Friday, June 22, 2012

June 22, 2012--The Other Side

So, I've been seeing Facebook posts over the last couple of days about getting through things, and finding the way to the so-called "other side." One of those was a quote by the late Doors front man Jim Morrison.

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.” 
 
My response to this post from my husband: "It's there, whether you want it to be or not. And if you try to ignore it, you can't ever get through it. That's why I let myself cry when I need to, if I can. You can't "break on through to the other side." You have to get there one tear at a time; one heartbreak at a time."
 
In forty years, I've managed to survive and overcome a lot of very painful things. People who know me well and all of the things I've gotten through in life think I'm strong. I suppose I should still think of that as a compliment, but any more, I just find it annoying. The thing about having a reputation for being strong is that when something hits me like a sledgehammer,  I feel guilty if I can't keep my shit together. I feel compelled to keep putting one foot in front of the other, even when I want to fall to the floor and crumple into a limp, damp ball. 
 
Another master of words has come to my mind often this week: Bono. Every time I hit a wall in life, there is a string of lyrics that never fails to flash through my mind. "Sometimes I feel like...I don't know. Sometimes I feel like checking out. I wanna get it wrong. Can't always be strong." I think these words mean so much to me, because of my annoyance with my reputation for being able to keep things together. Isn't even the strongest person entitled to a major emotional breakdown, and the occasional unbridled fuck up in response? 

I haven't done so well this week. 

After my last blog, a dear young friend reached out to me, and spoke of how strong my relationship with Jeph is, and how much she hopes to build something as strong as we have in her own life. 

Jeph and I have been through things we never imagined possibly being so hard. The loss of two of our dogs brought us to our knees. The destruction of a giant chunk of his home town brought Jeph to places so dark and disturbing that I can't imagine. Job losses. Dreams crumbling. We've seen a lot. He's the strong one this week, and I envy him, though I know he's being so for me. 

As I have slogged through the quicksand of learning what the fate of our lentil bean would be, I have gone from the moment I knew a heartbeat existed, to the moment I knew there was nothing. I've gone from cautiously optimistic to hysterical, and every place in between. 

I don't want to feel the pain; not because I can't bear it, but because I can't bear for anyone to see me bearing it. I want to skip the period of time in which I will be fine one moment, and a puddle of tears the next. I want to skip the hours of sleep I can't seem to get right now, because my brain and heart won't shut down. I want to get to the other side of this agonizing time.

I know Jim Morrison was driven and inspired by a fast life of substance abuse, and overindulgence on many levels. If you believe the version of his life presented by Oliver Stone in the movie "The Doors," he was more than a little crazy. But the quote my husband posted shatters my already broken heart with its clarity and truth. 

Whether it's pain, fear or desolation, you can't get through these feelings without feeling them. You can't be real with yourself or anyone else unless you let what your really feeling pass through you so you can get to the other side of it. 

Some people will argue that you must remain positive. You must keep a stiff upper lip. You must carry on. I found myself dealing with medical professionals who were less than sensitive. I found myself hearing life altering news from people who didn't know me. In the midst of this, I came to an understanding about how I deal with people who are in pain, or even just in a state of worry. In my business, people often make demands on my time and the time of my colleagues that feel unreasonable. Until this week, I had never been a person seeking help, seeking information and seeking comfort. I had never been the patient or client going off on the person on the other end of the line. I had never been made to feel so trivial and so helpless. And over the course of the week, I realized that I could think of times I hadn't been any better to those so-called crazy and nuisance people.
 
Not only was I uncomfortable dealing with my own pain and fear, but I didn't want to deal with anyone else's either. It's easier to avoid pain than to feel it or face it. It's the reason why so many of us never take risks or leaps in our lives. It's the reason why so many of us stay put in situations we don't like, rather than chancing a loss of stability. If we never try to do something amazing, we will never fail at it, and we will never have to recover from anything. We will never lose. 

The thing we often overlook in living our lives that way is that we also will never win. Every great thing we dream of, or aspire to will never happen. 

We spent a lot of time hemming and hawing over whether we would try to have a child or not. I think we mostly waited because we didn't want to risk that it would change us and our lives in ways we would regret. But when I think of Jeph explaining to people that it came to him that we should, because he wanted to finally do something meaningful with life, it occurs to me that maybe he's right, and maybe our fear of failing to remain who we are has kept us from living as meaningful a life as we might have for longer than we should have. 

We were afraid to feel the pain of mistakes. We were afraid to feel the discomfort of change. In the moment of hysteria I experienced last Saturday night, that fear and pain of loss made me understand how much I really wanted our lentil bean--how much I really wanted our child. While the agony of the loss seems to be hitting me in waves, without this pain, I wouldn't know that I must try again, and I must try better. Without feeling this pain, I couldn't get to the other side. I'm not going to break through, because pain doesn't work that way. The giant gaping wound heals slowly, and side to side. The pulling back together of my spirit won't happen overnight, and as another friend shared with me, I may still feel the scar so many years from now. I may still be feeling the pain as a reminder of how I made it to that other side. 

So, wallow, when you have to. Choke back tears when it feels right and you can. Eat a whole pie. Let the tears fall in the car while you sing along to songs on the "New Moon" soundtrack. Feel what you need to feel to get where you need to go. Because you're never going to get through it by trying to get around it. 

Sunday, June 17, 2012

A Miscarriage of Certainty


So, I haven't written for a while. For a number of reasons, I just haven't felt like it. I had been experiencing a sense of immaturity about it and the way that it sometimes feels like open mic night at a comedy club, when there are only a couple of people in the crowd, and they're really just there because of the fabulous potato skins and chicken tenders. I've also been wrestling with a new work assignment that has left me feeling drained mentally and physically. Writing seemed, once again, to have become something that really didn't do anything for anyone, except me, and like so many people, I felt like it was hard to justify something that seemed kind of self-centered.

Being self-centered isn't a hard concept for me, as I am sure it's not for many of us. It's easy to get stuck in moments that aren't great and be consumed by them. It's easy to get wrapped up in little events, things and excitements. But occasionally, life clotheslines us, and we realize that some things are really huge.

About four weeks ago, Jeph and I found out that we were going to be parents--to something without fur. Some things are impossible to believe, no matter how many times you see evidence of it. Like most women, I had decided not to spread the unbelievable news around until I felt like it was "safe" and that we were out of the scary time.

And then, the next life altering event: Jeph Blanchard throws a blood clot to a lung and spends three days in a hospital bed, completely out of control of one of the things he is constantly in control of--his body. The awareness of the gravity of the situation was not lost on me, and of course, the fear that something could happen to my partner in this big adventure hit me like a freight train. I'm sure the mere two hours of sleep I got after learning of this crazy made the weight of the situation significantly greater.

When you overcome the odds of age, percentages and a bullet, you figure that the biggest bump left will literally be the biggest bump your body will ever experience. The pursuit of getting pregnant and the thought of trying to become a parent is really pretty abstract. In the early days, I really haven't "felt" pregnant. But reading about it in multiple sources and visiting about it with experienced friends assured me that I was normal. At this point, it's important for us to all switch off the goggles and extendible ears that allow us to see and hear that biological clock ticking away as I get halfway through my fortieth year. My age was my only hurdle. My only fear.

I had already decided not to be a hero. I thought of the many women I have worked with over the years and how they had managed their pregnancies. They ranged from the very protective and needy, to the obscenely independent and blase. I've literally worked with women who have gone into labor at work. I don't see the sense of that. I was just going to do what I felt comfortable with. Unfortunately, in our work life, most of us feel compelled to be what everyone else needs, and most of the time, we put what we need on the back burner.

I had also decided not to be a crazy pregnant lady. I wasn't going to worry about every soda I shouldn't drink or every pound overweight I already am. I wasn't going to request that we purchase a special mask for me to wear while I managed anesthesia at work, and while I clearly wasn't going to clean any litter boxes, I was still going to touch cats. I wasn't going to freak out about every little bloat, cramp or spot. I wasn't going to be the wife who looked at her husband and said "no, honey, it might hurt the baby."

I know that there's really only so much anyone can control in life. I've made it pretty clear in past blogs that I'm not relying on some mystical, unknown being to save me or to magically wipe away any bad. But I never expected to feel the way I have felt in the last twenty-four hours. I never knew how horrible uncertainty and waiting could feel. I never knew that I could feel so protective about something that is so small. I never knew that potentially losing something the size of a lentil bean could make me feel so stripped bare. The limbo state of waiting for "threatened" to become "eminent" is painful. The prospect of things ending badly, and having to try again is sobering.

Part of me doesn't want to hope that the tiny intervention might work, because what if we are trying to save something that just wasn't meant to be? Part of me wants beyond all medical knowledge and reason to fight hard. Part of me wonders if there's something in our nature that helps us know when something is wrong, and if that's why I hadn't been ready to start writing in that journal I picked up while baby shopping for a friend.

For weeks, I have been thinking about one of my favorite movies about becoming a mother: "The Waitress." Jenna, played by Kerri Russell, finds herself in the family way while in the midst of a miserably unhappy marriage. One of the first things she does is write a letter to her unborn child, and she continues to do this periodically throughout the movie.

"Dear baby..." all of the letters begin. That's how I had been envisioning this time would be. Almost as if giving up writing here would be replaced with writing there.

As I sit waiting for my body to decide what to do, I am filled with uncertainty. I am filled with grief. I am filled with the emptiness of not knowing. But I think that no matter what happens, I am reminded today of how I cope with life. I cope with it using letters and words, and they don't have to be for anyone else. They can be just for me.

Dear lentil bean,

We don't know if we will get to meet you or not. We hope that you know we were finally feeling ready for you, and we were going to love you so much. We know if you can't make it, that there is a really good reason, and we will hope some piece of who you were going to be will find us again. For now, just rest quietly while we all wait to see. We're going to do our best to do the same, and hopefully tomorrow I will be able to write you again and tell you that everything looks much better.

Love,
Lima Bean

Fires--Band of Skulls