Numbness
The day of the PGS news, my mother asked what I was going to do that night. I answered, "Take my car to the shop. The 'Check Engine' light is on." (Oh, the glamorous child-free life!)
"You're taking this well," she said, skeptically.
Since then, I've heard several times, "I'm worried about you." How's a person supposed to respond? Don't worry, I'm fine? That's not true. I'll get by? That's true but not effective. Blunt though I'm afraid it was, I finally just told the truth: "I'm sorry that you're worrying, but those are your feelings, and I don't have control over them."
Someone else said, "How sad that this happened after you'd gotten your hopes up so high." It made me realize that, no, my hopes had not been high at all. This result was always a real possibility, not a surprise. But it was still a shock. No amount of mental preparation can ward off something that feels like a physical blow. The shock is physical too, like the temporary deafness that follows an explosion.
Anger
The anger wasn't about anything specific. It was certainly not about blame, just a wounded desire to be left alone, plus rage at any perceived trespass.
And there were plenty. Like last year, after my miscarriage, the whole world had to burst into full fucking bloom right after my awful news.
Oh sure, go ahead and rub it in. Even better, let's add Easter—a holiday focused on new life, symbolized by EGGS—followed by Mother's Day.
Pretty, happy flowers!
Is it weird that I'm developing a special aversion to tulips? They're just so obnoxiously big and waxy, so uniformly perfect, like something assembled at the Happiness Factory.
Anyway, moving on. The anger comes and goes. The worst was this Saturday, when I was calmly driving to the grocery store and another driver did something pointlessly, casually rude. These days—being acutely aware that there's plenty of random pain to go around—I
cannot stand people who purposely inflict more, however small the offense. I wanted to KILL. I suddenly, vividly wanted to ram this driver's car into a wall, reach in, wrap my hands around his neck, and squeeze until his eyeballs…
Of course, instead of ramming the car, I pulled over and called a friend who reminded me of some things that work for her when she's at wit's end. There were no real surprises, no magic. I knew all these strategies already (work it off with exercise, get outside, be around people even if you don't talk to them, watch a silly movie…). In fact, the comfort was in the familiarity.
It felt like waking up after a nightmare as a child, going to my parents' room, and hearing the litany: "Do you need to use the bathroom? Do you want a glass of water?" It was grounding. By the time we hung up, I felt fully awake.
Sadness
One night I went to an AA meeting. The speaker told a long story about how she'd abused her son while she was drinking and using. He was born addicted to methadone, and things went downhill from there (though she remembers little of it) until she got clean when he was 12. After her, other people spoke about their own parenting regrets and, in some cases, how close they and their children have become since those days.
Sitting there and listening was hard. I came close to walking out. You know:
They can have kids they don't even want?! I can't deal with this right now! But yes, dealing with my own resentments—the one part of all this that I could control—was exactly what needed to happen. So I stayed put. Slowly, surrounded by these people who were facing their own difficult truths, my focus drifted inward toward something I'd been avoiding.
Underneath the armor of numbness and rage came an image of a box inside my chest. It was sturdy, with thick sides, sharp defensive corners that literally made my chest hurt sometimes, and a lid that was clenched firmly in place. But tentacles of my darkest, slimiest feelings were starting to curl out experimentally.
The time has come, I thought.
OK, right here and now. Release the Kraken! Mentally and very deliberately, I removed the lid.
Whatever is here, let me feel it fully. The only way out is through.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It took me two full days to cry any tears at all, and then I cried over someone else's story in a book. It was written by the woman whose husband killed five Amish girls and wounded five more, then killed himself, in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse in 2006.
She wrote about how a group of Amish people came to the funeral she and her children held for her husband—the shooter! For religious reasons, the Amish are opposed to having their photographs taken. Yet they not only came to console her for HER loss, but they quietly put themselves between her family and the hordes of reporters, giving her the gift of privacy by sacrificing their own. And they weren't just impartial neighbors. That line of people standing shoulder to shoulder included the parents of EVERY ONE of the girls her husband had killed.
It took my breath away. It still does. Although our situations have nothing in common, I know we share at least this one essential thing: like them,
I still want love, not bitterness, to win.
