The Museum — Half Waif

#365Songs: October 4th

I know that being dramatic
Is becoming a habit.
Wish I was laughing, I just cannot see a way out of this.
And now they’re building a museum
On the corner of Main Street,
Preserving something while we’re left to decompose in the heat.

My Mom had a miscarriage between my sister and me, an unrealized life. I only exist through loss. Doctors warned my parents that another pregnancy was high risk, likely to end in more heartbreak, but she got pregnant anyway and there I was very much reminding them of my existence in all my endearing and cloying ways. That pregnancy, and my subsequent birth, taxed her body, culminating in a hysterectomy a few years after I was born. The surgery forced a premature menopause, which led to a prescription drug called Premarin, a hormone therapy produced by feeding pregnant mares heavy doses of estrogen. The medication is produced by repurposing the hormones that metabolize through the mare’s urine. A small but meaningful percentage of women develop breast cancer as a result of this medication. My mother was one of them, a side effect that ultimately ended her life.

A miscarriage indirectly created me; I indirectly created my Mother’s demise.

I don’t write these words from a place of guilt, even if it might sound that way, but rather from a place of acknowledgement that there are many things in this life we can’t control.

You said we’d make our own future.
I’m starting to think it was just a stupid idea.
Holiday at the active volcano.

Miscarriage isn’t a choice. It’s something that happens, for whatever reason, to a woman’s body. If my mother got pregnant with me, only to learn the risks early on, perhaps she would’ve continued forward and I’d still be here now writing this post 15 years after her death. If she’d chosen the alternative, aborting the pregnancy, I wouldn’t exist to know the difference.

Pregnancy isn’t always a choice, either, depending on the context, but the decision to proceed or not to proceed very much should be. I imagine the decision to bring a child into this world has never been easy, but it’s certainly complex in modern times: between unmitigated climate change, world tensions, global pandemics, political chaos, the unaffordability of modern life, and a mostly-ignored mental health crisis, there’s a lot to worry about it.

But I still go to the movies
And I think that it’s beautiful.
Fake lights making everything
Look like glitter.
And when I go to my high school,
I see that the view has changed.
All the apple trees they planted have finally grown up.

Nandi Rose’s band Half Waif just released their fifth album, See You at the Maypole, an epic double-LP that explores the emotional aftermath of her own 2021 miscarriage during a time of global chaos and grief. “There was no life there,” Rose says. “I was literally carrying death in my body.”

About the standout track, The Museum, she wrote: “There’s a warehouse at the top of Main Street in my tiny town that’s being turned into a museum for Shaker art. It’s just down the road from my house, so I pass by it all the time. When I wrote ‘The Museum,’ I was thinking about how sort of beautifully delusional it is to create a museum at a time when the world is reaching the apex of the climate crisis. This idea of preserving pieces of furniture in a pristine, white-walled space when outside, everything is collapsing.”

She continues: “I’d also read a headline about how people were vacationing in Iceland at an active volcano, and that seemed to hold the same feeling for me as the museum-under-construction. Tourism at the brink of apocalypse. Meanwhile, my husband and I were talking about building a family, building a future, and I was grappling with the responsibility of what it means to bring a child into this kind of world — where people pose for selfies while the earth explodes.”

Everything is political: the choices we make about our own bodies, the products we buy, our faith, how we parent if we parent at all. As long as there is someone with power looking to strip you of that right, every decision you make is a protest against that possibility. In post-Roe America, both my mother and Nandi Rose could’ve been prosecuted for their later-stage miscarriages had they lived in the wrong state at the wrong time — a choice-less world dictated by men whose bodies will never know the burden of such a process.

You said we’d make our own future.
I’m starting to think it was just a stupid idea.
Holiday at the active volcano.
Give it another year.

Art is, and always has been, our best platform for political protest, activism, and empathy building. Storytelling is how we personalize another’s pain, make relatable highly politicized concepts, and ignite others to contemplate the “what ifs” of life. Like many films, novels, and albums, Half Waif’s music forces us to imagine unthinkable loss during unpredictable times. There are many things next month’s election will determine — the future of Democracy, climate legislation, AI regulation, foreign policy — but the future of women’s rights is at the top of that list. What will be left when it’s all said and done, what will happen to future versions of Nandi Rose and my Mom when their unthinkable losses become criminalized?

Vote for them. Vote for your children. Vote for future stories with happier endings.

You said we’d make our own future.
I’m starting to think it was just a stupid idea.
Holiday at the active volcano.

~

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