By Alessa Martin, as told to Jill E. Duffy
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I am a woman who “blew up” her life. Or rather, I am a woman who watched her idealized future disappear and then chose to change everything else.
At 41, while working as a luxury marketing executive, I lost my daughter unexpectedly at six months pregnant. The destruction was so thorough that I walked away from a dream job, became a stay-at-home mom, and sold or gave away the majority of our belongings to leave the United States.
Since losing our daughter, my family and I have traded security and status for family, time, and freedom. Returning to the most simplistic understanding of what matters was the only way I could make sense of it. Here’s how it unfolded.
My husband and I met in Guadalajara, Mexico, 16 years ago. We fell in love and got married in Guanajuato, a few hours’ drive east.
We were living in California when we began trying to have children. We went through a six-year battle of infertility and miscarriage.
When the pandemic happened, we said, “We should go to Mexico. We’re working remotely. This is the time to go to Mexico, to do the thing that we’ve been talking about since we met.” We couldn’t because I was in the middle of fertility treatments that had been paused due to COVID.
Eventually, after many rounds of IVF, surgeries, and challenges, we had a son. This thing that we had worked so long for was with us.
I had a job that I loved. I loved living in Santa Monica. I was enjoying everything we had built.
My best friend, an author and illustrator of books for children and about raising children, was at our house one day and said, “I need a subject for my next book.” I suggested infertility and pregnancy loss, and we decided to work on a book together. The week we signed the book contract, I miraculously found out I was pregnant — miraculous because this time it took no outside intervention. My husband and I would get to close our infertility journey with the two children we always dreamed of, and my friend and I would give our book a tidy, hopeful close.
But in an instant, it all changed. It started with some blood work and more questions than answers. Within two weeks, everything that we had thought for our future was completely up in the air.
My daughter, Navy, passed away when I was 24 weeks pregnant.
I was fortunate to have six weeks of disability leave. But those six weeks were some of the worst in my life.
I originally thought that going back to work would be a helpful distraction, that it would keep me busy and give me purpose. Very quickly, I realized it was the opposite.
I went back for two weeks. During that time, my company decided that we should be in the office five days a week, after previously being in-person only two. The change meant commuting between 11 and 12 hours a week.
Sitting in a meeting one day, I remember being asked, “So how are you, Alessa?” and before I could even answer, someone else changed the subject. The only thing I was thinking about was my daughter and my grief, and no one was willing to name it. No one was even willing to have a conversation to hear how I was.
I’m not blaming them. The person who’s experiencing grief doesn’t know what to do with it, and the people around them sure as hell don’t know what to do either.
It wasn’t an easy decision, but I knew instinctually, probably the first day back at work, that healing would not happen if I were commuting up to two and a half hours a day while my son was in daycare, and while I had no time for myself. I’d worked so hard to bring my son into this world and, between toddler sleep schedules and commuting, I was seeing him maybe 45 minutes a day.
I had spent so much of my pregnancy with Navy waiting for the other shoe to drop. I didn’t tell people I was pregnant for a really long time because of everything that we had gone through with our previous attempts.
Then the other shoe did drop, and I thought, “I can’t keep living my life waiting for that.” I had wasted so much time not being present and happy with her. In hindsight, if I only had six months with her, I would’ve shouted the joy about her from the rooftops from the second that I found out.
I saw myself going down that fear path again. I thought, “I can’t do that again. I can’t spend all of this time with ‘what ifs’ if it’s not going to change shit.”
We had been checking all the boxes of the things that we were supposed to be working toward. To walk away from all those things … I don’t know that anyone understood.
The first step was leaving my job. I gave notice and ended up working another few months.
Once I was home, I needed the world to get small and safe. I needed to be with my son. I spent around three to four months, being in my cocoon and nesting, rebuilding a new version of myself.
I started to recognize the ways that I was being anxious or overprotective. It wasn’t conducive to my long-term happiness and health. That’s when my husband and I started talking about “What does growth look like for our family?”
The only thought was Mexico.
It probably took another six months to take care of logistics.
Leaving was hard on my family and friends. They wanted to be there for me but didn’t know how, and it was as if they were saying, “Are you going to this crazy length because I’m not doing enough to support you?” which isn’t fair or realistic, but I think that that’s where a lot of people went with it.
For others, it may have felt like a repudiation of what their goals or ideals are, like, “Well, why can’t you just do this to make it work?”
It has been a year and six months since Navy passed. At first, the transition of being in Mexico was hard because I felt like I was leaving her behind.
In Santa Monica, there were all these memories where my daughter was a part of the home — the place where I found out that we were pregnant, a place where we did photos with her brother. She was very much a part of our life in California. Coming here was really hard at first because I didn’t know if Navy came with us.
We’ve been trying to find different ways and rituals to bring her into our life here. I’ve started to talk to my son about her. He has a little bear in his room that has Navy’s name on it and we call her Sissy Bear. It’s not Navy, but it’s her bear. We hug her as often as possible.
Navy comes to me as a hummingbird. My grandmother first came as a hummingbird, and then shortly after Navy passed, I started seeing the hummingbirds in two.
It’s a wonderful thing for my son and I to go to the park or the garden and look for hummingbirds and see Navy visiting us. It’s important to me that he knows her as well.
Some people who move to Mexico or blow up their lives say, “It’s political. It’s economic.” For us, it’s none of that. Here we are, six months in, I miss my family and friends. I miss Trader Joe’s. It’s been harder than I thought to slowly rebuild a new community.
But there’s a different pace of life and a rhythm that our family has fallen into that’s a wonderful balance of working, learning, and exploring, and getting to be together.
I did end up finishing the book, which obviously had a very different ending. It’s getting ready to come out, and that has reopened every wound because to launch social media and to build a website and to do the things that are involved with making a book sell, it’s often quite antithetical to the things that are actually good for my healing and grief, like holding my son close while we look for hummingbirds.
I’d love to tell you that there’s a distinct plan. There is not. I don’t know how long we’re going to be here. I don’t know if my son’s going to go to kindergarten here or if he’s going to graduate high school here. But when we made the decision to come, there was such clarity that what is important is that we’re together and we’re doing now the thing that we have always talked about because that’s all we have for sure, this moment together.