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. 

On Taking It Personally

A friend of mine rarely seems to take things personally.  If she does, she does a terrific job of not letting it show.  Lousy day at work?  Oh well, no big deal.  Spouse in a crappy mood?  Clearly, that has nothing to do with her.  It just rolls off, like water off a duck's back, as they say.

I have historically been on the other side of the field when it comes to taking things personally.  A glance with a little too much heat has me flushing with embarrassment, wondering if I have done something wrong.  The abruptness of a few people at work has me wondering what I've done to piss them off.  A slight here, a casually tossed-out snide remark there, and I go into meltdown mode inside the nearest motor vehicle or bathroom stall, wondering what just happened, and why does this get to me so much?

It's a hard way to live, for sure, and yet I have tried so HARD over the years to overcome the ways in which I feel so incredibly delicate, sensitive, fragile.  I've even managed to cultivate a grand ol' horse-and-pony show in which I sometimes manage to come across as obtuse and uncaring when I am feeling anything but that.  One day, a few weeks ago, I gave up.  After some well-intentioned advice that I had heard time and again from one person after another, I was so angry.  In being told not to take things so personally, I interpreted the message as a way to blame and shame me for my own experience of life.  Others get to be cold, unfeeling, uncaring, and inconsiderate, I thought, but I have to find a way to check out of my experience and stop taking things so personally?  I have to condone the bullying behavior of others?  Well, blank that!  I will do no such thing.

That day, I decided to start taking things personally, and like magic, things started to shift.

As I noticed the tons of little things during the day that I was inclined to take personally, the feelings hung out in my body and then dissipated.  After a few days of this, I started to notice that my body began to relax, and curiosity got me wondering about that.  Upon exploring it, I noticed that I had been fighting so hard not to take things personally out of some misguided notion of trying to be good that I was stuffing down everything I actually felt.  I had been stuffing down tiny, everyday kinds of hard feelings -- a bit of loneliness here, a smidgen of sadness there, maybe even a touch of heartbreak -- and doing it for so long that taking things personally had become a kind of safety blanket.  It protected me from more of the slinging arrows of dealing with real, imperfect people in a real, imperfect life.  I was able to be kinder to myself.  I started to get the sense that all of these things I had taken personally were just part of life.  That knowledge didn't necessarily make things easier, or make me like that this is how life goes sometimes, but feeling how I felt and being kind to myself about it made a tremendous difference.

That's not the end of the story, since the end of the story is still to come, but at least I am moving in a direction that makes sense to me.  When I start to take things personally now, it is becoming an opportunity to see where I am feeling some kind of pain, and to be compassionate with myself as I give it space to be.  This, in turn,allows me to put words to it, to speak up for myself when necessary, to separate myself from a difficult situation, or to accept things as they happen to be and move on.  In this, I am starting to glimpse a bit of freedom that wasn't there before.

Blog CPR

Three foolproof steps for resuscitating your blog:
1.  Sit your ass down.
2.  Write something.
3.  Publish it.
Pretty straightforward, isn't it?

Top 6... I Mean, Middle 6... Reasons Why Solitude ROCKS!

After the highs and lows of summer school, I find myself on vacation for the month of August. I deliberately chose not to travel or to do anything unusual this summer, and instead committed to relaxing at home and enjoying it, since I’m so used to using my house more as a launch pad during the school year than as a dwelling. While I’ve always known that I lean toward introversion, coming out consistently as an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, I’ve always tried to push myself to be something other than that. Some of it had to do with wanting to fight the smart-but-can’t-socialize stereotype that has always existed, and until recently, I had no idea that that’s what I was doing. To my delight, I found that I didn’t need to keep on constantly battling against myself. I realized that I’m an introvert and I like it! Since I'm bored with 'Top 10' and 'Top 5' lists, I've decided to create a 'Middle 6' list of the reasons why solitude delights this introvert's soul:

8. Books. Coffee. Sandwiches.

All of the above are difficult to fully savor when you’re distracted by things like noise or incessant verbal processing.

7. Earplugs Get Uncomfortable

My resident Partner-in-Crime  – a far more introverted soul than I am – introduced me to the proper use of earplugs, and how I wish I had had them growing up! I didn’t realize until I was in my twenties that they could be used for anything other than road construction or factory work. Since then, I’ve used them to block out snoring, block out the neighbors on Competitive Suburban Lawnmowing Day, and for a variety of other quiet-making necessities. On the other hand, having them out and hearing nothing but the sound of the refrigerator humming is a pleasure.

6. Freedom of Choice

It can be awfully nice sometimes to be able to casually decide that you’re going to have lunch…now, rather than needing to take other people’s schedules into account. This is much, much harder to do if there is someone else around. Also, if you are used to making someone else's needs more important than yours in an unhealthy kind of way, or if you haven’t had the opportunity to develop much self-understanding, solitude has a way of helping you to become clear about what you like and don’t, and opens the door to further learning about where your preferences are as a unique human being without them being wrong or shameful.

5. Regular Rendezvous with the Unexpected

I’m amazed by how something completely new has the space to come into my life because I’ve stopped cluttering up all the free time with my brain’s never-ending to-do list. I was lucky enough to find some new radio stations to listen to, featuring world music, folk music, and even an oldies station I didn’t know about because I had the time to get curious about what my radio buttons could access other than Ke$ha, who apparently woke up twice before 9:30 this morning feeling like P. Diddy.

4. Pursuing the Creative Impulse

The pieces of life come together when you have some downtime, and sometimes the desire to do something in one area of your life satisfies more than one need. I had an overwhelming urge to go out to parks and state highways in my area and take photographs one day last week and came home to find that I had an array of photographs that I would be able to use as much-needed decorative art for the Master Bedroom, as well as potential gifts.

3. Spiritual Perspective

It is easy to get into a habit of reaching outside of oneself –whether you’re introverted or extroverted – when you’re feeling depleted and finding nothing to fill you. For those times when nothing else is fitting the bill, even five minutes of hiding in the bathroom, closing your eyes, and taking a few deep breaths can help to re-connect you to yourself or to God/Spirit. The chance to briefly be centered in solitude and be aware can quickly refresh and rejuvenate you.

I hope you are inspired to bring a little bit of the spirit of solitude into your world today!

Chicken Little Syndrome

When I was a kid, I went through a period of time where "Chicken Little" was my favorite story. I remember sitting in my grandmother's basement, switching back and forth between that and the children's version of the story of David and Goliath. Even though there were dazzling bright red letters on light blue background that nearly induced nystagmus on the David and Goliath book, I eventually favored Chicken Little, mostly because it was so silly! I mean, this tiny bird ran around all the time screaming about the sky falling when it wasn't! What a goofball!

Well.

Some twenty-odd years later, in the wake of what could have been a horribly catastrophic work situation, I find myself shaking my head, confused and puzzled by the innocuous, low-key outcome that actually took place and feeling a lot like Chicken Little.

All I know is that, time and again throughout my adult life, I've been in positions where I've found myself worried and fearful of what may come next. Worried that I don't have the skills or internal resources to deal with it. Worried that something bad is going to happen because I opened my mouth and tried on being assertive, rather than being passive or aggressive, or passive-aggressive. Worried that this time, this time it's really going to turn out just as badly as the worst case scenario I'm playing in my head says it will. Time and again, I have found that the worst case scenario virtually never happens.

How did I come to expect the worst out of things? I don't suppose the answer to that is really important. What is important to me, though, is all of the time I've wasted on worrying about the things that I cannot control. No matter what happens, no matter what I think I want to have in my life, there will always be factors that are outside of my control. It isn't like my worrying makes it easier or changes how other people think or respond. To think so is just believing in irrelevant hocus-pocus.

Basically, I can control how I choose to think about my life and what I choose to do about it. As far as I can tell, that's about it. When I think of it that way, there is so much I can control, but at the same time, so little.

Whenever I hear Chicken Little screaming and scrambling about inside of my head, perhaps I can find a way not to get caught up in it, not to follow him around and start screaming myself, but stop for a minute, look up at the sky, and see if it's truly falling. Chances are, it will still be up there.