Leaning out?

For a long time, almost for as long as I can remember now, I have been “leaning into” my grief.

This was my plan on Day Zero – the day I lost John. The first day of the “new me.” The day I stepped over the invisible line and became this person I don’t recognize. I wasn’t going to be stoic. I decided that the best way to deal with my grief was to deal with it head-on and with my whole heart. To do otherwise would be to deny myself my true feelings and my sons their legacy.

So I went to therapy and I talked about it. And I stayed up and cried about it all night and every morning on the drive to work. And when I meet someone and they ask me “how many children do you have?” my answer is “Two living children.” And I wear my necklace with the charms of all four of my children and I let people ask me about each charm. I explain about Chromosome 22 and 1g to anyone who asks and some poor souls who don’t ask and get to hear about it anyway. I argue with people about genetic testing and early intervention. Once, in a fit of righteous indignation in a Wal-Mart parking lot, I approached someone with a particularly ardent Pro-Life bumper sticker and told them what I thought of people who limit the choices of grieving mothers. And I told them about John and Drew and 1g and mercy and choices and grief.

I “lean in” to my grief because it’s there and it’s real and it feels like something I can hold onto when the world is still spinning and I wish I could get off.

But at some point, the deep, soul-crunching grief became my default. Some people are just happy people, some people are usually sad or bitchy. It’s their point-of-start, and my point-of-start in everything I do is grief.

And I like it that way.

And it has to change.

Last week I experienced the kind of moment every Baby Loss Mama kind of knows (or fears) she is going to experience. It’s the moment you prepare yourself for: when someone says something about your lost child or children or your grief and they aren’t being clueless or simply misunderstanding the depth of the situation.

People – people who I thought understood my grief to at least some degree and people I thought cared about me and my feelings and my boys to at least some degree – said some pretty horrible things. They said things that I can’t imagine anyone saying to a stranger, let alone to a person in my family who I have watched slog through this grief journey.

So there it was, the moment I knew would eventually happen, just happening with the last people in the world I thought would put me in that situation. And what did I do? What was the big response of the girl who would verbally assault someone over a bumper sticker in a Wal-Mart parking lot to defend her choices as a mother and the legacy of her dead sons?

I ran.

I got myself out of there so fast I don’t even remember half of the details.

So my big response was my default: severe grief. I stopped eating. Completely. I had about 150 calories a day from milk and refused to eat any more. I did this for 11 days, hoping the hunger would restore me in my re-broken brokenness. I cried for two days and then every night after my husband fell asleep. I wrapped myself in blankets, hoping the blankets would shield me from the hurt. I reached out to other BLM’s hoping they could give some perspective to the situation. I went to the cemetery and cried because I couldn’t see the headstone because of the fresh snow.

I leaned in, because that is the plan. That is always, always the plan.

Then, somewhere in this starving, freezing, snotty, crying hole of my own creation, I realized that it can’t be my plan anymore. It can’t be my default. Leaning in is hurting me more than it is helping me.

I know I can’t ever let go of my grief. I would never want to. It’s as much a part of me now as my fingers and toes. I’m not looking to put down the heavy cinderblock of sadness. But now I’m starting to think that the next phase of the my grief journey is finding a new default – the new point-of-start for me. I know that, like so much of this journey, I won’t get it right for a really long time – maybe I’ll never get it right. That’s OK. And I’ll deal with my in-laws and their personal affront on my grief in my own way, in my own time. Or maybe I won’t. I don’t have to lean into everything.