This post has been
inspired by a comment made regarding my blog entry dated the 26th
November last year, named “Empty arms and sweet cats”. This reader has been
through four rounds of IVF and has had two miscarriages, and is now coming to
terms with the reality that she might never be a mother.
She wrote that she
tries to be grateful for all the wonderful things in her life, but that the
pain doesn’t seem to go away.
I can relate to what
she is going through. When we first realised that we weren’t going to be having
kids, and we made the decision to enjoy the life we did have, I thought that it
was going to be it with the whole babies’ thing. I had a lot to be thankful for
– my home, my family, my husband, my pets, my friends. I just had to move on and live the life I did
have. I thought it was going to be quite simple. A few tears, telling people we
were stopping IVF, words of condolence from family and friends, and all the
dark emotions would go away.
I was so very wrong.
With every loss in life there has to be a stage of mourning. The realisation
that we were never going to have our own child was a huge loss, and the
mourning that came with it was very painful and at times seemed never
ending. I was angry, I was sad, I tried
to negotiate with the universe that if I did this or that then perhaps then we could
have a child, I was numb. I was in pain.
There is a common
belief that grieving takes a set path through the stages of denial, anger,
bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I believed this too, and when I got to
the stage of acceptance (the first time…) Kirby and I had a ceremony to say
goodbye to our children and to place a point in time from which we could move
on. I was looking forward to putting all that pain aside.
But we didn’t move on.
Not long after the ceremony I was outside with my anger, pain, and sadness.
Grief wasn’t done with me. I was shocked and felt like a failure.
So, five years later
have I finished grieving? Has the anger and sadness and pain gone away? No, I
haven’t, and, no, it hasn’t. It is true that the pain is less intense, most of
the time, and that I am not overwhelmed by emotions as often as I used to be,
but feelings of grief still visit from time to time.
In our modern day
society there seems to be messages everywhere telling us to be happy and
positive and then life will be wonderful all the time. And if we find ourselves
not feeling happy and positive, if we can’t find a way to make ourselves happy
and positive straight away, then we are failing.
This is simply not
true and it is setting us up – setting everyone up – for failure in more ways
than one. We think we fail because we are not happy, we don’t give ourselves
the opportunity to meet with those darker emotions, and we then don’t have the
opportunity to grow and deepen as human beings by reflecting on those emotions.
We want them gone, and with them goes something so very important.
I’m going to leave it
here today, and my next entry will be more about the times those darker
emotions do come calling, how I deal with them by honouring them, and how these
darker emotions are something I no longer fear as much as I used to.
To end, here is a
quote from one of my favourite books by Thomas Moore, “Care of the Soul”:
“The soul presents itself in a variety
of colors, including all shades of gray, blue, and black. To care for the soul,
we must observe the full range of all its colorings, and resist the temptation
to approve only of white, red, and orange – the brilliant colors.”
Moore, Thomas (1994) Care of the Soul,
HarperCollins, New York
Thomas Moore's website: http://careofthesoul.net
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