Half Waif on Surviving a Miscarriage, the Failures of Healthcare, and Being One With Nature

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Half Waif's "Ordinary Talk" was one of my favorite songs of 2020, and following 2021's Mythopoetics Nandi Plunkett's back with a stunning new album See You at the Maypole, which just dropped last week. To my ears, it's her best record to date, and it was borne out of a series of very difficult circumstances that we discussed in detail over the phone last month. Check it out:

How are you doing?
My son just started daycare last week. I was kind of a nervous wreck, so now we're headed into week two and feeling a little more settled. It's nice to be able to schedule things and do things on my own time.

How did it feel taking him to daycare for the first time?
It was really surreal. I can't believe we're here already. They always say, "It goes so fast," and it does. He was born last year, and now we're already on this trajectory of drop-offs for the rest of the time that he's living at home. But now that I can do things—write, do yoga, go for walks—it's kind of insane and very surreal. My husband came home from work for lunch last week, and he walked in the door and was like, "Where's our son? He forgot that we'd done daycare drop-off, so then I freaked out. I was like, "Oh my God, am I supposed to have him?" It was so weird to be in the house without him.

Talk me through everything you went through while writing this new record.
Writing a new album is such a funny thing, because you can set out with an idea of what it's going to be, but ultimately it becomes what it wants to be—and that was very much my experience with this one. I went away to a cabin at the end of August 2021. I'd just put out Mythopoetics and I was like, "Okay, I'm ready now to start a new body of work." I knew that my husband Zack and I were going to be starting to try for a baby that fall, so it was a very exciting time, a lot of anticipation. I started writing from this space of peering into the future with a sense of uncertainty, but also a lot of excitement and hope—like, "Finally, it's my time." I knew I wanted to be a mother for a long time. We were just waiting for the right moment, and when the pandemic hit, both our careers were thrown into question, since we were both touring a lot. So there just didn't seem to be a right moment. Finally, we were about to take this leap of faith that was really exciting, which was the space that I was writing from.

I got pregnant about a month later—I found out while I was on tour for Mythopoetics in a green room bathroom at Mississippi Studios in Portland, Oregon, which was wild. It felt like everything was building. I started recording that fall with my co-producer Zubin, and then very suddenly, without any sign that anything was going wrong, Zack and I went to our first ultrasound and we were told there was no heartbeat. It was very sad, upsetting, and confusing, because there was no indication anything was wrong, so we were totally blindsided.

After that point, I remember just feeling so upset—and I did not want to write another sad album. Every time I'm approaching an album, I say, "This is going to be my hopeful, happy record." But you know what? I don't think Half Waif writes that kind of music. I lamented this to a friend of mine, and she was like, "I come to you for the sadder, darker material. You help me work through that." So if that's the role I'm meant to inhabit, then maybe that's something I should be embracing, and I should feel grateful that I can potentially be that for other people. I've certainly I've used music as a healing for myself since I started writing songs.

Anyways, it was at that moment that the record really took a turn. The first song I wrote after finding out about the miscarriage was "Fog, Winter, Balsam, Jade," the first track. I was singing about how I didn't want to be sad that time of year—it was right before Christmas—and from that point on, I was really searching for a way to come back to my life, and to love my life again. I wanted to get back to that hopeful place where I believed in the world and felt like the world believed in me.

When anyone goes through a big reckoning like that, I think it's pretty common to just lose faith. I'm not a religious person, but I'm a spiritual person—I believe in a lot in signs, little cosmic winks. I go into nature a lot to look for guidance. So as I approached this new iteration of what the record would become, I was looking for a way back to faith and joy. My full name, Ananda, means "Divine joy" in Sanskrit, so I think I'm a joyful person at my core, and I certainly reach for that.

But it was a pretty dark winter. I had a really bad recovery. It's a confusing medical thing that happened, but basically, I had routine tissue from my pregnancy for four months, and the doctors were very dismissive of me through that time. My body was not recovering. I wasn't able to move on. I had a lot of pain, weird bleeding, and in the midst of this wintertime, I felt completely frozen and at a standstill. Here I am, reaching for the light, the warmth, joy, springtime—just wanting to regenerate. And, physically, I could not. So the bulk of the songs were written at that time of me bucking against this harness that I felt had been placed over me.

Also, in the midst of that time, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which came a month after the miscarriage. It was just one of those moments when the universe decides to dump on you. As naive as this may sound, I thought that there was some sort of cosmic balance that would happen, right? You get your fair share of shit, and then it balances out and you get some good news and that's how life goes. We ping-pong back and forth, and just as we're getting back on our feet, maybe a wave comes and knocks us over again. That's how I thought it worked, and how I wanted it to work—and that's not how it works.

This was my experience of being knocked down again and again—I'm trying to get back on my feet and I keep being knocked over. My therapist at the time said that the lesson you need to learn to become a good mother is to let go of controlling anything—total surrender to the chaos. That's what makes a resilient parent, and that is ultimately the lesson I want to pass on to my kids. Looking back now, if we are to say we believe in some sort of sentient universe, maybe I needed to learn this lesson that winter in order to enter the next phase of my life and actually become a mother. I don't know. We have to look for some sort of reason or silver lining, and I do think that I learned a lot.

And, you know, my mom had two miscarriages before me, and Zach's mom had one before him. The baby that's born after a miscarriage is called a rainbow baby. I don't know if you knew that.

I did.
So, River, my son, is a rainbow baby, and we're a rainbow family—and a big theme of the record is this idea of collecting color. It was not conscious at the time, I didn't make that connection, but I think there's something really beautiful about it. That period in my life was a very bleak one in which I was trying to bring color back into my landscape and my days, and the product of that was this rainbow baby.

As far as treatment post-miscarriage, what made it harder specifically to get access to mifepristone? You mentioned doctors being very dismissive of what you were experiencing, and I know I'm not saying anything revelatory here, but it seems like the American healthcare system loves to tilt the scales against anybody female-identifying.
At the time, I had full trust in my care team, because I didn't know anything better. I didn't even know that you could have a missed miscarriage. So when you're approaching this completely new experience, you're going to trust what they say.

When I found out that this life was not viable but my body hadn't expelled it yet, I was given three options. One option was to let it pass naturally, which could take weeks. That was an absolute non-starter for me, because I couldn't bear the idea of carrying something that was no longer alive, any longer than I already had. Another was a D&C which is a procedure to scrape out the uterus, same thing with abortions—but it's a surgical procedure, and I didn't want to do that. I also didn't want to wait to even schedule that. The third option was to take pills that day and begin the process of passing.

It's funny, because in hindsight, I was like, "I need this to be over as quickly as possible"—and it ended up being the most drawn out of the three options. I was only given misoprostol, which, from my research and understanding, was more readily accessible. Mifepristone, you could access it, but there was a lot more red tape. There were only certain places where you could pick it up. It couldn't be called in to your local Walgreens. I'm not saying that this nurse practitioner was being negligent, necessarily—I think she was like, "Okay, this is going to be the easiest thing for all of us to get you to take—but what I really wish had been communicated to me, and what I feel like was negligent, is that misoprostol used alone is only effective 70% of the time. 30% of the time, it doesn't work—and that is not an insignificant number. Something gets retained, and you need an additional procedure.

So what I still don't totally understand is why, in those four months—we're talking December to early April, an entire season—they didn'tthink to take me in for an ultrasound. I think part of it is our healthcare system being totally horrible. I had a really high-deductible health insurance plan, and every time I went in for an in-person appointment, it was $200. I had to go in many times in the month after the miscarriage to get my blood drawn. They were checking to see if my hormone levels were falling, so I was going in every week for a blood draw, $200 every time. The hormones were falling, and I did eventually test negative, but it took me about a month. So I think they thought at that point, "Okay, she's done."

And, at that point, we were only communicating over the portal, because I wasn't advocating enough for myself—even though, at the time, I remember telling them, "This seems abnormal. I'm still in pain. Why is my body not recovering? Why is my period not coming back?" At the very end of March, things got really really bad and I was in a lot of pain, and that's when my husband was like, "You have to ask for an ultrasound." Sure enough, I needed the D&C.

I just wish that there had been more knowledge. At the time, I certainly felt very angry, and I'm still pretty angry. That didn't need to happen. Even after the procedure, I had a lot of inflammation, and it took me 9 months after that to get pregnant again. It's just really horrifying, imagining that there's such restricted access on this very necessary medicine, as well as restrictions on knowledge and what our providers are sharing with us. Yes, we have to be advocates for ourselves, and we have to do the research in all aspects of our lives. We want to be educated—but, you know, these are professionals, these are experts. When you're coming into a situation like that, which is already traumatizing, confusing, and disorienting, you need guidance and care, and I'm just so disappointed that I didn't get that.

To be honest, in the last few weeks alone, I've heard of two other people who have had the same experience as me—and I thought that what I went through just shouldn't have happened. It was a unique shitstorm of circumstances. So something is really wrong about the way that we're approaching what is already an extremely traumatic experience.

At the risk of sounding naive, did anybody apologize to you for this?
No apologies. Immediately, I was like, "I'm not working with these people anymore." Those months when I was like ,"Why am I not recovering?" They were like, "Everybody's bodies are different, give it time"—which was so impersonal. So I went a different route after that. For my next pregnancy, I worked with a midwife, which was a much more hands-on, personalized care experience.

What is health care like for you as a musician? I know that it can be quite precarious for anyone working in the arts, having stable access to health care.
Oh my God, yes. I feel incredibly lucky, but first I should say that what's incredibly fucked up is that I got a bill after my D&C for $4,600, which is how much I had to spend to have a miscarriage in addition to all the blood draws. So we're also looking at having to spend thousands of dollars for this incredibly traumatic experience.

I'm grateful that I was able to get on Medicaid the following year. The threshold is slightly higher when you're pregnant—at least in New York State—and I did qualify, which is amazing because it's great health care. My labor and appointments were covered. That was also the crazy thing about my terrible insurance plan: Your prenatal appointments are covered, and then as soon as you have a miscarriage, they're like, "Sorry, this is no longer prenatal care because there's no baby," even though you're still dealing with the fallout. So it was wonderful that I was able to qualify for Medicaid.

We're also on Zack's insurance, but he has to pay so much every month out of his paycheck to cover me and River, so that's a whole thing that we're working out right now, and there's still a really high payout. It's all crazy and really awful—the second something happens to you and you need that support and care, there's no safety net for so many people. It's just so backwards.

I want to go back to you mentioning that you could've advocated for yourself better. Obviously, there are instances in which responsibility is passed along to the individual in lieu of authority figures taking responsibility for themselves—I think of climate change as another example of this. Given all of that, did this experience radicalize you when it comes to your own feelings about the American health care system?
You bring up a really good point. It is important to advocate for ourselves in all aspects of life—we're our #1 cheerleaders—but it shouldn't be that way when you're just going into an appointment, especially when you're receiving a diagnosis. I've been watching my mother-in-law—who is miraculously still with us—go through this crazy experience, and we've done some deep dives into the research there too. It's scary, when you're facing something, to have to use this other part of your brain to do very dry research that reconciles the emotional and the rational. You shouldn't be having to hold all of that at once.

The experience really changed the way that I've been approaching my care. I still believe in Western medicine in a lot of ways. Just last week, I got a tick-borne illness and I got started on doxycycline and it's worked very well. So there are instances where it does the trick and I believe in it. But I think my faith in it was shaken, and I had to go and seek out alternative forms of care, which ended up being really healing for me. I did ultimately deliver in a hospital, but I had an independent midwife throughout my entire second pregnancy. The appointments themselves were 30-to-60 minutes rather than 5-to-10, and I actually got to sit down with her and ask questions. The midwifery model is just much more personalized and hands-on.

I also started seeing a naturopath and an acupuncturist and have looked into other modalities for healing. Ultimately, it's been really beneficial for me in all aspects, so part of what came out of this is casting a wider net of where I seek healing. Music is a huge one, right? Because it's not just medicine, but also looking at healing as this wider tapestry. It doesn't just look like one thing, like going to a doctor or a hospital. It's taken a lot of different forms for me.

You mentioned earlier the notion of not wanting to write another sad record. I think there's a certain fatigue artists are feeling over the last few years when it comes to the need for public vulnerability, especially in terms of promoting their work. Is that something you feel or are wary of?
It's something that I think about when I'm in the writing process. There are certain guardrails that need to be up, just to protect the sacred source of whatever's coming up. But when it comes time to share, I find it to be a real source of strength, ultimately—a way of unifying us, getting to the core of humanity, and making connections with people more readily.

I was at a wedding last year, and I was literally going up to people and being like, "What are you grappling with right now? Tell me about your grief." My friend was like, "We're at a wedding." I was like, "I know, but this is when we see each other!" Not just in grief, but in uncovering those deeper feelings and what's going on under the surface. We're all swimming with so much, and I want to see it and to be seen, and I want to share all of those depths as well. To be honest, when I was working on See You at the Maypole, I was looking forward to the opportunity to talk about my experience for that reason. Miscarriage and pregnancy loss is hard to talk about.

The day after my miscarriage, my sibling-in-law sent me an article in The Atlantic about this woman talking about her miscarriage and how poetry had saved her through it—and I just devoured this poetry. I felt so seen and understood by this language and shared experience. I went on to read a lot of books about it, and I found art to be another source of healing. I was looking forward to having the opportunity to add to this discourse and hopefully be a lifeline to someone else going through it, because it was so crucial to me at that moment to have other people talking about it through art—being open and vulnerable with their own life experiences. That's something that I want to share and would be honored to share with others, too. In that sense vulnerability, feels almost like an honor, because you enter this wider stream of conversation when you bust those doors open—and that's a conversation I want to be a part of.

Do you ever feel a sense of fatigue from being open?
I definitely get social media fatigue in general. When I haven't posted in a while, then I feel like I should actually give something of myself or show something about my life—and I don't really want to do that. It was nice having a baby, because I went into this hole where my entire life was in our house. I felt like it was a reasonable hiatus. It's crazy that I feel like I need to have a baby in order to reasonably get off social media. But that's just the way that we get caught up in staying relevant and posting about ourselves, which I do find to be pretty exhausting.

I also live in a really quiet place—I'm looking out at the woods right now. I live in a small town, and it was a conscious decision to move up here in 2017. Well, actually, it wasn't totally conscious—we moved up here to make Lavender, and we just never left. We got absorbed by small-town life after living in Brooklyn, being surrounded by this atmosphere of stillness, serenity, and peace. Any kind of depletion that I feel from being online and sharing that way, I readily get filled back up by being here and having a lot of quiet and time for myself, my family, and my community.

Sonically, this new record is the most wide-open your music has been, to my ears. Tell me more about developing those textures in the studio. The idea of sonic refinement has been at the forefront of my mind ever since I started this project. I remember in the very early days of Half Waif being like, "What is my sound?" Of course, it's something that you have to find, and continue to find, redefine, and refine—and that takes a lot of time. Six records in, I'm still on that quest of refining and redefining.

Zubin and I have been working together for a while now. We first made a record together in 2014 and came back together for Mythopoetics, but we've been in each others' musical orbit for many years, and we're the same age. I feel like we've really grown together, and that's a huge part of this palette developing and sounding more sophisticated and evolved. We're evolving as individual artists and as collaborators, finding that shared language and skill—and that comes with time and age.

With the last record, we were swinging for big pop hit moments, which was something I wanted. I love synth-pop, and I wanted a big chorus with a lot of electronic sounds and drama. The cover was literally me screaming—it was cathartic, maximalist, and big. Coming into this record, I literally wrote in my little document of notes throughout the process, "This is my anti-drama album." It's not dramatic, even though the first line of "The Museum" is, "I know that being dramatic is becoming a habit," which is a little self-deprecating comment about how it's my tendency to make everything very dramatic and emotional.

But I was reaching for sounds that felt more organic. There are only a few instances of electronic beats on this record, which is something that I'd been interested in for a while—to add new kinds of colors and textures, and in regards to the live performances as well. Also, with Mythopoetics, Zubin and I did everything on that record pre-pandemic, but it felt like we were in isolation making it. After going through the pregnancy loss and the experience of being isolated in my body, I wanted to invite more people into the process of making this record. That felt crucial to me, and it was part of going through grief and understanding.

It was like I suddenly heard this drumbeat that was underneath our feet at all times—like when Harry Potter saw death for the first time, and then he could see Thestrals. Only in going through that, could he see this animal that was there all the time—and it felt like in going through this experience, could I suddenly hear this song that had been going on all the time. That fueled wanting to make this record with more people, and more sound. A number of the songs were live takes, going for a performance approach in a way that I hadn't before. That meant more imperfections, and embracing more of the moment.

It's funny, because when this was all happening—people always say, "Live in the moment," and I remember being like, "I can't live in the moment. The moment is the least hospitable place. I can't live here." I was resisting the moment so much that winter. But then we were in the recording process, and we really embraced the moment. It was so much more about what was happening in the room and less about crafting. Another line we had for ourselves was, "Don't be too clever." We were challenging ourselves to just let it be what it was.

Tell me about how your relationship with the natural world has evolved in the face of climate change.
I just went through so many emotions as you were asking that question. I felt like you were asking me to talk about a lover. My relationship to nature feels so potent, sacred, and fundamental to my being. I'm looking out the window right now, and trees are already starting to change. I always find so much inspiration from seasons and where I live, and that was something I wanted to explore in this record too. I wanted to bring a little bit of Columbia County—upstate New York, the specific flora and fauna, this season—into the music. The album cover was by a painter who grew up in Chatham—the town where I live—and it felt really important to honor this place that helped restore me.

I derive a lot of comfort from nature. It's such a mirror—I get a lot of lessons from its resilience and regeneration, even in the face of collapse. I think that's why it was so hard in that winter, to be going through this stuck-body feeling at a time when nature was also frozen. I almost wish it had happened in the spring. Even if my body wasn't moving forward, the birds would've been returning, the buds would've been coming in. But it ended up being sort of perfect that I was moving in tandem with nature.

By the time we got to spring, I had the D&C and was starting to reemerge—and that's where the maypole imagery came from for the album. "I'll see you at the maypole, see you in the spring, and we'll gather together and weave our colors together, and we'll celebrate after this long winter." I was experiencing nature as a mirror, a teacher, and a healer.

Having a child now, I'm teaching him about plants. He loves to pick the mint and lemon balm in our garden and eat them—and then he'll go and pick another plant, and I'll be like, "No, no, you can't eat that one," or "You can't go in the bushes because those plants are toxic." He's 15 months old, but he can understand that there's plants that are medicine and food, and there are plants that might hurt you. I want to share this world with him so badly, but knowing—or not knowing—what world I am sharing with him is a precarious and confusing place to be in. I try to just share the share the knowledge that I can and cherish it.

When it comes to touring, how do you feel as a new-ish parent?
Oh gosh, it's such an unknown. I feel vaguely terrified about the logistics of it. I'm really excited to share this music live, because this record was recorded with the "live" in mind. I'm starting to put together the release shows now with an eight-piece band, and then we'll be a five-piece band on tour. It's really exciting to get back into a space of shared sound, building a moment together—but the logistics feel really hard to approach.

I'm grateful I'm part of a text thread of musician mamas that was started by Sima Cunningham. We're 16 people now, and it's a really cool group of people sharing tips and tricks and venting. It's just such an amazing community resource, and I've been getting a lot of strength from that. There's one who was touring away from her eight-month-old for three weeks, which felt insane to me—but there she is, doing it and sharing how she's pumping and approaching all that. I'm very in awe of these musicians who have come before me and are paving the way, so in that way, I feel like I can do it—and I can do it, too.

I'm mostly going to tour without River, but because I'm doing my few Europe dates solo, I think I'm going to bring him and my husband. I'm excited to give River the experience of a venue. It's only five shows. I feel like we can do it. I mean, ask me again afterwards—maybe I'll be like, "That was the worst decision ever." But I also want to model that it's good to embrace the unknown and uncomfortable situations, because that's where we grow so much. We can't just stay in our lane and our routines all the time. We have to try new things.

A mantra of mine from that bad year was that it's okay to be uncomfortable. We want all the time for things to be easy and comfortable—but, like, it's okay. I hate the cold, so that winter I was trying to take a lot of walks outside and just be like, "It's okay to be uncomfortable. I can be cold." You can sit in that. So I'm approaching this tour like, yeah, it's gonna be hard and uncomfortable—both to be away from River, and to have him there. Each experience will have its own challenges. But it's okay, you know? Not every aspect of it has to be easy, and I think there will be big rewards—and if nothing else, it'll be a good story.