Angie has a thoughtful post up today about how it gets better. About how grief--and our responses to others' reactions to our grief--change with time in positive ways. How we become less utterly crushed. She is right. At two years and 1 month out, I feel so differently than I did at the beginning. For one thing, I can breathe. For another, I am in my right mind (mostly). For a third, I can go to a job and be okay. For a fourth, less sobbing. The list goes on, making me grateful for the passage of time. Angie has a project in mind for sharing about this, and I am all in.
But. Ironically. Today I was thinking about how it does not get better. How there is so little joy for me when I wake up some mornings. How I do not trust anyone or anything. How I am not really sure what I am looking forward to in life--excepting those small, pleasurable moments, both anticipated and surprising, in the course of day: joking with my stepdaughter, laughing with my nephews, cuddling with my husband. Valuable, like tiny diamonds. But outside of those shards of time, I don't really know what I'm doing here. Alive. On this planet.
Yesterday I had tea with another babyloss mama, newly met. We talked about, well you know, everything we talk about. I sat with her: I'm so sorry, yes. Yes, I understand that feeling. Yes, I've had those thoughts and worries too. I'm so sorry. Yes. Yes. At a certain point I realized I was saying I feel that way sometimes, not I felt that way. I have those thoughts, not I once thought that. And I hoped I was not freaking her out. Her loss is fresh, less than six months. I'm sure she wants it to get better. And I here I sit telling her, yeah, I still feel like you feel two years later. If I were her, I might have wanted to run.
Getting better has not looked the way I thought it would. I had a mantra, early on: I must allow this to change me. I must allow her to change me. Because I could feel my soul getting angry and trying to claw it's way back to the before. I thought that would detour me, slow my healing process. I thought, okay baby, change me. And I thought, I hoped, that if I just went with it, it would be a change for the better.
In some ways, yes. I am less naive. I am more present. I work harder and have a higher pain tolerance. I care slightly less what people think of me. I feel more compassion for those who are suffering. But I am also angry. Awkward. Neurotic. Fatalistic. Overweight. Selfish. Exhausted.
Maybe I am genuinely depressed and it's finally time for pharmaceutical help. Maybe I need therapy or to find God. Maybe I need to winter in South Carolina and get out of this bitter wind. Maybe I should go back to school. Maybe this is my mid-life crisis. Maybe it only really gets better if you have a subsequent baby.
* * * * * *
Over tea this mom and I also talked about infertility. We are both attending a support group for people who have had losses and are actively trying to build their families again. And we joked a bit about where we would end up for support if things did not work out for us. The End of the Line After Loss Group? I can just see it now--in a few years I will be facilitating the infertility after loss group in my community.
You see, with a dead baby and subsequent infertility, I find it hard to wake up in the morning (and go to sleep at night) without feeling like a universal reject. By which I mean, kicked to the curb by the actual Universe. Application denied. Not genetically qualified. Unacceptable to procreate. Unfit to parent. Move along.
Except I can't move along. Although I do not believe it will really work, pursuing IVF feels like a compulsion and a rebellion. The Process of Life has already said no to me--so what am I doing?
I am almost 40, and I just want something for myself. One accomplishment. One big creative act. One thing that is wholly mine that I can be proud of. A child (I know, I know, too much pressure, I'll fuck the kid up), a novel, an actual career, a lottery win followed by a huge and valuable donation to someplace needful. One thing mine! (*Insert tantrum* Did I say selfish above? Oh yes, I did.)
It's my own fault really. I was restless, escapist, early in life. I would try to buckle down, but I'd always end up packing my bags. I have some wonderful memories, amazing photographs to show for my first 40 years. But now what? In the face of grief and the reality of human suffering and the shortness of time, my past is nothing that I can ground myself in, and I wish I'd birthed, grown, created just one thing of value that I could point to right now and say... see Universe, see self, I made that. I'm good for somethin'.
* * * * * *
Not that I am useless. I am really good at working. If you have a book or a business or a project or a website, and you need some writing or organizing or brainstorming, I am good at helping you. Whatever your dream is, I can probably help you organize it, so you can make it happen. And I really want you to succeed. You deserve it.
Also, apparently, I am pretty good at raising somebody else's daughter.
I am good at serving other people's dreams.
I used to think I was good at being friends. But maybe it wasn't that at all. Maybe it was servitude--good at listening, and supporting whatever you wanted support with, and making myself useful. I hear about people who can say to their friends, Where the fuck are you? I need you. You hurt me. Help me. Do this for me. And their friends do. And are still their friends. And I have no idea what that vulnerability is like. I look back over my friendships and wonder how many of them I really trusted. If I've ever been a really warm person. How high my walls have been. How many people simply found me useful and used me.
And then I don't wonder why so many of my friendships are not surviving my loss and why I don't know how to fix it. I wouldn't dare. Why the moms in my new neighborhood are polite but not friendly. Why I am so awkward with new people. I don't wonder at all. I think I am bad at this friendship thing and didn't realize it until now.
* * * * *
This sounds bad, I know. It sounds ungrateful, when I have a husband I love, a sweet living child in my house (even if not mine), enough to eat, rent money, two cars, internet access, and no one patrolling a no-fly zone over my roof. My loneliness and insecurity are first-world problems, to be sure. And I am better. I know I am. Ask anyone. I can eat, drink, and be merry even with her ashes in a box upstairs.
The most comforting words I've heard of late came from a babyloss mom who is four years from her loss and seeing things differently. I wrote to her explaining that she was making four years look really good. That at two years I did not feel as well as I thought I would. She told me to go back and read her blog entries from her year two mark. I did, and read that she was still angry, still in a muddle. What a relief (not on her account, obviously). I suddenly felt less fucked up and remedial. I did not have to have anything figured out by that therapeutically designated grief boundary of 24 months. Maybe I'm only half-way through the worst of it--in which case my frustration, isolation, and existential distress is probably pretty normal.
Thank goodness (sadly) for the moms further down the path. Their presence, their footsteps, make this trail a little clearer. And that, ultimately, is what Angie's post and project are about. What Glow in the Woods is all about too. Lighting the path for one another.
Wednesday, March 30
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4 comments:
I'm 20 months out, and i feel so much of what you talk about here. I too had tea with a BLM yesterday, she's almost 6 years out and it was good to talk to her, to feel safe and unguarded and to see she is surviving.
Jenni I think about the mamas like you all the time, the ones who have not gone on to have another child, and especially those of you who don't have a (genetic) child of your own. I try to put myself in your shoes and I wonder "would I be any better either?" I'm sorry it seems like so many of us have moved on to greener pastures. It must be such an awkward place to exist in.
I know when I talk to new loss mamas I wonder why they don't go running for the hills as well. Because I often find myself saying the same - "yep, I still feel that". And here they are sharing with me their inner most thoughts from only three months out. And here I am, nearly three years out. Some things do get better and easier, but some just stay the same. Your kid is still dead. Your heart is still broken.
And I know I've been so lucky to welcome another baby in to my life, but I do feel like you most days in that I'm still so broken and sad and still can't believe this is my life.
Such a rich and thought-provoking post. I am so glad there are bloggers/mamas out there like you.
xo
This is a really great post, and I wish I had something really earth-shattering to reply. I'm not that eloquent. But I will send a big hug and some understanding, a listening ear. (Or a reading eye, as it is, I guess)
Sometimes I feel like I have no right to be so sad, what with my house and husband and food and, oh yes, my two living children, one of whom was born after Calla died. But man, it sucks. The dead baby thing. And while it gets, well, easier to breathe on a daily basis, nothing makes it better. As we all know.
I guess this is just my awkward way of saying I hear you and I'm listening.
God, this is what I've been turning over and over in my head and heart, now before me in black and white.
I'm so glad I'm not alone.
I too wonder if having a baby makes it better. And in my saner moments, I think of course not. Not better, only different. New aches and new holes and new griefs and perhaps forever terror of wondering when this one is taken too.
Still, it's a comparison I'd like to make, a problem I'd like to have, I think. Most days, anyway.
And what you said about friends? Yes. Well, I know I have a handful of good, solid, true friends. But the rest - were they using me (some, yes), was I using them (some, yes), did we ever have anything real? I don't know.
20 months out for me as well, and mostly it feels better. Calmer, less intense. I don't break down weeping in the store, I can stand to work alongside a woman heavily pregnant with a boy and even venture a comment - and not qualify it in my head with 'if he lives' which I think is a real accomplishment. But because the day to day is so much more peaceful and placid, when those moments hit that transport me back in time or put me face to face again with my loss, it rocks me so much harder. I am back in my living room, alone for a moment, keening my grief as if it could never stop, and the pain is so intense.
Those feelings - yes, we do feel them. Perhaps it's the limbo we live in? The in-between where we still hope to be parents to living children and still aren't?
I think the bitterness is what I most struggle with. I am beginning to feel bitter towards even baby-lost mothers who have been able to 'move on' - and let me tell you, I felt guilty and ashamed of my bitterness towards regular, lucky women. Feeling it towards my own community reduces me to a heap of blubbering, burning shame. I wish I knew how to stop that flare, rather than just sternly suppress it.
Anyway. . . thank you for making me feel less alone.
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