward was safe, that we would soon be witnessing the birth of a monarch.

A quick internet search told me what had happened: an unseen fly larvae had burrowed itself into our caterpillar, which had unknowingly cocooned itself up with a deadly problem. As the caterpillar became a chrysalis and developed, so did the parasite, which would eventually eat the caterpillar alive and then burst out of the chrysalis as a maggot. Suddenly I wanted to go back five minutes in time, back before I knew what lay ahead. I wanted to be the person I was before I walked into the kitchen that morning.

Rationally, I could see there was little reason to continue believing in the possibility of life for our chrysalis, but--like the bleeding woman I was on her way to the hospital five years before--I scrambled for fragments of hope. Maybe, in spite of the evidence of everything falling apart in front of me, this coveted creature was strong enough to survive the attack of a single maggot? I had loved my son to the utmost capacity, but my love alone had not been able to save him. Something beyond my control had wrested his life. Maybe, this time, love could be enough?

But it wasn’t. I wept as another maggot wiggled itself out of our lovely chrysalis three hours later. It was confirmation through and through, like an ultrasound verifying the worst: “There is no heartbeat.” Panicked, I turned to BJ as he ate lunch.

“I have to bury it. Now! I can’t stand to see this anymore!" BJ moved with understanding, leaving his lunch to go cold while he went to the shed to get a hand shovel. I stayed in with the chrysalis, carefully working through my tears to detach it from the milkweed stem from which it hung. One small snap and then it rested snugly in my hand. Only in that moment did I truly see the parallels between these two tiny, doomed lives. In the palm of my right hand, nearly identical in size to my cherished son five years before, lay my chance for redemption.

BJ and I both cried as I used a hand shovel to carefully bury our chrysalis in the large pot overflowing with pink gerbera daisies. While we worked, I imagined it was my son, his body beautifully swaddled by a bright-green chrysalis, dotted with golden beads of light. Somehow, I felt its warm glimmers envelop me too.