Becoming Mother

Wounds don’t hurt.

Until the bandage comes off.

Until that crisp, fresh air rushes over the newborn skin.

Somewhere along the line, you learn to not wince.

That means it’s getting better, my mom would say. Just keep changing the bandage.

I change my bandage at 5:00 p.m. on Sundays.

My children give me one last hug before they run into the house that used to be my home to see their father, excited and full of stories. And this is right and good and I am grateful that our children are eager to see each of us when they return. It makes me feel like we are getting at least part of Divorce right.

Then, I am pulling away from the house.

I try to be optimistic and tell myself that I will welcome this week-long break without my kids.

I could almost believe myself. If I couldn’t feel the holes, all over me.

I want to run from the feeling or numb it or distract myself from noticing it. But then I remember.

They can never make it pain-free, my mother whispered as she lay dying.

I breathe.

I remind myself that I am here, with me. I am alive and this is what I’m feeling. First, the sting. Then, the pain.

I feel it all. All of it. 

Too much and all at once. 

A hole for each child, the shape of their heads, situated over my stomach and chest, where each of them rest when I hold them.

A hole for my husband, which is different than the one for my marriage. The hole for my husband cuts through my flesh down to the bone, leaving a hole the size of his body and spans the entire length of me. It is massive in size.

But the one for my marriage is deeper, digging all the way down to the nerves. It unearths a steady river of doubt that assaults me, carves away at my beliefs, and sweeps away the earth below my feet. It plows through my reality, creating deep valleys which I will fill with confusion and sadness and gratitude and frustration and hope as I make sense of what my life has become.

Then, there’s the hole left by my mother, puncturing the very center of my heart, from which pour memories of Love and Belonging and Safety and Goodness and Strength. I use words to fasten some of them in place and give shape to all that she was. But I am too small, my knowledge too limited, to ever be able to fully represent what she was to all of us.

The hole left by my father is hidden away, inside my ears, where his voice and laugh continue to resound, where he will forever tell his stories and give advice.

Each loss has consumed the tenderest, most fragile parts of me. They were the first to go. The parts that believed that Love is a wholly uncomplicated thing, impenetrable when you do it right and construct strong walls around it.

Also gone are the parts of me that anticipated that grief would mean, mostly, that I would miss my loved ones after they died. The parts of me that couldn’t imagine the actual physical and emotional pain that follows in the weeks after a Loss. It takes time and effort and examination just to survive the paralyzing pain that shuts me down for ten, twenty, thirty minutes. Sometimes a whole day. Sometimes more than that.

After the pain comes what I’ve worked so hard for: The manageable, persisting ache that is now a part of me. The echo of original hurt. Now I can acknowledge their absence without dissolving into tears. That is what my grieving has earned me.

The ability to keep them alive with my recollections.

The ability to accept the End while still holding love for the Journey.

***

The weight of the loss, how heavy it becomes on the hard days. It takes running and yoga and kickboxing to relieve the weight and the tension, to remind myself that these legs and hips and arms and chest are me.

This is me, here, running against this pavement. I am here, with me.

Does that sound crazy to you? Or does that just make so much sense?

It reminds me that I am here, now. I am not alive in the past, where I first felt the sting, where the wounds began and opened and grew and ruptured.

I am alive here, today, where the healing is happening. Where I feel the ache now more than I feel the pain.

I am not there anymore, where the hurt occurred. In a time where the pain was ever present.

But it takes All the Therapies.

• Exercise Therapy
• Coffee with a Friend Therapy
• Massage Therapist Therapy
• Hairdresser Therapy
• Coworker Chitchat Therapy
• Writing Therapy
• Snuggle with Child Therapy
• Farm and Family Therapy
• Divorce Memoir Therapy
• Secondhand Retail Therapy
• Liturgy Therapy
• Therapy Therapy

It takes all of these, just keep me from becoming rigid and fragile, brittle and dry.

What I become is a choice, and one that I don’t always choose well.

There have been days–their number mercifully limited to two hands–when I fell into the hole and chose to stay there. When you’re out of resources, anything that takes work is sometimes just too much. When you’re out of resources, sometimes, you choose the warm blanket and an empty stomach just so you don’t have to marshal the energy to make the decision to move.

I was prepared for a story arc of rising action, climax, and denouement. I was not prepared for the story to move like a carousel, cycling through all the stages of Grief, taking me up and down and around, even as I search for just one stationary emotion to cling to as life goes on.

I can ride Rage for a few hours. I can ride Sadness for a lot longer.

But riding both tears me in half.

So it takes All of the Therapies, just to reconnect me. With others. With myself.

This isn’t self-care right now. This is survival.

After all the loss of this last year, re-establishing these connections is right up there with food and shelter.

***

Am I a traveler on the bridge between Life and Death, trying to find my way back?

But a bridge is too level. You can drift across a bridge. But I am not drifting. I am climbing. I am pulling myself up with all my strength. Climbing through fog, uncertain about where the top is. Sometimes, carrying two more people.

So not a bridge. But a ladder. Maybe even a rope ladder, one that swings and bends and moves away from the very place where your foot expects to find a rung. It takes concentration and effort to move from one rung to the next.

It is exhausting.

But it does make you stronger. Sturdier. More resilient and, in time, more reliable.

***

The strength that it takes, just to walk through this life, without the ability to hear your parents’ voices anymore. To know that they are gone forever and what remains are ashes and a grave.

Ashes are light. You can carry them with you. But in this way, they are deceptive. The action of tossing your father’s ashes to the wind provides a ceremony that visually punctuates the grief.

It is finished, Jesus said. But it is not. And you realize this a year later when the anniversary of his death blindsides you. June 12th. Your body remembers the pain every year, presenting in odd ways like unexplained back pain, trouble sleeping, moments of panic, and sudden clumsiness.

The grave is heavy, but honest. You feel it’s gravity when the earth that holds your mother becomes quicksand. You don’t even realize how far you’ve sunk until you try to leave and just can’t. The memories are too thick, too sticky, caught on the curves of her name, etched forever into stone. One memory brings forth another and another.

It is finished, Jesus said. And this time you believe it. Because now, they are both gone.

With the loss of your parents, a part of you dies along with them, the youthful half, the one in which their laughter can still be heard, the one in which you could still run into their house and share all your stories.

This loss swallows the you that made carefree plans based on Desire instead of Need. Because there is no backup plan anymore, no more possibility of moving back home or asking for financial help or reaching out for anything, should Need overtake you.

And then your children utter the words, It isn’t fair!

Even as your reactive side applauds their frustration, you restrain yourself from throwing this hard truth in their faces: Do not expect fairness and justice in this life. And do not ask me to create a world for you that doesn’t exist. The best that I can do for you is to help you preserve your hope and optimism in a world of hurt and inequity.

You don’t say this to your children. Not yet. There will be a time. But you love them too much to walk them through this truth right now. In the meantime, what is required of you is to be strong and let these thoughts and protests wash over you.

The strength it takes comes at a cost. To become strong is to sacrifice pliability. To achieve strength and grace? That is sometimes impossible in a world governed by norms.

Because your situation is not normal anymore. It does not enter the world’s frame of reference when organizing Life.

We would love to see both parents at the kindergarten celebration! Grandparents too! You are welcome to take your children home afterward! Most parents do.

We are divorced. My parents are dead. And we work full-time.

What are you doing for Mother’s Day this year?

Trying to get through it.

Do the children reside with you or your ex-spouse? Only one parent can be deemed the residential parent.

They reside with both of us. Do not make me use language that reduces who I am to my children.

***

Love is not pictures on the wall advertising blessed and grateful and livelaughlove.

It is sugar over bitter herbs.

A white flag and bandages.

The rope that you both hold on to when the world begins spinning.

And finally, the knife that you use to cut yourself loose when you can’t tell up from down anymore and when the pain of living with your insides outside of you becomes too great to bear.

And this is true of both Death and Divorce.

What I tell myself in these moments of Feeling it All is that I can survive the pain.

(They can never make it pain-free.)

It means I am alive. I am here, with me.

It is not Life without the pain.

The next moment could bring joy.

It could bring peace.

***

Am I a depression in the earth, a sinkhole where the waters of our marriage once resided?

Or am I the weeping willow dying beside it?

Here is a lesson that my marriage taught me:

A relationship can last a long time when it’s built on a reciprocity between two people. I will love you and you will love me. We will fill each other up because without each other, we are empty.

But it cannot last forever–because Life will give you too many situations when the other person will be incapable of filling you up. And in those moments, you need to believe in your own self-worth and value.

***

“Now, we’re just here to be memories for our kids,” the father in Interstellar said. “Once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your children’s future.”

Now that my parents are gone, how painful and wonderful I know this truth to be.

When I close my eyes and think of them, what are the memories that immediately spring forward?

The answer is: The very best. And the very worst.

Remember this.

Your children will remember you at your very best.

And your very worst.

Remember this, I tell myself.

Make sure that the very worst thing that you say doesn’t make your children question their worthiness or whether you love them.

Make sure they always know this, after a hard moment is over.

Because now that my parents are gone, that is what I cling to.

The moments when their love for me came alive.

Some people say that all they need to know is that God loves them.

I’ll be honest with you–I’d rather know that my parents loved me. Because they were the face of God in my life. They were God’s hands and God’s heart to me.

And on the hard days, this is what I remember:

The I love you notes that my mother put in my sandwiches.

The stuffed bear from Shoney’s that my father bought, just for me.

The tears in my mother’s eyes when I said good-bye to her at the end of my wedding reception. (She rarely cried).

The way my father held newborn Felicity and said, They don’t stay small like this very long.

***

Here is a truth about my children now that they have experienced divorce.

They will know the Joy of Return. Over and over again.

***

When I’m with my children now, I sometimes wonder what will be the snippets of memory that they will carry with them.

What mundane and boring sounds or smells or sensations will become the backdrop of comfort for them?

For me, it was the sound of a barking dog, an unwatched TV in another room, blaring news or commercials or Judge Judy. The smell of pot roast if it was Sunday. The smell of cinnamon and pine cones if it was Christmastime. If it was summer, it was way too hot even though the A/C was constantly roaring because how do you keep a house cool when seven people are constantly moving into and out of it?

What sharp memories will rise to the surface of my children’s consciousness? What will become their I love you-notes-in-sandwiches? What will their bodies crave in their hardest moments? Will they remember the way I hold them?

I think about this. And I try.

I try today, every day that I have them, to create memories that will reach out from beyond the Grave and surround them in thick and sticky Love so they will remember I love them today, tomorrow, and every day of their lives, long after I am finally Gone.

I will love them through these memories until the Moment they return to me.

***

Here is a truth about how I’m feeling today.

I feel like I’m just now waking up on the shore after months of storms and shipwreck. I’m just now lifting my head, brushing the sand from my face, and starting to walk this new life.

This is my new place to run. The new coffee pot and new mug. My new job (because why not add that into the mix of all the Life Changes?)

This is the place where my children will sleep and here is the stove where I will cook their meals. This is the grocery store where I will gather everything I need to care for them. Here is my bank account, in my name only. Here is my paycheck. Here are my credit cards, with no other authorized users. My credit score.

This is my new shore.

Or is it my new soil?

It will take more time.

It will take All of the Therapies.

But I am here, with me.

I am where the healing is happening.