In Which Miscarriage Teaches Me About Rest
Intellectually I believed in it. Resting. Yet spiritually I fought it. It was an unconscious fight, but a fight nonetheless; it was a conflict deeply rooted.
Perhaps the roots of this fight started growing in my childhood. A childhood where I’d walk home from school with my siblings and find my mother asleep on the couch. I don’t know where I first heard the term lazy, but I know it’s a word that always followed my mother. My mother never worked and slept often. I didn’t understand, then, what mental illness was, but this was the way it manifested within my mother. In ways others deemed unproductive, unfruitful, and thoughtless. Later, I’d learn about my mother’s schizophrenia diagnosis, and I’d spend so much time trying to figure her out and unlearn the word lazy. Yet even in my learning, I couldn’t quite unbind its meaning from myself.
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About a week after finding out my partner and I were pregnant, we learned the pregnancy was no longer viable. We’d been planning for this pregnancy, so it was not only a devastating moment, but it was also a moment that forced me to understand that I am not as in control of my body as I like to believe. I’ve become well-versed in believing I have control. Growing up with my mother’s mercurial shifts fostered a strong yearning for stability within me. I became good at finding my own sense of control even when the universe of my childhood couldn’t provide it. I willed myself to survive the chaos of my childhood and because I survived, I believed that I could not only control the trajectory of my life, but my mind and my body.
When the pregnancy ended, it reminded me about the fallacies of control. As much as I wanted to believe I had control, that I could move on quickly, I couldn’t. I couldn’t focus on the work I needed to do, the life I was supposed to live. I couldn’t help but think of the word lazy. I couldn’t help but think of my mother. I couldn’t help but believe I could “will” myself to survive the grief of this miscarriage. I couldn’t help but realize that I was failing to unlearn something, something I knew, on some level, was far from accurate.
Racist stereotypes that equate laziness and Blackness are still rampant. It’s no wonder, the difficulty of unlearning this concept of laziness is difficult. Not only is this unlearning difficult, it’s crucial, especially in the landscape of maternal health for Black women. Research has shown that the risk of miscarriage is 43% higher for Black women than White women. Not only do Black women experience all types of pregnancy loss more often than White women, “Black mothers themselves are three to four times more likely than White mothers to die of pregnancy-related complications.”
My own internal struggle with my feelings of “laziness” paired with the experience of miscarriage is a struggle I am ashamed of. Believing in the concept of “laziness” while living in this context of risk, as a Black woman trying to conceive, is also something I’m ashamed of. How I can I even suggest laziness as a concept when the weight of becoming a mother and being a mother, while Black, is so exhausting and dangerous?
When I shared my partner and I’s experience with pregnancy loss to some Black women in my life, they all had experienced similar losses. Before I left the hospital, after learning about my declining HCG levels, a Black nurse told me about her four miscarriages. The number of Black women experiencing pregnancy loss is immense. The more I hear other stories, the more I can’t stop thinking about our individual and collective strength, yet what I never think about is our rest.
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The night we learned of the miscarriage, my partner held me while I sat on the bathroom floor crying uncontrollably. I could barely lift my body. It felt like every part of me had stopped working. My mind wanted to get up and move but everything else kept me on the floor. What could this have been but an urgent ask for me to rest and ground myself?
Most often, cases of miscarriage have nothing to do with the person carrying the pregnancy. Yet, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something I did to cause this. While my mind was in turmoil, trying to find a way to blame myself, my body was physically responding to the loss. I bled. I cramped. I felt my body slip into the physical symptoms of depression it experienced many times before: loss of appetite, headaches, and an overall since of heaviness.
As my body and mind reckoned with the miscarriage, it became physically impossible for me to do anything but rest. I was forced to rest. Yet it often felt difficult. As much as I felt like I needed to rest, I continued to check my company’s Slack channel, my emails. I thought about cutting my time off from work early. It felt inorganic to stop doing anything. Even when I knew I needed to. I pulled a tarot card and it told me to: water myself. Yet, what does it mean to water yourself as a Black women conditioned to be resilient and strong in our society? What does it mean to rest against our culture’s overwhelming current and historic obsession with productivity?
Ironically, I learned about radical rest by scrolling through social media. For a while now, I had been kept seeing posts by The Nap Ministry floating around. After my miscarriage, I felt called to return to the posts I kept seeing in the past. I needed to understand how to rest, how to uproot this conflict within me. I needed to dig deeper.
The Nap Ministry, founded by Tricia Hersey, is an organization that examines the liberating power of naps through the “REST IS RESISTANCE” framework. Hersey writes “my rest as a Black woman in America suffering from generational exhaustion and racial trauma always was a political refusal and social justice uprising within my body.” Understanding rest as political refusal is revolutionary. It’s a fight in itself. Rest isn’t solely something to do, it’s something that relies on dismantling our systems of oppression.
Hersey believes that this movement is “more than naps. It is not about fluffy pillows, expensive sheets, silk sleep masks or any other external, frivolous, consumerist gimmick. It is about a deep unraveling from white supremacy and capitalism. These two systems are violent and evil. History tells us this and our present living shows this. Rest pushes back and disrupts a system that views human bodies as a tool for production and labor. It is a counter narrative.”
When I think about how difficult it’s been for me to truly upend my own perspectives of laziness, I realize that it’s not solely about my own willpower, it’s about my own existence within a society where white supremacy and capitalism are dominant. Resting and reframing laziness isn’t simply about belief, it’s about a deep shift in my own psyche about what it means to live and exist in the world.
What if I truly accepted, as Hersey writes that “we are not machines. We are divine”? This acceptance not only allows for a renewed understanding of rest, it allows for a dismantling of the internalized oppressive forces that work every day to inform the false narrative of “laziness.”
Radical rest goes beyond our cultural norms of the concept. It’s an immersive experience that puts the body’s needs above all. It rejects productivity because it can’t exist amidst it. It’s asking us to repair the connections we subconsciously or consciously severe between our minds and bodies in order to be productive, in order to survive in our capitalist society. I know this severing well.
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Years ago, I found myself doing the impossible. Attending graduate school and working fulltime, teaching courses, and attempting to write. Each weekend, I’d find myself in an almost deadening sleep. A sleep that it seemed my body earnestly needed. I was comfortable in this chaos, in fact, it seemed like I needed this chaos in order to feel like myself. What I didn’t know then, was I was completely disassociated from my needs. This disassociation is something we all learn, especially when you’re marginalized by larger society.
The morning after the miscarriage I woke up from what felt similar to the type of sleep I had on the weekends in grad school. My body needed something I often kept from it during my grad school years: rest. This need was not only birthed from the sheer exhaustion of the mental and physical effects of pregnancy loss, but from what our bodies need in order to grieve. My body needed something I often resist; a space to not only grieve, but to rest wholeheartedly. My body gave itself what it needed with or without my permission. In this moment I realized that my rest is always choosing me, even when I am not choosing it back. Isn’t that a boundless type of love?
When I think of the many people like me, women or not, who’ve experienced pregnancy loss, I know that rest can’t solely be a concept. As someone who has the privilege to be able to take time off of work, or have access to spaces that foster more rest, I know that there are colossal needs for those who don’t have this access. We need radical rest not only because it will dismantle oppressive systems, but because it’s a necessity for survival.
Radical rest isn’t simply about resting: it’s about a systemic upheaval that prioritizes humanity. Or as, Cole Arthur Riley writes in her book This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us, “Rest is not the reward of our liberation, nor something we lay hold of once we are free. It is the path that delivers us there.”
After my miscarriage, I sat in a bath filled with warm water, Epsom salt, and a stone from a fertility candle we used to conceive before our pregnancy loss. I tried to calm my mind unsuccessfully, yet I couldn’t control the way my body softened and pruned submerged beneath the water. I wondered if my mother’s body softened in similar ways on the couch decades and decades ago. Perhaps this is what rest means. The subtle shifts towards ease while we attempt to move our bodies and minds along towards the concept. Trying and trying to care for our bodies when the world could care less. Making space for the many shades of grief that can exist from living in this world. I am still trying to understand this. I am attempting to slow down when I know it’s what my mind and body craves. I am saying “no” more and showing up for the world outside of me less, because I desperately need my own presence. Could this be what my mother was teaching? Was it rest that I mistook for laziness? Perhaps it isn’t about sheer willpower when we’re surviving, but ability to bring a softness to the brutal nature of withstanding pain. Perhaps it’s not about if we are worthy of rest, but the truth that our bodies will find it, even when we don’t believe we are ready.
About the Author
Tatiana Johnson-Boria (she/her) is the author of Nocturne in Joy (2023), winner of the 2024 Julia Ward Howe Book Prize in Poetry. As an educator, artist, facilitator, and mother; she uses her writing practice to dismantle racism, reckon with trauma, cultivate healing, and to explore the complex magic of mothering. She has received fellowships and awards from Tin House, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, The MacDowell Residency, among others. Tatiana is a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, teaches at GrubStreet, and has been on faculty at Emerson College, among other institutions. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Seventh Wave Magazine, ONLYPoems, The Academy of American Poets, Kenyon Review, and more.
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