My Guest House

Overwhelming emotions, that is what happened.  I think?

I haven’t cried in about a week.  Then today, I was feeling really happy, productive, even excited.  I was excited about a new challenge I had been given at work.  I went and talked to my supervisor about it and then right afterwards, when I was alone in my office, I could feel that I was just going to start crying.  And I did. 

I could feel it coming.  The warming of my neck and then my face, the surge inside of me that moves my tears to flow from my eyes.  Then the drops of saline started streaming down my face and I didn’t know why.  And I decided just to let it come.  I sat there, staring out the window of my office at the beautiful St. Mary’s Cemetery across the street.  The cemetery didn’t make me more sad, it actual brought me peace, as if my emotions and my reality were in line with each other.  Even though Nora is not buried there, the serenity of it, the finality, made me realize that my heartache was because of a tangible loss.  My pain was real and for a very real reason.

After sitting with the emotion.  Allowing it to come, over take me, and then slowly leave, I sat there wondering what had just happened.  Just before my crying spell I was in a state of happiness, I was content, even excited, why did I cry?  Then I realized that maybe the opposite emotion of happiness had triggered my suppressed feelings of grief that I did not realize were boiling up.  I have heard of this happening before, I have seen it happen with clients of mine in therapy, but I had never experienced it myself.  I found it confusing and frustrating.

But after realizing what was taking place inside of my body and in my heart, I let sadness wash over me again, I decided to let it be.  Let the tears come.  Let the sadness flood me, roll through my body and out through my tear ducts.  I sat with it.  I felt it. I let sadness have its place and time within my being.  

Apparently my sadness needed more recognition, more space within my bodily house, so I cleared off the couch in my heart, made the bed in my being, and invited sadness to stay for awhile.  It seems that this was just what sadness needed because it only stayed for a minute or two.  I had listened to it. I acknowledged sadness’ voice like a parent would a frustrated child or teenager, and in doing so, it went away, as quick as it had come.  Out of nowhere, sadness was gone.

There is a Rumi poem I often use in therapy with clients about the purpose of emotions and the importance of accepting them instead of pushing them away.  It’s called the Guest House, and it describes exactly what happened to me.  

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

Some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even it they’re a crowd of sorrows,

Who violently sweep your house

Empty of it’s furniture,,

Still treat each quest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

For some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

Meet them at the door laughing,

And invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

Because each has been sent

As a guide from beyond.

~Rumi

I guess it was just my turn to open up my house to sadness.  

May I continue to welcome my guests, but like the loving company of family or friends, I hope at some point they, too, leave.

Forever Waiting for My Little Girl

Waiting.  Waiting for her crib to be used.  Waiting for her clothes to be worn.  Waiting.  Waiting for her to come home.  Sometimes it feels like I am forever waiting for my little girl, who will never come.

One of the challenging parts about losing a child during pregnancy is that I, at times, still anticipate that she will be coming home, even though I know she never will.  Right after I delivered Nora and I came home empty handed without a baby, I would still walk by her room at night and think to myself, "Oh, I can't wait until Nora sees her room."  It was strange.  I knew this would never happen, but my whole experience of her, during my pregnancy, was that of just waiting to meet her, waiting to experience her.  Even though she was no longer in my belly, a part of me still thought she would come home.

This slowly faded, but at times I still think about Nora as if she is yet to be born.  Like yesterday when I was walking out to get the mail from the mailbox at the end of our concrete driveway after work.  As I was walking I thought to myself, "It's going to be so fun for Nora and I to someday write with sidewalk chalk on our driveway in the Spring when she gets older."  And then if felt like I got punched in the gut and I became a little nauseous, for in the same split second that I had this happy thought, I realized it would never come to be.  I continued to get the mail and walk into the house where my now broken dreams lived.

It's also frustrating because it seems that these flash forwards of the future that will never be happen at the strangest times, times when I am not thinking about her at all and am actually enjoying myself and not focused on my grief.  Maybe it's that in these moments, I have forgotten about my present pain and live in a place of imaginary and unrealistic hope.

For instance, I was out at a fancy restaurant for my friends 30th birthday when I ordered espresso as an after dinner drink.  I saw the cute miniature cup that my coffee came in that looked like a child's tea cup.  In that moment I had a vision of Nora, about four years old, sitting at a little play table in her room having a tea party with George our dog, a little shih tzu.  I smiled to myself and stayed in this imaginary future, where I peak in on Nora sipping her pretend tea and talking to George who she has forced to play tea party with her and has dressed him in a silly hat and made him sit on her little chair across from her while she jabbers away.  In this vision, I see myself smiling in on Nora and George as I silently watch from a distance and see my handsome little dog giving me a look of "please help me" along with, "I will do anything for this cute little girl."

At the dinner table, in my real life, I stayed in this dream of the future that will never be for a moment more, before I returned to the party at hand.  Instead of feeling as if I was going to vomit, this time I was slowly brought back to reality and only felt as if my heart had been stepped on.  I guess that's a little better?     

To me it is strange that I have these comforting thoughts of the future about my deceased daughter.  It's as if I am still waiting with anticipation for her to come home and grow up into the little girl I was excited to meet and guide through life. I wonder if this confusing phenomenon ever goes away?  I wonder if I really ever want it too?  I guess a part of me will be forever waiting for my little girl. 

The Childless Mother as a Parenting Therapist

Part of my specialty as a mental health therapist for the past three years has been providing family therapy and teaching others how to parent.  When I went back to work I decided to help out my co-worker for a month and fill in as the therapist for the parenting group.  I didn't see this as a problem, as working with parents has always been just a part of my job, and after all I wasn't actually working with their kids. This should be easy right? Uh, wrong!

This past week, a minute before group started, I checked my cell phone.  As I picked up my iPhone, staring back at me on the screen was a text picture of my old co-workers newborn baby girl.  Ugh!  I mean this baby was freshly born, with baby goo all over her face, wrapped in a fresh receiving blanket, nicely nestled in her mothers arms.  When I saw this picture, all I wanted to do was throw my phone across the room, but instead I just stared in jealous horror at what was not my life, at what my life should have been.  Instead of breaking my expensive phone and upsetting my husband, I deleted the picture.

But the hardest part is I wasn't able to let myself cry in that moment.  I wanted to.  I needed to. But I had to go focus on other people's emotions, children, and struggles with parenting for the next two hours.  So I sucked in all the air in the room with a deep breath and went to group.

In group I had the unwanted pleasure of hearing about each women's joys of parenting.  This is not how parenting group usually goes.  I mean most women are in this group because they struggle with the darker sides of parenting, but for some reason I was not even allotted the little relief that some childless adults have when they hear challenging stories of raising children.  I know I used to feel this way before I lost Nora, but not today.

Today I was able to see each women's unconditional love for their child even through their difficulties and frustrations with parenting.  For me it was a confusing experience, because being a therapist, I really do enjoy seeing people 'light up' when they are realizing they have purpose and meaning in their life, which these women were doing when talking about their children.

However, I also experienced pure jealousy, anger, and judgement towards these women.  I mean, I was the person leading the group.  I was the professional.  I was not required to be in a parenting group as these women were. I did everything right in my short time of parenting and look where it got me.  I was fuming on the inside with flames of rage rising from my emotional core while on the outside, on my face, the women only saw my calm eye contact and welcoming smile that was doing a fantastic job of covering up my pain.

I grabbed my coat after work and got into my car.  When I closed the car door I thought I would be able to finally let go, to release the tears I had been hanging onto.  But the tears did not come.  I had stuffed them so far down during group that I had numbed myself to all the pain.  So, I did what any rational woman does when she knows she has to cry.  I called my sister.

I was composed still at that point, but I knew talking to her, saying the words out loud over the phone would slowly bring the emotions back to surface. And then it happened. The tears started rolling down my checks and onto my phone and down my neck as I tried to talk through them to my sister on the other end of my lifeline, the phone.  She had done her job.  She had allowed me to voice my feelings and they came alive again inside me.  I hung up with her and I wept. I wailed. I sobbed.  I cried so hard I couldn't breathe. I almost drove off the road.

By the time I parked the car in the garage I had pulled it together and was back to the sniffle stage of crying. I opened the door from the garage into the house and found my husband sitting on the steps in the hallway. He greeted me at the door and noticed my red eyes and runny, red nose. He asked, "Are you crying?" And I fell into his arms and sobbed some more.  He held me.  He let me cry.  I noticed he shed a tear with me too, and then it was over.  The anger, the jealousy, the pain, the 'why' question, it was all done with. Gone. For now.

Until next week, when I will  once again be the childless mother who gets the unwanted pleasure of being a parenting therapist. 

Letters to Nora - February 26th, 2012

 February 26th, 2012

Dear Sweet Nora,

I couldn't stop thinking about you today.  Well, I think about you everyday, every hour, and every minute.  It's like I love you more each day, even though you are not here.

Your dad and I are taking photography classes together again.  We did this a lot before we were pregnant with you.  We went to one tonight but I couldn't concentrate, honey.  I love photography too.  I am not great, but I have always loved how a camera feels in my hands and I love putting the pictures I take in shutterfly albums as keepsakes of the past.

I guess it was hard to focus because I kept thinking about how I was planning and anticipating taking pictures of you after you were born.  I wanted to lay you on your blanket on the floor and place blocks next to you with the number of months old you were.  I wanted to capture your smile in the camera's lens, as your face glowed with the excitement of a new soul learning about life through this unfamiliar body of yours.  I imagined your squeaks, cries, and laughs that you would have made while the flash blinded your eyes and you would have responded with a strong blink and a crinkled face.

I mourn the fact that I won't be able to make a happy baby book, with pictures of you coming home from the hospital in your proud daddy's arms.  Me holding you in the hospital bed with a smile of excitement on my face.  This is a different reality, one that might have taken place in an alternative universe adjacent to ours, where the opposite results of the events of this world go on.  The Nick, Lindsey, and Nora of that world live together happily and are innocently oblivious to this kind of loss, this kind of grief.  I envy them and wish we could trade places with them in their reality.

So, to focus on you in class, and all my overwhelming thoughts, I drew my feelings.  I drew you a picture during class.  Your dad looked over at me and my drawing at one point and I believe the look he gave me said, "Are you okay," because my picture was dark, but I think, also full of love.

So honey, today I leave you with the picture I drew.  I always hoped that you would draw me pictures to hang on the fridge one day, but I guess I drew you this picture because you can't draw one for me.


Love Always & Forever,

Mom  

   

An Aunt's Perspective: Trauma

Earlier today my sister posted about how we lost our cousin in a motorcycle accident on Saturday.  All day long I have been thinking about this on and off.  Mostly I try to shut it out because the sheer weight of the emotional and physical exhaustion I have been going through is slowly devouring me.  When I do think about it, I am immensely sad over the loss of such a young life with so much ahead of him.  I also think about how I am tired of the universe playing Russian roulette with my family members.  But mostly it makes me think about the trauma I endured exactly 9 weeks ago, on the Sunday I found out my niece had left us before she was even born.

I hadn't really thought about that day as traumatic for myself.  Yes, my sister has written about how traumatic that day was for her and Nick, with good reason, but for me that day just felt incredibly sad and overwhelming, not traumatic.  Usually we attribute trauma to great physical injury or at least some sort of deeply psychologically scarring event.  I hadn't thought about it being traumatic until I relived those frightening moments of being told that someone had died today.

Like most bad news, today I was woken up by an early morning phone call (7am).  Nothing good ever comes from a phone call that wakes you up.  I knew immediately that someone had died or was in the hospital.  As my husband handed me his cell phone that was blinking my sister's husband's name, I had flashbacks to the night that Nora passed away and my brother-in-law had called to tell me the news.  (At least at that time I was excited, since I thought she was in labor.)  My heart began to pound and gravity felt like it was going to suck me through the floor.

When I answered, it was my sister's voice that greeted me.  She asked me if I had spoken to our mom, which I hadn't.  She then proceeded to tell me the bad news; however, in both our early morning fogginess and my impending anxiety, I did not hear her correctly the first time.  She had said, "Brian died" and continued to talk.  I wasn't listening because all I heard was, "Grandma died."  Hearing what I thought I heard, gravity began to succeed in crushing me through the floor and it started with my heart and stomach.  Everything stopped.  Then I heard something about "motorcycle" and "crash" and I was brought back to reality, realizing that we couldn't be talking about the same person.  I asked her, "Wait...who died?"  And she repeated with, "Cousin Brian."

That is when I lost it.  A confusing mass of emotions: relief that it wasn't grandma, sadness that it was my young cousin, plus a mad case of PTSD began to wash over me and I threw the phone at my husband, sobbing that I couldn't take phone calls from her or Nick anymore, and that my cousin had died.  (He was still sitting there wondering what the hell had happened and unfortunately for him I didn't specify which cousin.)  I ran out of the room into our guest bedroom and stood in the doorway sobbing and shaking.  The frightening familiarity of the phone call was consuming me.  Everything about the phone call had struck the same chord like the night Nick called to tell us that Nora had died.  I was reliving my worst nightmare and my body was reacting to it without my mind realizing it.

Yet, it wasn't until I was in the doorway, sobbing, shaking, attempting to put my thoughts together that I realized how traumatized I was by the initial phone call those many Sundays ago.  There is no doubt that that phone call is imprinted in my mind and that I will be able to recall it with perfect clarity forever, but I never attributed it as traumatizing.  My response today solidifies the notion that I am traumatized by that phone call, that day, and everything else that I have endured in the last two months.

Eventually I composed myself and came back into the bedroom.  Zach (my husband) was now fully aware of the situation, and now I had to call my mother.  I was greeted with the same PTSD moment when I heard her on the other end of the phone line (because why not, universe), but I was able to control it better.  Again I was back to that Sunday, talking to mom on the phone, hearing her fall apart which made me fall apart.  It sucked.

After getting the full story from mom, my husband and I continued to lay in bed, knowing we couldn't fall back asleep, but not really wanting to get up to another horrible Sunday.  We both recalled the familiarity of the phone call and I explained to him that he was no longer allowed to hand me the phone.  I cannot be the receiver of bad news for at least a few years.  That can be his job.

I realize that possibly some of this is hard to understand since I have not written about Nora's day from my perspective yet.  There are two main reasons for me not doing this so far.  The first is that it will be extremely emotionally draining to sit down and write down my memories from that day (like I said, the phone call, I realize now, was clearly traumatic to me).  The second reason is because keeping her story, as seen through my eyes, also keeps a little part of her with me that is just mine.  Part of me feels that sharing her story will be me giving that part of her away to all of you who read this, and I don't think I'm ready for that yet.  I do want to share her story through my eyes, but it will take time.

Coming back to my point, today proves that I am deeply, psychologically scarred from that phone call on Sunday, December 30, 2012.  It is a real nightmare that I relive over and over in my mind, and that unfortunately I relived today for real.

Rest in peace, dear cousin Brian.  And give Nora a kiss for me.

"Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy." --Eskimo Proverb

Anger - My Overlooked Emotion

When Nick and I went to our last couple’s therapy session a few weeks ago, we talked about the different stages of grief that we both were experiencing.  I wasn’t sure where I was in the stages of grief, I was sad, so I said depression, maybe.  Nick was irritable, which was anger for him.  I noticed he started getting into the anger stage when he would have conversations with the T.V. and get annoyed at reality T.V. stars and sports players.  It was slightly amusing and gave me opportunities to laugh at our grief.  But, I said in therapy, that I’m not angry.  Or, I don’t get angry.  Maybe I don’t get angry, because I don’t see a point in it.  Or, maybe I don’t get angry because it’s the stage my dad seemed to use the most growing up and I found it futile.
   

I guess I thought I was immune to the anger stage.  After all, you don’t have to go through all of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief in order, or you don’t have to enter a stage at all.  I would tell myself that one reason I didn’t get angry is because I didn’t believe in God.  I didn’t have him to fight with, to try to have conversations with him questioning why he did this, or put me through this.  I didn’t have to ask him, “why me, don’t you love me?”, “why my child”, or “what did I do to deserve this."  These conversations and feelings of anger never happened for me.

 

I also never got mad at the doctors.  I knew logically, after much research, that this was a fluke.  Something that couldn’t have been prevented and something that they could not have predicted.   And I wasn’t angry at myself.  The doctor’s had assured me that I did nothing wrong.  It wasn’t anything that I ate that caused the infection, it wasn’t anything I did, or didn’t do.  It was just a random, cosmic, unfortunate act of the universe, and instead of me winning the lottery with these odds, it was me losing my child.

 

I thought that I was immune to anger.  I thought I didn’t have it in me.  Logically, I knew that there was no one, no being, or nothing to be angry at.  It wasn’t my fault or Nora’s fault, or anyone else’s, not even God’s.

 

But, while working in therapy, I realized that there is one thing I had lost my belief in due to this traumatic event.  There was one entity that I no longer trusted, even though I had to everyday.  There was one thing that failed me more than anybody or anything in this world could have, and I have been mad at her from the moment I knew my daughter was dead.  Mad doesn’t even begin to describe it, I have been downright P*SSED at her.  She failed me, and betrayed me, and traumatized me beyond belief.  

She, my daily companion, my trusted guide in life, deceived me.   She lead me to believe that I would be okay, that she knew what she was doing, that I should and had to put my trust in her.  This devilish her, is my own body.  My anger was not at God, or doctors, or myself, but at my body.  How could she have betrayed me?  Who did she think she was anyway?  She turned out to be the cruelest of jester’s, blinding me with her magical trick of thinking I could bring life into this world, and then with a slight of her hand, at the very last moment, she deceived me, and my world would be forever changed.

         

So, I have learned that I am not immune to anger.  It has been with me this whole time.  From the moment I heard the words, “no heartbeat," I have been silently harboring a sense of resentment and hate for my body.  The lovely lady I trusted with my child and my life, my every day existence, was now my worst enemy. 

 

It’s bizarre that I can be so mad at my body, but yet during the month of February it has been with my body that I have begun healing myself both physically and emotionally through my grief.  My healing techniques for February have been about exercising at least 30 minutes every day and cooking nutritious foods to nurture myself through my grief. 

   

In therapy I have started to work through this dichotomy of both healing and hating my body within the same space and I guess, within the same body.  I am slowly working towards resolving my anger at my body through exercises in therapy of writing a letter to my body about my anger and betrayal by it, as well as working towards writing a letter from my body to my soul, giving my body a chance to tell its own side of the story.  But right now, I just think my body owes me an explanation and I will focus on being angry at my body until I am ready to move to the next stage of grief. 

I hear it only gets more messy and difficult from there, because as a therapist I know, under anger lies your true emotions, the ones we are often afraid to feel or confront.  And I’m already having a hard enough time to admitting to anger.  This could be a long, difficult road for me to run…I guess I better slow down and walk or even crawl through it instead.

~Still Breathing…Lindsey