Wed 11 Jun 2008
i take it outside
Posted by bon under coping stuff, stuff stuff
pondering how to actually deal with things going right got me thinking about a random encounter i had in the grocery store a couple of months ago, back when i, um, used to go out.
i got told i hadn’t changed a bit, with a big ol’ perky smile thrown on the end of those words for good measure. and i hated it. because i don’t want what’s gone wrong in my life - and specifically, or for me, most significantly, the loss(es) we’ve endured in our road to parenthood - negated. i don’t want that journey of coping and healing dismissed, written out of my history, my identity. and yet neither do i want the role of garment render and teeth gnasher to become a crutch, an excuse for fearfulness, a cloak worn past its expiry date.
i has a new post up at Glow in the Woods. all welcome. 
June 12th, 2008 at 8:37 am
It’s a hard thing to balance-making your loss part of you while moving on, incorporating it into who you are.
It took me a long time to get used to things going right-I still expect them to fail. But I’m working on that.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
You know, even now, when I refer to “last November,” I can see people giving a dismissive little nod, as if to say, “Well, yes, I know you went through a hard time, but everything is fine now, right?” People don’t like to accept that pregnancy loss forever changes you.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
It seems a puzzle, as much for those who have lost a child, as for the fringe people (those not directly affected) who know them, how to react to the changes and yet still enjoy what’s the same.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Somewhere in this bloggy world just wrote about how we should all wear signs…just a synopsis to hand out like a pamphlet to clear the air and make our way. Would you want that though? I’m thinking, something in between?
June 12th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
I think people sometimes say things like that because they don’t have the skills or the words or the ability to speak the truth but they want to reach out to you and say something.
June 12th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
ah, good point, Woman in a Window…no, i definitely wouldn’t want the sign. for a long time, all i wanted was to be totally incognito, as normal-seeming as i could pretend to be…the pity and the discomfort of others overwhelmed me. and still does, a little, in person.
but neither do i want to have some kind of Stepford Life read on to me, nor do that to others…the person who saw me in the grocery store had no idea, i don’t think, about anything that had happened in my life in the past two decades. and rather than ask ANYthing, she very intentionally kept the conversation on a relentlessly cheery, positive, isn’t-everything-gorgeous kind of note that made me feel just…dirty.
in a sense it’s a personal reaction to a societal tendency to gloss things over, in general. which i know is discomfort…and which i share, often…but god, i am sick of all our discomfort sometimes.
end rant.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Bon, I have to say this. Not everything needs to be on a deep philisophical level. There are many possibilities for why she was like that, each (I think) is okay - Maybe everything is relentlessly cheery in her life.
Or maybe she has secrets in her life she doesn’t wish to air with relavite strangers she knew in a past life, so she just keeps it chipper and light then moves on.
Or maybe she has enough friends and really just wanted to say hi ’cause it’s polite and move on.
Or maybe she’d heard about Finn and knew she knew nothing about you anymore so didn’t even know where to start. Maybe she was thinking “considering I haven’t seen Bon in 20 odd years who am I to decide whether she wants to talk about her recent loss in the middle of the supermarket?”.
A sweet-n-light conversation with an aquantance in the supermarket is pretty normal.
I understand where you’re coming from with discomfort being a shitty thing, but sometimes what appears to be discomfort may actually be a person realising the boundaries of their relationship with you. We all have different ideas of privacy; but inherent in the notion of privacy is the idea that there has to be a certain level of closeness before some things are discussed.
Just where infant death fits into that I’m not sure - I guess it depends on the person feeling the loss, but then that comes back to the level of closeness you have with that person doesn’t it? You have to know them to know if they want to mention it.
I guess what I’m trying to say (without being anything like the definitive answer on this) is that there will always be sweet-n-light situations in life where your grief, like many other aspects of your life, is not aknowledged. This does not mean it is not a part of you, or that it is unimportant. It just highlights the fact that there are different levels of social interaction in this world, and some of them are the shallow-gloss-over-anything-important type.
Not being very closely related with grief myself I am not sure about this, but I wonder … if every interaction involved a recognition of the grief would it make it more or less easier to bear - or would it make no difference to the grief and just mean that living life with the grief was harder.
end rant.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
George…nah, i guess i didn’t explain well. the desire to actually flaunt the scars or bare any details? only a gut reaction…not something i’d ever do, or even want to, in reality.
but relentless perkiness makes me wish i had the balls to. i am pretty sure she was totally innocent, knew nothing. was just playing a societal role that makes me even more uncomfortable than actual discomfort and sadness…forced gloss. i get pleasantries. conversations that unfold like beauty pageants and rope me in with no chance to actually dissent? ick.
but mostly it just made me think about where we hold on to things and how we construct ourselves, and when to let go…even on the inside.
June 13th, 2008 at 12:06 am
I actually came back to make sure I hadn’t ranted too hard, to make sure I didn’t leave you feeling I’ve been harsh and uncaring.
I guess I may not have explained myself very well either (in my long winded way I tend to do that). I didn’t think you really wanted to bare the scars, I really meant to discuss the holding onto the grief. The strong reaction you had which made you question whether you were holding on to your grief too hard. I think you hit the nail on the head with the question of whetehr it’s normal to react so fiercly. There are parts in all of us that we want acknowledged. Me, I want to let everyone I meet that I’m a mother and that is the most important part of me and everything else comes second. Not as socially awkward as letting people know you’re stricken with grief (except maybe in a job interview), but my point above was just meant to be that whatever it is you want acknowledged it won’t always be. I guess it may then be a good skill to have to be able to deal with that. If that means letting go of the grief a bit (if that is possible) thehe stronger the emotion connected
Let me try and be succint here about what I meant to say above, cause I’ve written this comment three times and my rambling always sees to get in the way.
1. There will be many situations where aspects of ourselves (eg identification with loss) will go unaknowldged.
2. The greater the identification and the stronger the emotion attached to that identification the harder it will be to accept that lack of aknowledgement.
3. In line with my basic philosophy of life, this will only become a problem if the way you see yourself handling such a situation (internally and externally) does not match the way you would like to handle it.
4. I guess that was part of what you were trying to understand in your post at GITW; do you want the loss of Finn to be so much a part of your identity that every day situations can cause extreme feelings of rage?
(btw: I came back because I can’t stop thinking about this latest predicament you find yourself in following Finn’s death and I had to make sure you weren’t hurt by my ranting, which I subsequently thought may have come across as harsh. I find myself an outsier in these discussions of grief and I worry about making it worse.)
June 13th, 2008 at 1:41 am
my husband’s aunt lost her husband a few years back (she’s the youngest sibling, her husband was 36) and i remember her saying to us once she wished she could just reclaim the black-armband tradition for a while…just so she wouldn’t have to explain why she was the way she was, in a way. after my mom died i totally got that- hoping that strangers would be gentle with me when i was wandering in a store with no idea why i was there, etc. i also think that unless you’ve suffered a deep loss you can’t really understand the idea that while you are in hell you are watching everyone else pass by going on about their lives and remembering that, just a few days/weeks/months ago, that was you. and being bitter and sorrowful over it.
my mom died in january 2001. in most ways, that grief doesn’t knock me down the way it did for years- but that loss has changed my life in ways i’d never have imagined. i guess i mostly hope that i am a stronger and more grace-filled person because of this journey- i am not scared to look in the eye of anyone who is suffering and give them the compassion i know they deserve. often times, though, i personally struggle with the residual damage of anger and resentment and how different my life is now from what i imagined it could have been. that is what i fight- not letting the nastiness of the grief shape me into someone i don’t want to be, someone i never was before, someone i don’t even know.
June 13th, 2008 at 11:17 am
I think we all have so many sides; chips, blemishless planes, chasms and more, that part of the beauty of this whole thing is that at any given moment, only certain views are exposed to the outside. If you want, you can turn, it’s your divine right to say to the smilers, “Know what? This is me too.” Though for me, some of my blemishes are my dearest parts, unworthy of the surface encounters with people who wouldn’t think or take the time to look beyond what sits before them.