Weekly Read: “Mental Health Days” by Sakena Jwan Washington
BLR’s Weekly Read brings you one outstanding story, poem, or essay from our archive. This week’s read is “Mental Health Days” by Sakena Jwan Washington, from Issue 43: Recovery.
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My second miscarriage was caused by Trisomy 18, a chromosomal abnormality that my doctors attributed to “advanced maternal age.” This was before a team of sociologists released a study declaring Pittsburgh, the place I call home, to be the worst city for Black women. Fetal deaths are two times as likely among Pittsburgh’s Black women compared to white women. So unless I could have gotten my hands on a time machine and a moving truck, this wasn’t something I could fix overnight. At forty-one, I didn’t feel that old, but each time I saw those words on a pathology report, I imagined my eggs with little canes complaining about the weather in my ovaries. It didn’t seem too late to be a mother, but every time I considered my age, I remembered how much time I’d wasted with men whose blizzard of red flags I muscled through in denial.
Why this essay?
“Writings about miscarriage are far less common than writings about other medical conditions, and far less common than miscarriage itself. Sakena’s essay stood out to me for its percussive pacing and engaging voice that encompasses both humor and grief.
Her journey is unique and her writerly voice reflects that. But she’s also able to conjure up the universal, and when she writes, ‘My body is a graveyard,’ we are immediately drawn into the emotional core of pregnancy loss.”
– Danielle Ofri, BLR Editor-in-Chief
More from Sakena
Sakena Jwan Washington is a Pittsburgh boomeranger and creative nonfiction writer. She is the 2024-25 Emerging Black Writer-in-Residence at Chatham University, where she is teaching MFA students and developing a limited-edition chapbook as part of the Boosie Bolden Chapbook Series. She is the current guest editor for Tributaries, the weekly online publication for The Fourth River, and is also one of five Pittsburgh-based storytellers who documented the public art project “Art in Parks” in the city’s Allegheny Regional Asset District parks. Learn more about Sakena on her website.