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. 

Self-Care and the Green Smoothie Fast

I was standing in front of the mirror today and tilted my head to one side. I had to squint, since I wasn't wearing my glasses. I turned my body so that I was sideways to the mirror, rather than just facing it on an angle.

I pursed my lips together, my brow furrowed, as I strode quickly into my office, grabbed my glasses from atop the pile of assessment notes that I've been steadily cranking my way through, and went back in to look in the mirror again. Then I frowned. I hadn't been imagining it, after all. My abdomen was protruding past my breasts.

I know what this means, I thought, as I pulled my shirt up just to make extra sure. I wasn't making up that whole thing about my pants getting tighter.

At the beginning of the school year, I have the best of intentions. I am feeling good, rested, happy. My food is healthy. It's still sunny and reasonably warm outside. I'm drinking three cups of coffee a week, tops, and my water intake rivals my food intake. But then something happens -- usually work related -- that requires my attention and triggers my stress level into sky-high flight.

There are many levels to this pattern. I might deal with whatever is stressing me out on the emotional and spiritual levels, but by that point, I've somehow managed to forget that the way I stay out of the stress is strictly physical. Enough rest. Healthy food. Plenty of water. Not too much caffeine. Going to the gym and doing more than a 15-minute walk around the indoor track. My convenient forgetfulness -- combined with the sharp increase in the cost of produce, the fact that cold weather makes cold food less interesting, and the fact that I know the location of every Starbucks vendor within a 50-mile radius and how delicious whipped cream can sometimes be -- kind of sets me up to put on a few pounds.

I forget this, I swear, every single year.

It isn't really about the weight or the food for me. As a teenager, I was thin. I would have liked to have weighed a few pounds more, but I was generally fine with my appearance overall. I started to gain weight in college, and I was glad about this. But then it started to go too far the other way, thanks to intimate discourse with my Russian textbook and the Papa John's delivery guy at 2:30 a.m. on most nights of the week. Well, I take that back. It had to do with feeling most of the time like I was in way over my head at a private college 13 hours away from home, and believing that I did not have the emotional resources I needed to deal with such a huge life change.

There were several things I deeply understood about myself when I was 18 or 19, but I didn't realize that much of how I was thinking about my life at the time was contributing to my stress level, and that much of what I was worrying about wouldn't matter much in the long run. Like some new college students, I was terrified, and as badly as I had wanted to get away from home and try something new, I feared that my adjustment was going much more poorly than it had for my peers. I wasn't completely oblivious, but I didn't have a solid idea about how to comfort myself well through some of these major changes. I also didn't have a great sense of how prone my body was to chemical ups and downs depending on the food I ate.

I have learned a lot about this over the past 12 years or so, about my food, my body, and how I deal with my needs for comfort and care. Sometimes my strategies are effective, and other times, they aren't. When my belly extends past my breasts, I view it as my wake-up call that my self-care has somehow gone by the wayside, and probably not just physically.

I marched out of the bathroom, walked into the kitchen, and thought for a few moments before I told my Resident Partner-In-Crime that I was going to do a 7-day green smoothie fast so that he had fair warning. It wasn't urgent. It wasn't forced. It was simply an acknowledgment of the fact that it is time to step back from my habitual way of responding to life in the month of November and to pay closer attention to myself. This doesn't mean that I pay attention to the point of self-absorption, but rather that I notice how I'm feeling, how I'm thinking, and what things are in my power to address in a different way. I can't do this effectively if I'm distracting myself by knocking back a bag of smart puffs.

Stepping back to do something as simple as drink smoothies for seven days and get regular exercise feels like stepping into a minefield. I know it isn't, really, that I'll eventually feel much better like I have every other time I've set forth to interrupt an old pattern. It's also helpful to remember that I have the resources within and around me to deal with any emotional or spiritual fallout. I've acquired enough practice and experience with this over time to realize that I've done it before, and it didn't kill me. Quite to the contrary, it brought me to greater peace.

Born to be Wild!

My stepfather had been outside for what seemed like hours while I had been inside, dragging my camping stuff out of the closet and packing for the weekend. My younger sister and brother and I lugged our stuff downstairs to the kitchen, overtaken by mom, chaos in the form of coolers, and the classic rock station playing some song by Bad Company, which my sister switched to the R&B station on the way out, my brother switched to the Country station on the way in, and I switched to the Indie station as soon as he went the other way.

At some point, we began to drag our gear out to my stepfather's pickup truck, and I was startled at what I saw. He had taken the back seat out of the Dodge Caravan and was hard at work binding it to the back of the cab. He was using rope, bungee cords, and there may have even been some chains and padlocks involved.

"What are you doing?" One of us asked him.

"Well, you guys need a place to sit," he said, "and it's against the law to ride without seatbelts, but we've gotta take the truck to go four-wheelin'," he said. "So you're gonna sit back here."

The three of us looked at each other, and I thought I could see the same excitement in their eyes that I felt. Little brother, being only 8 or 9 at the time, actually expressed the excitement, while little sister and I, both well into our teens, exhibited mainly detached mild disinterest.

An hour later, we were strapped into the back of a Dodge Ranger without the cap, the little brother squeezed in between me and the little sister. We were doing at least 70 up I-91 into Vermont, so the fuel economy must have been lousy. The three of us were screaming along to 'Born to Be Wild' as we watched the cars approach in front of us, move into the next lane, and pass us by. I'm not sure why we chose that song. I don't remember if it was playing on the radio and we could hear it through the opened rear window. I don't know if it was the last song we had heard in between the time when mom had said, 'leave the radio alone!' and switched it back to the Classic rock station and when we left the house. My hair was whipping in my face and I was wishing that I had thought to stick an elastic in my pocket before we had left. The smell of late spring was in the air as we screamed at the tops of our lungs. For a little while, it was the three of us just having a good time together.

Years later, I'm driving through central New England along a state highway, on my way home from work, and enjoying the beauty of fall. My fingers happen to land on the radio dial and I hear a familiar song. 'Born to be Wild,' plays on the radio in all of its Steppenwolf-ish glory. I smile, roll down the windows, and scream along for a little while. Now that my sister is a mother to six, my brother is reveling in the ups and downs of young adult life, and I spend much of my time driving all over creation, our times together are infrequent. There is no screaming in the back of a wannabe pick up truck. The three of us would never be able to fit together in that Dodge Caravan seat now. But it's still nice to be able to shift back to that time, a time when all that any of us really needed to do was sit and scream at the tops of our lungs.