Babies, Loss, and Keeping Secrets

A little over a year and a half ago, my younger sister found her infant son in his crib, cool and unbreathing, on an early February morning.

It's the kind of thing that you think will never, ever happen to you, nor to anyone you love.  Not my family.  Not my children.  Not my niece, nephew, grandchild, brother, sister, cousin.  It's also the kind of thing that you just don't get over.  Life goes on, yes.  New things happen.  People come and go.  Yet the death of a child is one of those things that lingers in your heart.  Like all deaths, it is a forever kind of game-changer.

Early this morning, I awoke to thoughts of the afternoon tea party and shower that my mother and sister-in-law are hosting today in celebration of our first child, who's due to come join the rest of us at some time in November.  It hasn't escaped me that my child's due date is close enough to my deceased nephew's birthday to matter.  It hasn't escaped me that, as we approach the birth of my first child, my sister is approaching what would have been her deceased son's second birthday.  So, I find myself thinking of my sister today, too, as well as my oldest nephews, who are now 13 and 12 and remember all too well the events surrounding their little brother's death.

My child is the first child to be born to someone in my family of origin since J.  passed away.  As I get closer to the end of my pregnancy, I find myself thinking less about the pain of labor, or whether or not I have enough (or too much) stuff packed in my hospital bag, and more about loss.  I find myself staring down thoughts and stories of loss, and remember the words that someone very wise once told me: loss is a part of life, and loving fully means accepting that loss can and will occur.  Even if the loss is something as common as the child being born, growing up, and leaving home, there will be many little losses and changes to meet along the way.  There is the loss of oneself, too, as a person who is not a parent and becomes one.  I think that keeping a loving spirit in the face of loss comes from accepting and acknowledging (but not resigning oneself to) the fact of loss.  Shortly after J's death, a friend also shared what she had learned about loss, saying that it was not something you really get over or move past, and that no one else can take the place of someone who has passed away, but that you discover that you are big enough to hold the space where that person used to be.

I have seen my sister act in ways over the past year and eight months that show something of her own understanding of both of these ideas that others in my life have expressed.  I've been able to witness some of the changes that have come to her over time as she follows her life where it takes her.  I see her growing, both because of her devastating loss and in spite of it, holding the loss and expanding around it as she moves further along the path of her life.  I have the most profound respect for the challenges of her journey and how she has met them.

At my midwife's appointment the other day, I was asked about my sister's kids.  I told the midwife that she had six children.  "How old are they?" she asked.  I found myself saying, "The oldest is 13, and the youngest is almost 2."  That was the first time that ever happened.  Usually, when I talk about my sister's kids, I tell them how old child number 5 is, and that the youngest passed away from SIDS.  I don't ever say, "my sister has five kids," because that is not true and dishonors the short time that J. came to hang with us here on planet Earth.  I suppose that the reason I told the midwife something different was because I just didn't want to get into the big, awkward conversation that tends to happen when someone finds out a child you know has died, even as I wanted to keep the memory of my nephew alive.  I also feared being seen either as attention-seeking for sharing this information in the first place, or uncaring in the way I sometimes matter-of-factly convey this information.

The thing is, I'm not a big fan of secrets, although I've been known to harbor a few.  Privacy, yes, but secrecy, no.  You can decide just once not to tell the whole truth about a situation, for a reason that may feel perfectly right at the time, but then it gets easier and easier not to tell the whole truth.  You start to box parts of yourself and your life experience away.  Whether it's because of shame, or being concerned how others will view you, or whether or not someone's opinion of you will change, or just because it seems easier for the moment, you keep a secret that needs to be expressed or you hide something of yourself that is starving for light and air.  Loss winds up begetting loss.  You may have started by losing a person to death, or an important perceived part of your identity, or all of your money, then you start to hide these facts of your life.  That is where you wind up losing yourself. 

Meditating and Thinking

I meditate twice a day. I do it when I first get up in the morning, and then again before I get ready for bed. Over the past few months, when mentioning this in conversations with friends, the most frequent comment I've heard has been something along the lines of, 'I've tried to meditate/I'm interested in meditating/I wish I could meditate, but I can't stop my mind from thinking.'

When I hear this, I say something like, 'that's kind of the point.' Then I get funny looks, which I've just had to get used to over the years for a number of reasons.

I want to talk about this comment in more detail, because it demonstrates that a lot of people don't know a whole lot about what meditation is, or what it's supposed to do.

Meditation, in the way I use it, is a type of brain training. There are many different ways in which to train one's brain. We train our brains in acquiring information, applying information, thinking critically, and comparing and contrasting, just to name a few. When I use meditation, I'm doing it to cultivate the ability to watch my thoughts and see how they affect my experience of the present moment, and of life in general. From that place of witnessing and knowing the thoughts, I can later work on understanding the role they play in my life and go about changing them or letting them go if that's what I want to do.

One of the most amazing things for me to discover, when I first sat down and began to meditate back in my teens, was that I was thinking all. the. time. I also thought that the point of meditating was to get your brain to stop thinking, and when I couldn't do it, I figured that meditating just wasn't for me and stopped doing it. This was untrue. All of those thoughts that I was having were the means through which I could acquire some awareness and insight into what I thought, how often I thought, and what happened if I shifted my focus. I started to investigate whether all of my thoughts were useful and were working for me, or if there were some thoughts that I could do without. Were there thoughts that were more persistent than others? Were there ones I didn't want to let go of because I enjoyed the emotional state into which they seemed to place me? Yes and yes. Part of meditation is experiencing the thoughts and their associated emotional states thoroughly, without getting stuck in the feelings or caught up in the thoughts, or mistaking it all for meaning something other than me being a person with a brain, and that my brain was just doing what it had learned to do over the years.

Through the process of meditation, I've learned that my thoughts have power. I've witnessed firsthand in myself how quickly I can get caught up in a spiral of negativity by thinking about situations in my life and drawing conclusions about how I have to act because of them. If I'm getting ready to do something new in my life, maybe I have thoughts like, 'I can't do this,' which cause me to feel afraid, or 'This is something I can learn,' which causes me to feel confident.

I have also learned that my thoughts are not all powerful, and am at the very beginning of understanding that my thoughts do not make me who I am as a person. I can think many things about myself, but the content of those thoughts isn't me, and not even the grouping together of those thoughts is 'me'. The part of me that's aware of what I'm thinking is as much 'me' as the thinking is, maybe even more so.

As I restarted my regular meditation practice a year and a half ago, I was initially unimpressed. I'm just sitting here and wasting time, I thought. I noticed I was thinking, and just watched the thought, feeling the restlessness and impatience that came with the thought, and it went away. Then it came back. It kept doing this for a week or two, every time I went to sit. Then something interesting started to happen in my day-to-day life. I noticed that I was going into situations that had previously been highly stressful and overwhelming but was no longer reacting so quickly to what was going on. I noticed how I was relating to challenging situations with a more balanced perspective. Joyful situations brought delight, but also the awareness that it would also pass. I noticed during meditation that I was sustaining chunks of time where I was not thinking...and then realize that I was thinking again. I began to feel calmer and more peaceful during the day as I kept this place of stillness in my life, this place where I could practice noticing thoughts and letting them move on through once I'd brought my full acceptance to them.

A few months ago, I decided to add a meditation session in the morning to my practice, and have learned a great deal about how old habits of negative thinking like to try to weasel their way in as early in the day as possible and take over. When I sit with them in silence, not judging them, not resisting them, but just realizing that brains are like computers and need to be re-programmed with new thoughts when an old program no longer works, I can become aware of the thoughts and then work on changing the ones that no longer serve a useful purpose. It is a process. It's not magic. But it brings me a great sense of calm, stability, and peace of mind that was not part of my life a few years ago.

So if there's anyone reading this, thinking they want to meditate but that they just can't because they think too much or don't have enough time, I encourage you to take 10 minutes a day (or whatever you can handle), sit down, and try it. Don't let the thinking stop you, because it's the thinking that will help you to learn how to meditate. From there, a new relationship to your thoughts, feelings, and life experience can form.

Taking Yourself Seriously. Or Not.

The Ocean!

--> Singing to an ocean, I can hear the ocean's roar.Play for free, play for me and play a whole lot more.Singing about the good things and the sun that lights the day.
I used to sing on the mountains, has the ocean lost its way.

--Led Zeppelin

The Spouse and I headed down to Misquamicut for our annual day-at-the-beach last Sunday. It's a pity we don't get to the ocean more often, living as close to the coast as we do. After driving and being pleasantly surprised at the lack of traffic, we got within 2 miles of the coast and were rudely awakened by the reality of end-of-summer beach traffic. Since The Spouse  loathes waiting in a non-moving vehicle and I loathe waiting in a non-moving vehicle with people who loathe waiting in non-moving vehicles, we decided for the sake of continued marital bliss that he should walk to the beach while I sought parking.

Once my fine luxury automobile (look, after having driven a 1992 Buick Century for most of my adult life, a Honda Civic is a luxury vehicle) was safely docked in some parking spot a zillion miles away from the bathhouse, I proceeded to track down His Spouseliness. He awaited my arrival in all of his sun-weary excitement at a picnic table. We headed down to what was supposed to be the beach but, due to high tide, a hot day, and it being the last beach-able weekend before the start of the school year, we were instead met with a gigantic people carpet.

Eventually we found a patch of sand maybe about 8x8 feet and planted our stuff. We didn’t fret too much about the insane numbers of people because, well, we were at the BEACH, baby! Yeah! There was pasty-bodied fist-pumping, followed by the two of us trotting eagerly (not running – way too crowded) to the water.

I got to the water and was met with…fear? I sighed and, yes, it’s true, I rolled my eyes with impatience at my own reluctance to ride the waves. Was this particularly compassionate? No, of course not. But I had come to have fun, not to watch The Spouse dive under 300-foot high surf and squint into the sun without my eyeglasses (basically rendering me temporarily blind) until I spotted him again. Since his hair these days is reminiscent of Fabio, it was easier than I would have expected. Men with long blond hair are sorely lacking in New England, and the particular dude with whom I keep company was gleefully frolicking in the surf as I dealt briefly with my inner worrywart.

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely LOVE the ocean. I could body surf for the rest of my life if it weren’t for my day job and the fact that lousy surf happens. We had come on a perfect kind of day. Well, I mean, aside from the riptides, the intense undertow, and the waves, which seemed a lot bigger and more intimidating than I remembered them being. The lifeguard kept blowing his whistle. The kayakers kept yelling at people to move back toward shore. I wondered if there were going to be lots of jellyfish. I thought about several bad experiences I’ve had, and all of them have involved the following two things:

1. Being in a body of water.

2. Panic.

Even with these thoughts, it didn’t take me long to get into the water, and it’s because I kept on thinking of all of those metaphors about life that have to do with waves. You know, things like, “Life is like being in an ocean. You just have to let the waves take you where they’re going to take you.” Or whatever. I figured it would be an entertaining way to pass the time to see if I could just let the waves take me wherever they were going to take me.

The other thing that helped was dropping the judgment and totally letting myself be afraid. Once that happened, I had the freedom and space inside of me to realize that I was creating worry and fear. I could feel myself being afraid, just for the sake of being afraid. It was abundantly clear that my mind was just trying to come up with a reason to be afraid. I remembered that, even though I’ve had bad experiences in the water in the past, I can swim now, and I’m even a fairly strong swimmer. I have more confidence in my swimming than I have ever had in my life. I’ve made many beach trips in my day, rode many waves, and lived to tell the tale. I knew that this was just an old habit of fearing everything worth doing that was trying to take the reins, wanting to keep me protected from experiencing new bad experiences in the water.

I feel pretty ridiculous talking about my brief hesitation before getting in the ocean. Yet I realize that it’s the brief moments of hesitation where I have a choice to either act out of my fear and old habits or to continue on with what it is that I originally wanted to do. I noticed that I had a total ball on the waves once I recognized that there was fear, and then was free to make a choice regarding what to do about it. Did I want it to overtake me, or did I want to ride the waves anyway? When I made the choice to go in, the fear quickly transformed itself into the pure bliss and excitement of flying toward shore on the top of a wave while slamming your thighs together so that the bottom of your bathing suit doesn’t disappear.

Of course, the waves had to test me a little bit. At one point, one of them totally bitch-slapped me on the back. That kind of hurt. I slapped it back, and then we were on okay terms. Another one tried to separate my lower body from my upper body, but I just did my Superman pose and I was fine.

So. Waves. Get in the ocean and ride them! And if they’re too big, just dive underneath them. If only all of life were so simple.

Loneliness and Disconnection, or Being Part of the Whole

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Rather than take a far-away trip or fill my days with projects and activities during the month of August, I decided to deliberately leave things unstructured this year. As a result, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to learn about loneliness and that adrift, disconnected feeling that can sometimes arise for a person who is spending a lot of time in his or her own company without others. Even when I’m not on vacation, I suspect that I find myself in solitude more often than the average person and this lends itself to presenting opportunities to see this disconnectedness arise. For work, I am alone in the car or in my home office, sometimes for several hours a day. At home, I am often alone for several hours after the end of my school day. Only recently have I begun to really start to see the blessings that arise from allowing myself to be lonely or to feel a sense of disconnection, rather than trying to avoid the feeling or distract myself from it.

A few weeks ago, I decided to experiment with being conscious of these feelings as they came up throughout the day, to bring my focused attention to noticing when I was feeling lonely or disconnected and letting myself lean into it. I would not exactly describe this as fun, but I’m kind of hardcore about my spiritual growth. I discovered that I felt these feelings on many occasions throughout the day, yet it wasn’t as intolerable to manage and deal with as I had thought. In fact, as I acknowledged to myself what I was feeling, as I named it and treated myself with kindness and generosity when I was feeling that way rather than trying to pretend I didn’t feel that way, I slowly started to glimpse a bit of freedom.

I think there are two truths about separateness from and connection with others: one is that I am inextricably connected to others, and what I do has some kind of influence on others, which impacts others, and so on. If you’ve ever had someone show you an unexpected kindness that has altered the course of your day, you know what I’m talking about. The other truth is that we are unquestionably separate from one another since we are in separate bodies. Of course we are going to be lonely and feel disconnected sometimes! How could we not be, with each of us housed in a separate physical body that has a specific biology, with completely different life experiences than those of anyone else?

The part about freedom comes in from knowing and accepting that we are, indeed, separate here in the ‘real world’ or the physical world: I am somehow not like others, or I am separate from them, and this can be lonely. Realizing and accepting this is what ultimately gives me the freedom to express the uniqueness that I may happen to carry. Loneliness and the sense of disconnection that comes with it teaches us about our separateness and how we can honor and act on the stuff within us that is unique and, on the surface, may be separate from the greater whole. It shows us how we can care about ourselves and we can be brave and courageous on our own behalf, and how the benefits of that extend beyond us, helping others to become more of who they deeply are.

When I fully embrace my loneliness and don’t automatically try to fill it up right away with people, activities, or distractions, it creates a space for me to be able to see myself as the person I am. Embracing this willingness to be separate by relaxing with myself and not being like others as a way to try to win their approval allows me to take my rightful place as an individual person on this planet, which paradoxically helps me to fit right in as a part of the greater whole. When I can honor and see my separateness and disconnection, it helps me to see the ways in which I am the same as others and the ways in which I am connected to them. I can then come to know myself more as a whole person, who sometimes happens to be solitary and sometimes happens to be connected with others, while being both solitary and connected with others at the same time.

I am beginning to think that feelings of connection, community, commonality, and solidarity with others just can’t exist without the experience of feelings of separateness, loneliness, and disconnection. How can someone know what it means to be connected and part of a community if they haven’t had the experience of disconnection and separateness? It can be easy to try to cast loneliness aside because it seems, on the face of it, like just another difficult feeling that we don’t really want to have to deal with. Yet like any other feeling, loneliness and disconnection have a lot to teach us about how we are a part of the greater whole. For me, this takes willingness to open to the feelings, cultivate kindness and friendliness toward myself, and allow them to take me deeper into my own experience of self.

But I'm On Vacation!

This week is school vacation week, but instead of hanging out on my back porch for hours on end, staring at the water that sometimes trickles off of what The Spouse and I refer to as our 'giant rock,' drinking tea, and reading one of the several books that I'm attempting to make progress on, I have instead found myself contending with job-related legal paperwork that must be dealt with this week, the fact that the bathroom needs cleaning, the kitchen needs cleaning, the floor needs vacuuming, and a few mice have made themselves all too welcome within our home.

While my brain understands that this is just part of life, I can't help but find myself annoyed.

There. I said it.

I stood in the trash can aisle at Target for way too long this afternoon, trying to decide on what cleaning products to buy, as well as whether or not to spend what I felt was a rather steep amount of money on trash cans with lids. I am tired of seeing and smelling the open trash can in the kitchen, I'm sure it's contributing to the mouse issue, and I've wanted one for a long time. I checked the price: $40.00. For a trash can? Sheesh. The New England miser in me came up, thinking about all of the other things I could spend $40.00 on. I found myself debating in the aisle about whether or not to buy the trash can. Would Josh be annoyed about this? Would I be annoyed if I didn't get the trash can? I paced back and forth. I looked for less expensive options, but could not find what I wanted. I sighed. I felt myself grow even more tense and agitated than I already was. I tried hard not to feel that way. I asked myself, rather unkindly, what is your problem? This is just a trash can.

As I lugged the trash can into my shopping cart under the watchful eyes of the nearby security guard, who probably thought I was some kind of lunatic (a person muttering to oneself for ten minutes in the trash can aisle at Target could be disturbing to some), it became clear that my irritation wasn't about the trash can. It couldn't have been, since it's been steadily growing since Saturday night, when I was notified by mail that I had urgent legal matters to attend to for work. The key was in what I thought in response to my own self-inquiry:

But I'm on VACATION! I shouldn't have to deal with this crap! My vacation is ruined!
All of a sudden, everything made sense. Of course I was angry! I kept on telling myself that all the stuff I was doing this week that I didn't really want to be doing was ruining my vacation! Instead of just letting myself be irritated and accept that this was what I had to do, I instead tried to get things done as quickly as possible, to make them all go away and to allow me to get back to what I really wanted to be doing with my time. As often happens for me when life decides to teach me something new about myself and I'm not quite getting it, I found events outside of me conspiring to point me toward my anger. I found myself stuck in traffic, being cut off by other vehicles on the road, in line behind the person paying with all pennies, and the irritation grew as the thought kept cycling around in my head: this is ruining my vacation. I don't want to be doing this.

Once I gave myself permission to feel angry, irritated, and helpless, and fully move into it, I had the freedom to discover what I was thinking that led to the feeling. And once I knew what I was thinking, it was clear that it was my own thinking -- rather than the events happening outside of me, as inconvenient as they were -- that was causing me to act like a cute, fluffy bunny had just stabbed me in the back.

So I've decided to do something called 'dropping the story' or 'reframing.' I stop telling myself that my vacation is ruined, dropping my crappy, anger-inducing story. I decide to shift my focus to the good things coming out of this vacation week: dinner with friends one day, brunch with another friend, bowling, guacamole, chocolate chip cookies, a clean kitchen and bathroom. I tell myself that my vacation has been productive, that I've been able to do a few things I really enjoy, and I still have plenty of time left -- three whole days! -- to hang out on the back porch and watch the water trickle across the rocks. This feels like a better story. It certainly helps me feel less pissed off. And maybe I'm starting to feel like I'm on vacation after all.