crying on the dance floor, vol. 2

CW: pregnancy loss

Like so many of us across the globe, I have been experiencing a Renaissance World Tour withdrawal since August. I feel lucky to have seen some truly life-altering live shows in my life, but this one has rippled through me nonstop ever since. This is, of course, primarily because Beyoncé is our greatest living performer, one of one, the only one, alien superstar, no one else in this world can think like her, she’s that girl, etc. But as the weeks go by and I still find myself tearing up listening to the set list, I have been wondering about a particular aspect of what the show meant to me, at this moment of my life.

Yes, it was the biggest and most historic tour of my lifetime in so many ways. Yes, we were surrounded by an electrified crowd in wall-to-wall silver, singing every word. Yes, I went to it with my best friend on the last night before I left the country, and it signified something enormous about our friendship and the years we have lived through together. Yes, we were at the infamous Night 2 in DC, battling lightning, rain, crowd chaos, and a show we were sure wasn’t going to happen until the very last second. But today I’m thinking about another aspect of what the show meant to me, one that’s taken me longer to understand.

Ever since we lost our pregnancy, I carry a Rolodex in my head of other women who have had miscarriages. I scroll through celebrity interviews gathering up all the details: how old were they? did they get pregnant after? how long after? were they different after?

Beyoncé holds a special place in that list. The way she spoke about her first miscarriage in Life is But a Dream echoes my own experience in a way I still feel so desperately hungry for. She said:

She’s never released “Heartbeat,” the song she wrote about that miscarriage, but she does share some of the lyrics in Life is But a Dream:

She’s also spoken about how her miscarriages changed her — one of the few plain acknowledgements of how you don’t “get over” pregnancy loss that I’ve seen from a celebrity.

I’ve written before in this newsletter about how it feels like almost no one talks about miscarriage in a way that does anything at all for me. For an experience that is apparently so common, I’ve found almost no writing about it that means anything to me. (Two notable exceptions: Alice Bradley’s essay in The Sun and parts of Jane Dykema’s Electric Lit piece.)

But the way Beyoncé describes her experience, and the lyrics she wrote to capture it, mean so much to me. They are straightforward, and they are true. They don’t attempt to inject the experience with false hope, but they also aren’t entirely hopeless. They have stayed with me. The most beautiful music I’d ever heard in my life. I swear, I swear, I swear I tried. 

Back when she released her self-titled album in 2013, I didn’t yet understand what it meant that she followed “Heaven” with “Blue” — following heaven couldn’t wait for you / so go on, go home with make it last forever / come on baby, won’t you hold onto me. The one you couldn’t keep, followed by the one you get to hold. That love now forever tinged with that loss, precious and painful. Now I think about it all the time. When we do have a child one day, I understand that I will be different now as a mother. That I now carry this knowledge of how quickly it can slip away, that I’ll never be without it.

Anyone who’s talked to me since 2015 has probably heard me reference one of my favorite personal essays of all time, Samantha Hunt’s “There is Only One Direction.” She covers a lot in that essay, including mortality and boy bands, but nowadays I think the most about this passage on motherhood:

“Wow. You made three deaths.” It’s funny but I never laugh, reading it.

She goes on to talk about how so many “notions of motherhood … measure only its unbearable lightness without mentioning the flip side of that coin.” It puts words to something I’ve been floored by since losing a pregnancy — all my patience for that cute, simplistic language of motherhood has abruptly drained from my body. To me, talking about pregnancy, about children, about parenthood, even about love, is talking about death.

At times, I’ve worried that this means I’m now imprisoned in some depressive, negative worldview. The kind I wouldn’t want to subject a child to. But more and more, I have come to suspect that something else is possible — that when Beyoncé sang make it last forever / come on baby, won’t you hold onto me, her love was not diminished by her loss, but amplified, sharpened, deepened. Death not as an eclipse of everything else, but a shadow that reminds us of mystery, of what we’ll never know and can’t control.

Like everyone else who attended RWT, I was overwhelmed when Blue came on stage. To see her showered with the love of a crowd that has watched her grow up, to see this beautiful Black girl treated as an American princess, made me incredibly emotional.

Standing there in the pouring rain, I saw something else on the stage, too. I saw a woman who had lost the baby she thought she’d get to love, looking at the one who came after. Their love — the depth of it, the complexity — there on the stage, in front of all of us.

Blue, dancing like her mom, smiling proudly.

A mom who understood loss, a woman who once sang You took the life right out of me / I’m so unlucky I can’t breathe, watching her daughter dance.

Beyond what she’s shared publicly, of course, I don’t pretend to be able to know anything about Beyoncé’s actual personal experiences, about how she’s made sense of her miscarriages or what runs through her mind when she watches Blue dance. But something in me changed, watching them on that stage. Who knows why some moments leave me cold while others break through my grief and leave a kernel of hope, but this one did just that. I feel it again every time I listen to her music. She is still here, still growing, still loving, and maybe I will be, too. A renaissance.