It’s been a while, sweet peas. I’m so sorry for my absence—I’ve been wrapping up legal and copyedits for my book (which you can preorder now, by the way), weathering the ebbs and flows of patients at the clinic, showing up for my communities, and raising a toddler with some very robust opinions and a shocking amount of upper-body strength.
The election, sure, the climate, the ever-shifting tectonic plates of our state abortion laws. The violence and the illness spreading through our communities like wildfire—and those we trusted to wield the hoses declining to . But also: the dark and the cold. The sudden plunge into what we know will be a very long winter. The scarcity and the isolation we’re already feeling, compounded by the coming snow (at least in my little corner of the world).
A beloved midwife friend has a standard response to the anti-abortion folks who refer indiscriminately to pregnancies of all kinds as babies (i.e. “Don’t kill your baby!” or “Your baby has a heartbeat!” or, of course, charmingly and reasonably: “Planned Parenthood sells baby parts!”). She looks her assailant in the eye, or in the profile picture, and calmly says:
An acorn is not an oak tree.
It’s a reminder I’ve been holding close to myself lately—close enough to spur the collection of an actual acorn from the frosty woods behind my little house. I hold that little acorn in my hands whenever I am stopped in my tracks guilt or grief about my own abortion and the death of my 5-week-old embryo, the size of an orange seed. I hold it—the smooth nut of its little body, and its roughly textured little cap, and the sharp little point of its ending which, I have learned in my “anatomy of an acorn” Google search, is called the remains of style.
(Remains of style, incidentally, is what I would call my current manner of everyday dressing when I’m not in scrubs—randomly assembled pieces of pre-pregnancy and post-pregnancy items, lots of sweatpants and leggings and second-hand boots from years ago, some half-hearted stab at a trend or a ~look~. Gone are the days of carefully planned fits and bimonthly manicures in chic neutral shades and a curated jewelry collection and a full-length mirror in my bedroom not blocked by overflowing laundry hampers and toy dinosaurs).
An acorn is a piece of fruit, a hard little gem containing an embryo of its own. It can be crushed under boots, collected and consumed by little woodland creatures, stored in little alcoves and under stumps for month at a time, frozen in the dark, forgotten under the snow. Or it can—if each and every factor aligns in its favor, the calendar and the weather and the conditions of the earth and all its inhabitants—become an oak tree.
Even then, this is not a binary linear neat little story of becoming. If and when the tree exists—sprouting the taproot that will anchor it for the rest of its life, breaking through the earth to be called a seedling and then a sapling, growing old and tall and many-limbed, shade and color and life and abundance radiating outward from its center over years or centuries. But even if and when this all happens, this unfolding of a story and a life—there are seasons. There are hurricanes and ice storms and tornadoes. There are those who would fell the tree, count the rings of its wound. There is sickness and rot.
I walked through the woods this morning, thinking of the many beloved members of my communities who are currently pregnant, or who have recently miscarried or given birth or had abortions, I run my fingers along the weathered trunks around me. I look down at the roots and up at the near-bare branches and listen to the leaves under my feet, a spectrum of russet and gold and brown, their dried edges curling up toward the sun.
An acorn is not an oak tree—and sometimes it never will be. Sometimes it will not have the chance to struggle through the elements to grow old. While I feel a fondness for this little acorn in my hands, the trees on either side of me are the beings who feed and are fed by us. The beings who need to be acknowledged, written about, protected, loved. Birds and animals make their homes in these trees; these trees communicate with one another and change the shape of our sky and our earth. These trees are here now, vulnerable and mortal and connective and worthy of our care.
And I will toss this little acorn aside in pursuit of their thriving, each and every time.
Anyway—as those harsh overhead lights in the Twitter warehouse flick off one by one, expect this newsletter to get more social—more abortion love letters, more interviews and conversations, more thoughts and ideas and questions from your favorite doulas and artists and writers and abortion providers.
The newsletter, like my abortion doula services, will remain free. If you or someone you know needs help or support or just someone to listen, I’m hannahmatthewswrites @ protonmail.com and I’m on Signal, too.
In the meantime, please do preorder my book (only $16.74 on Bookshop.org to support indie bookstores)! It publishes in May, if you feel like spending your spring and summer reading about the ways in which abortion is love, sex, joy, loss, religion, tragedy, power. 100% of any royalties I earn will go to Blue Ridge Abortion Fund, Texas Equal Access Fund, and Indigenous Women Rising, among others, so your order could also be a piece of making someone’s abortion safe, healthy, beautiful—possible.
Talk to you all soon. My eyes and ears and arms are open for you in the meantime. Love yous, all you beautiful gnarled cranky leafless old oak trees.
H