Tough days: they come, and they go

I wrote this almost sixteen years ago, and published it on A Separate Life. It was about those tough days six years earlier, when I was in the midst of figuring out what life was going to be like now. I thought it was worth repeating here, all these years later, just to show that a) I understand what you might be going through, and b) that I don’t feel this way anymore. In fact, it has been a long time since I felt like this. Read the posts around it on A Separate Life, when I was already loving my life. We all get past those tough days. And we find joy again in that strong summer morning sunlight that is returning to the southern hemisphere right now.

“The strong summer morning sunlight was insistent, piercing her closed eyelids, willing her to wake. She struggled to hold on to sleep, because even asleep, her mind knew that she was protected, safe. But the sun won, consciousness was stronger. Her eyes opened. For a moment, serene, comfortable, rested. Then ... loss! She squeezed her eyes shut, but it was too late. The pain followed very quickly.

She spent her days alone. Wandering the silent house, listlessly. Talking to the cat, checking her voice still worked. But he never spoke back. And when, in fits of sadness, she would hold him tight, rocking back and forward in her grief, sobbing, wailing, desperate to feel another living thing close to her, he would struggle against the unfamiliar grip, and break free. Leaving her scratched, scarred, and feeling even more alone.

Mostly, she lived with the ever present sadness, hovering so close to the surface. She kept it in check by a thin veneer of calm, covering the cracks as they appeared as quickly as possible, usually before the tears leaked out, but not always, usually before others noticed, but not always. She found herself weeping easily, at the simplest of things. TV ads seemed to be a weak spot. Unaccustomed to tears, it was as if the tap had been turned on, and she feared that now it could never be shut off completely.

She dreaded the phone ringing, having to make conversation with someone, anyone. Home was a haven. But of course, there were unavoidable chores to do.

“How is your day going?” asked the cheerful, spotty youthful checkout operator at the supermarket. She hated this question. “Fine,” she mumbled, struggling to look normal, incapable of raising a smile. Supermarket shopping was daunting. She was reluctant to go when there might be crowds. She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing someone she knew. Having to make conversation, appear cheerful to those who didn’t know, or sense the pity in their eyes, their judgement of her situation. So she went in mid-morning, quickly, furtively. With the retired folks and the new mothers. A double-edged sword. She looked only at the floor or the shelves, avoiding all others.

After the supermarket ordeal she escaped to the nearby cafe for a latte and the opportunity to sit for a while, incognito, for just a while being normal, doing normal things. She would take that when she could get it. The other customers largely ignored her. The teenage girls from the school down the road were appropriately happy and boisterous, beginning the new school term. She was invisible to them, and that was fine by her. The business people unnerved her a little. Usually she was one of them, in another café, discussing the latest office gossip over a coffee. But now she wasn’t part of that club. And felt lost. Because then there were the mothers and babies. Usually one or two were pregnant, a few loud toddlers, and a crying newborn. They would settle next to the play area, spreading out, taking over, leaving their buggies in the way and their toddlers to play. One of them ran along the banquette seating towards her, and stopped. He stood, turning his head on the side, looking at her as if she were a strange alien being.

And she felt she was – a woman without a place in the world, in society. She wasn’t at work, and she didn’t belong to their club.

She drove home. “SORRY” said the neon sign on the big yellow bus as it wound its way down the gorge. In an odd way, she felt comforted. Not too many people had said they were sorry. Or meant it.”

No Kidding Healing Project: A revisit

Almost five years ago I began writing a series of posts under my Healing Project title. It was early 2020, and I didn’t realise the irony of the title, just when healing was about to become so difficult as the pandemic took hold across the world. We still haven’t healed from the changes that were wrought – societal, biological, political – during that pandemic, and covid still takes lives.

I tried to look back, see what had helped me heal, and move through each concept methodically. Yes, I have it marked here in a separate page on this blog. But frankly, if you read this on a mobile device, you won’t see the links easily, and any new readers might be completely unaware of the project. So here is a summary post, with links to each original post:

Day 1 - Show Up. Showing up is halfway there. Acknowledging that there is healing to be done, and that you are ready to be open to the idea that you can, in fact, heal from the grief of childlessness, is a major step.

Day 2 - Feel. There’s no healing without feeling. What you resist persists. Feel what you feel – that honesty is valuable.

Day 3 - Delight. Delight and joy show that life is always worth living, and they are signs that we will be okay. Let it find you. Let yourself feel it.

Day 4 - Surrender. Surrender. It so often is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of resolve, a sign of hope, and a new beginning.

Day 5 - Love. Love yourself. It brings compassion, empathy and comfort. To yourself, and then to others.

Day 6 - Forgive. Forgive yourself, your body (or your partner’s body), your emotions and decisions (and your partner’s emotions and decisions) and limits. It’s a gift to yourself, and brings new opportunities.

Day 7 - Honour. Honour yourself, honour your partner (if you have one), and honour those you have lost. Honour them all by living well. Honour. It’s so much more productive than guilt.

Day 8 - Write. Writing saved me. At the very first, it simply released me from having to remember, allowing me to sleep. Then gradually became the way I figured out what I thought, how I felt, and how I could move forward.

Day 9 - Appreciate. Learning gratitude is one of the first steps in healing. Appreciating the tiny joys in life, and then eventually seeing the benefits of a No kidding life, help us appreciate the life we have, rather than the one we lost.

Day 10 - Balance. Balance and perspective are what help us know we will be okay.

Day 11 - Dare. The beginning of acceptance is being brave. Shrugging off what hasn’t worked for us. Daring to be positive about our lives. Beginning to hope for something new.

Day 12 - Accept. We need to accept what has happened to us, accept our reality. That brings us to the second step – taking acceptance, and making it part of us. Because when we can do that – without self-recriminations, without judgement, without cringing – we can put an end to the battle. Sure, we carry everything we’ve been through with us, but with acceptance, we carry the lessons, rather than interminable pain.

Day 13 - Connect. You are not alone. Connections – whether in real life or online – help us feel normal, teach us wisdom, encourage us as we develop, walk beside us, and hold us when we fall.

Day 14 - Enquire. Asking questions, challenging assumptions and stereotypes, can silence those negative voices in our heads, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. But we can also challenge the assumptions of those people around us, their thoughts of the childless, as well as challenging our own thoughts about others. It’s my favourite technique of all, I think.

Day 15 - Admit. Admitting the truth to ourselves, the realities of our situations, our thoughts, our expectations, all help us to navigate our lives.

Day 16 - Experience. Living each of our lives is a unique experience. When one choice is taken away, maybe we don’t know what to anticipate. But perhaps we don’t need to. Experiencing life, day by day, can bring great joy.

Day 17 - Speak. I try to choose my moments. I speak here, and I speak up from time to time around family and friends and acquaintances who sometimes resort to false stereotypes or assumptions, and I speak more publicly when I can. Most importantly, I speak these truths first to myself. Maybe that's all some of us might need. I refuse to feel invisible, or diminished, and that prompted me to speak, and feel more truly myself.

Day 18 - Remember. Remembering is not dangerous. It helped me learn from everything I went through. Most importantly, it reminded me of the love I set out with. My memory has to be focused on the love – for my losses, for my husband, for myself. The pain has diminished, and now I can simply remember and feel the love.

Day 19 - Liberate. Liberate yourself from your own expectations, from society’s limitations, from stereotypes and judgemental voices, from guilt and pain, so that you can embrace yourself and your life. Liberation. It’s both the result of, and the penultimate step to healing, living and enjoying our No Kidding lives.

Day 20 - Celebrate. Celebrate your survival, your wisdom, the connections made, your new life and its unexpected joys.

Looking back on the early years

Something I saw or read or heard last week got me thinking about the early years of loss and grief and pain, and how different life feels now.

I haven’t forgotten. I can still see that younger <Mali> clinging desperately to the internet relationships she’d made who got her through many of the hardest days and the absolute distress she/I felt when our internet went down for a few days (horror – can you imagine that happening now?), the loneliness of being ‘other,’ the shame and the guilt, the lack of hope she/I felt for my future. I remember the gut punch of opening a cupboard and seeing the folic acid  bottle that I had kept “just in case.” And I remember the almost staggering shock at the realisation that I would be “one of those people” who didn't fit into mainstream society.

I think it’s important that I mention this some 20+ years later, because I want anyone who might find this site to know that it was never “easy” for me, for my readers and commenters, for any of us. I can and do remember that without pain – which is, if you might recall, how I define “getting over it.” Not that the pain doesn’t arise from time to time, not that there are never ouch moments, not that the world doesn’t make it easy for those of us who are living a No Kidding life. No, simply that I can talk about and remember those years largely without pain. The Mali who went through those emotions is different to the Mali* who writes here now.

It gets better. So much better. Life is pretty wonderful now, even the difficult parts. That’s because I embrace it, because there is no other choice. There’s so much to be grateful for, to appreciate, and yes, even to relish in our No Kidding lives. I don’t know if I’d have believed it back at the start. In fact, I think I might have fought against the idea, as I have seen others fight against it over the years. But simply deciding to look forward, to have hope for something new, and to embrace life honours the pain of the Mali of 20 years ago. She/I deserves to enjoy life now. And so do you!

 

 * Apologies for talking about myself in the third person, but it seemed appropriate, because the Mali of the early 2000s is not me anymore.