Broken Butterflies

By Rina Kenney

For most people, the birth of a baby is sign that life goes on, and that God is still in love with creation. What does it mean that women lose babies everyday, even when they are past the "safety" of the first trimester?

 

Broken Butterflies is a true story of a woman who was on the road to becoming a religious sister, only to learn more about God in her journey to becoming a mother. Rina Kenney has written a deeply personal story of a common yet strangely unexplored experience.  She was raised a devout Roman Catholic and believed that God would be best served in helping the poor and "needy."  Ironically, it was within the relatively safe context of religious life that she felt finally able to explore desire. Through the gifts of religious life and the holy women she met, she learned about trusting her intuition and experiences with God and discerned her way from the "monastery" back into the "ordinary" world.

 

Most spiritual literature seeks to take us out of our bodies. Broken Butterflies puts us right back in.  The author chronicles, through thirty seven bite-sized vignettes, her experience with pregnancy and miscarriage, both early and late. She shares her personal story yet ties it to the larger culture in which women face pregnancy with heavy expectations and blind faith. Most women are handed a copy of "What to Expect When You Are Expecting" or other such manuals.  Few are given the tools with which to approach this singular, liminal experience in a woman's life.  Broken Butterflies is the book to help women approach pregnancy from an empowered, prayerful stance. It is also for anyone suffering loss and struggling to find hope in a heartbreaking world

 

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rina Kenney
• Release date: Jun 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201919436

Rina Kenney

Rina Kenney lives outside Philadelphia, PA.  She writes, works in early childhood education, and has a reiki practice which focuses on women living with cancer.  This is her first book. www.rinakenney.com

Book preview

Prologue:  Proof of Having a Body

"You have to follow where your blood takes you."  Federico Garcia Lorca

December 2004

I did think it was strange that we were going to a kids’ movie without kids.  This way we’ll know if we should show it to the baby, Ray said as we drove.  It was dark already and I would have been content to go home. Ray had said the baby, even though I was only seven weeks pregnant.  We chatted casually, certainly not about the hubris of his statement. A movie about a magical train seemed to be pointing backwards to childhood instead of forward to parenting. We haven’t earned the right yet to see movies as parents, I thought.

We had just finished dinner at our favorite pizza place and decided to see The Polar Express.  I hadn’t heard of the children’s book that inspired it, but Ray said the movie looked good.  We went to a theatre near our home that I had been going to my whole life.  It is where I would have seen movies with my friends on our first forays into freedom; movies like Stand by Me, Karate Kid, Pretty Woman, every John Hughes movie about growing up, falling in love, living happily ever after.  The tag line for this movie was fairly generic:  Journey beyond your imagination.

The film was darker than I had expected, eerie even.  The conductor seemed menacing and not in control.  Communication onboard was sketchy. Extreme snow and wind put the train in danger.  And just who gets to board this mysterious train that barely stops to let people board? 

One thing about trains, says the conductor early in the movie, it doesn’t matter where they’re going...what matters is deciding to get on.  One character said something about having a hole in his pocket, when I whispered to Ray that I needed to go to the bathroom.  Once there, I noticed a small amount of blood.  I was nervous because this hadn’t happened in the earliest days of my pregnancy when I knew blood could still be considered normal implantation bleeding.  I knew with a sinking feeling that it could mean something worse, something I hadn’t considered a possibility for us—miscarriage.

Some people become terrified or squeamish at the sight of blood. I had never understood why the sight of something so visceral could cause such total, instant disconnection between mind and flesh—why proof of having a body causes you to leave it or deny it. I was about to learn more about why we do this. 

I told Ray about the blood.  We went outside to the theater parking lot to call my doctor.  When she called back, her voice sounded cool and detached, disembodied.  I don’t remember everything we talked about, but she asked me about the blood – the color of it – and how much.  I felt a lack of dignity and privacy standing in a movie theatre parking lot on an island talking about such intimate, scary things.  I was thinking she would provide answers.  The most she offered was that I should call the next day and make an appointment, if the blood didn’t stop. 

We went back into the theatre a little dazed but stayed to the movie’s end. One of the kids with the hole in his pocket was hemorrhaging magic. There was talk about the true meaning of Christmas that had to be held onto as adults or they would not be able to hear the magic bells ring any longer.  I assume the train got where it needed to go.  I felt nervous and sick and sorry that we had gone to the movies. 

On the drive home we didn’t discuss whether we’d show this film to the baby, but I did decide that The Polar Express was a horrible movie.  I didn’t like the idea that some people couldn’t hear magic just because they grow up.  I am sure this was supposed to seem whimsical. It felt cruel.  I disagreed with the conductor who’d said it is easy enough to decide to get on a train, that this is the important part of a trip. No, I thought, the thing about journeys is you never dream they will take you anywhere you’d rather not go.

Chapter One:  Dry Bones

OCTOBER, 2016

It is late and we are reading Shakespeare. You are about to turn ten.  I am impressed you are already reading Shakespeare in your small parochial, Catholic school.  I never did at that age.  Progress, I think. 

We read one of his poems where he compares a chalice to a flower.  You have learned what a chalice is at school and church, but you don’t understand the point of the poem.  I don’t go near the sexual symbolism and instead suggest to you that, based on the rest of the poem, Shakespeare is comparing the cup that held Jesus’ blood to something beautiful like a flower.  I tell you he is saying that the holiness of Christ’s blood is like the holiness of nature. And that maybe, just maybe, he is saying that what carries the sacred, is sacred, too.  A poet saying to you what a priest, apparently, has not, because you reject my interpretation.  But mommy, you say, nature isn’t holy.

I don’t think you are prepared for my reaction. I am not prepared for my reaction.  I have known parents who come undone when their children reach an age at which a significant event in the parents’ own life occurred. I don’t remember exactly what age I was when I realized that I too had somehow absorbed the erroneous, catastrophic message that nature isn’t holy, or that my own body was not, so I have not been on the lookout. I nursed you as an infant, bathed you, kissed your cuts. I have combed your hair for lice.  Made sure your body was safe and healthy. I have taught you to be good.  Your words bring a shocking realization that I have failed you, or that at least I have been lazy in counting on the Church to teach you holiness.  They cannot teach what they cannot know.

You go off to bed unaware that those three words, nature isn’t holy are incantatory, and initiate a whispering over dry bones. And that it is time to revive those bones, look at them, gently but attentively, reattach sinew and flesh.  To come alive again.

Soon you will be thirteen.  Then 20, then 30.  You may want to be a mother one day.  You may hate the idea of being a mother.  Either way, you will need to know that you are holy. What do I want you to know? What do I wish I had known? What couldn’t have been told?

I have to tell you what it took to get you here, what was gained and what was lost.  I can tell you the power you have, too. How you’ve made this place beautiful...natural and holy.  And how I know that you can bear anything. 

Chapter Two:  Wrapped in Love

CAPE MAY, NJ

August, 2001

Saint Mary’s by the Sea is a retreat house located at the southern most tip of New Jersey, where the Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean.  Operated by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Philadelphia, it is a beautiful, rustic, red-roofed hotel-turned-convent, used for spiritual programs for religious orders and lay people alike.  The building is perilously close to the Atlantic Ocean, and were it not for the efforts of some preservationists such as the Army Corps of Engineers, it may have succumbed to the sea long ago.  The U-shaped building stands as a testament to the power of nature and the power of prayer.  I was lucky enough to do a week-long retreat there in August 2001.

That summer, I was coming up on the one-year mark since I had entered the Sisters of Mercy.  The retreat would afford me much-needed reflection time to process what had been a fruitful year, and to consider whether I was ready to ask the community for permission to move on to the novitiate.  The path to becoming a sister was one I would never have imagined just a few years earlier.

I could credit my mother, father, and the stars...the cinematic kind, not the heavenly.  My mom would have on her bedside table a holy trifecta of novenas stuffed inside romance novels tucked on top of gossip mags. I grew up in a traditional, loving, suburban Catholic home.  I went to Catholic elementary and high school.  My parents were very faithful people and we went to Church every Sunday, but they were not bible-thumpers, nor were they what would be considered overly rigid in their faith.  They lived simply, and by what they preached (what was preached to us).  I know they believed in the power of prayer and they imparted that to me, my brother and sister.  Two stories of such belief in intercession stand out to me from my parents lives, before they ever had kids. 

My father had had kidney issues as a young person and he was hospitalized with a serious episode soon after he and my mother married.  My mother told me that she went home from the hospital one day after visiting him, just having been told how serious his situation was.  She apparently knelt before a statue of what is known as the Infant of Prague and begged for him to be well.  She described to me how peaceful she felt after the prayer, and of course found out soon after that his condition had indeed improved.  I used to tease her about this story, mainly because of how she pronounced Prague wrong (as Prayge) and because she wasn’t usually given to such dramatic stories of faith.  We certainly weren’t expected to kneel before statues in our home.  But to this day, whenever I see an image of this little Infant, I bow my head in gratitude, convinced I am alive partly because of Him.

The other story involves my father and school.  He was the oldest of seven kids and had always helped to support his siblings.  His father told him to leave school to get a full time job, but a priest at his Catholic high school intervened.  He told my dad (and his father) that he was too smart not to finish his education and made sure he graduated.  These two stories represent to me the best aspects of faith, even mysticism.  I love the idea of my mother trusting in an unseen force for protection, and feeling like that force came through for her and my dad.  I love that this person who represented faith did the bold thing and made sure my dad finished school.  These stories remind me of just how much my little life is now, and always has been, at the mercy of people who went before me, not just my family but the people they encountered.  I always felt protected and, for a long time, didn’t question too much about my faith. It didn’t occur to me that choices made by others could hurt me, let alone affect my future children. I believed that who or what protected me would surely do the same for everyone. 

I do remember being bothered by the treatment of women in the Church.  One day at Mass, I asked my mom about why the woman caught in adultery was publicly shamed but the man wasn’t.  My mother would often say she wasn’t a feminist but she was...no one and nothing told her what to think.  She didn’t claim to have answers for everything and didn’t make me feel like it was bad to question.  She mainly modeled fidelity to presence.  I know she believed in presence.  Many times when I was very young, my mother would bring me to novena masses for devotions to Mary.  I always preferred these to Mass because there seemed to me more of a feminine presence there than on regular Sundays.  It was obvious to me that there were things at those novenas that my mother prayed for intensely, and I believe wholeheartedly that these prayers still protect me.  I know there are things my mother thought about at church that she never talked about with me.  I wish that she had.

Along with church culture I was heavily influenced by pop culture, such as the books on my mother’s bedside.  I loved stories of artists and actresses, not just because of who they portrayed but who they were in their real lives, or who they didn’t get to be. When I blew out the candles on my thirty seventh birthday cake, I thought Well, I outlived Marilyn Monroe. Next goal...Natalie Wood and Vivien Leigh.  I devoured movies like Frances and Lady Sings the Blues, about women who were immensely talented but also seemed to suffer greatly, even punished for being different.  There was a movie I was obsessed with called Let’s Scare Jessica To Death about a weird unseen presence at a lake house, a dead woman haunting a living woman who lacked any agency to fight back.  The image of that dead woman’s ghost pulsating from a lake was terrifying and sent the message that something from the deep will always come for you.  So much of the culture that I consumed