Healing From A Tough Year

I had a crazy revelation the other day, and the revelation was this- if things had turned out differently in 2016, I'd be two weeks away from having a brand new baby.

I haven't thought about my miscarriage in a while. Life has been moving so fast lately that there doesn't seem to be much space for retrospection. And the honest truth is that I've come to an unexpected place of peace about the whole thing.

But this realization hit me like a punch in the gut. It's given me pause to consider, and has left me in an unexpected deluge of grief.

2016 was a tough year. I don't want to minimize or overlook all the good that came along with it, because the good was there in abundance. Yet I'm still left with a pointed need to take stock and grieve.

I don't know why bad things happen, just like I don't know why good people get cancer and refugee babies wash up on the shore like broken seashells. We live in a strange world, and some years are strange and challenging and marked by grief.

If there's anything I know about grief, it's that she moves with indiscriminate freedom. Like a whimsical decorator, she flits from here to there, adjusting a photo here, fluffing a throw pillow there, beating the area rugs, and then adorning a new corner in layers of knickknacks and lace. Her touch lingers and her aroma seeps into the corners of the hallways, leaving behind what seems like an indiscernible path of chaos.

But when she's done, the residual effect is a room more well lived in. It's a space of casual elegance and grace, one that knows itself well and that welcomes guests in with warmth and unexpected beauty.

I'm trying to give her room to move, and I'm practicing the humble discipline of choosing hope despite the lingering traces of darkness. It takes work, and here are a few things I'm learning along the way, in case you too are engaging in this deep soul work of healing and hope.

1. Wear the pretty sweater. In times of grief, it's easy to grab the ugliest old sweatshirt and wallow in unrelenting self-pity. But one day I looked in my closet and saw this one sweater that I reserve for "outside." It's a pretty, oversized, cable-knit number, and when I slipped it on, it felt like a warm hug. In this small act, I felt the tension releasing from my body.
2. Make your throne and lie in it. If you must be sick- if you must be sad and tired and grieving- then choose your space with care. Prepare the sunny spot by the window, lie out the best blankets and softest pillows, and give yourself the dignity of a beautiful place to rest your head. 
3. Break out the bodice rippers. I say this rather tongue-in-cheek, but the meaning is sincere. I love a good romance novel, but these days it's a frivolous indulgence for which I have difficulty justifying the time. Yet grief is often hard enough without the added pressure of self-improvement or other serious endeavors. So delve into your guilty pleasures. Allow yourself to get lost in fanciful, imaginative places. Let the mystery and awe of otherworldliness soothe your soul and bring you back to life.
4. Let the river flow. Once you have clothed yourself in kindness and given yourself a safe and beautiful space to rest, by all means, let the tears come unabated. Tear down the dams, clear the roads, and give in to the release. Emotion needs flow, and flow it must have. So for just a little while, give yourself permission to let go.

I believe that good things are ahead, and that greatness lies just around the bend. And I want to send this hope and healing to you today.

But before we get there, let's give ourselves time to wrap things up, to feel the big feels, cry the big cries, and say the necessary goodbyes. It's going to hurt, but it's also going to feel a lot better on the other side.

Grief is a wayward mistress, but she knows her way around. She'll tidy things up and leave something fresh and new in her wake. She'll also leave the door open on her way out, and she may even offer her hand to help you step outside into the beauty of a brand new day.

Cheers to you and yours, and Happy Holidays.

9/11: In Remembrance

When I was a senior in college, I went to India for the second time. This time as a student, and not alone, but with my soon-to-be-husband. We were studying Tibetan culture, and traveled through Tibet and Nepal before settling in the tiny mountain town of McLeod Ganj in Dharamsala, Northern India, in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Throughout the months of our stay, I lived with a young Tibetan mother and her five-year-old son. They had a tiny, one-room apartment with a cement floor, three beds, one clothes bureau, a television, and a bathroom down the hall we shared with the neighbors.

There were house spiders as big as my hand, and instead of stray cats meowing at the door, we had wild gangs of rambunctious monkeys playing on the balcony outside our windows. It was intense, to say the least.

One day, I returned to this little home after teaching English down the road to Tibetan refugees, and found my new family and a few of their friends sitting with eyes transfixed on the television. They were all watching the BBC news, and the images on the screen were alarming.

When my host mother told me that someone had attacked America, I fell to the floor criss-cross applesauce in front of the screen, and didn’t move for the rest of the night.

I’ll never, ever, in all my life, forget that first image of the wings of a plane sticking out the side of the World Trade Center.

Never. Ever.

It was a strange experience, and an unusual place to experience it in. But here’s what I remember most. Two of our Kashmiri Muslim friends buying us tea, comforting our sorrow, and sitting with us in compassionate silence.

And then the whole town coming together in an evening of prayer, walking through the streets holding candles in silent vigil as we all prayed for world peace and solace for the dead.

In response to the violence, the community around us acted in love.

This past weekend my husband and I got to spend a couple of days in New York City. We didn’t have a ton of time for sight-seeing, but I convinced him to go to the 9/11 Memorial with me. I’m not sure why, but it felt like something I needed to do. And I’m glad we went.

It’s a hard place to describe, but New York City itself is hard to describe, something that needs to be experienced to be understood. A city so alive that it’s like its own living organism, offering an intoxicating journey of the senses accompanied by a constant cacophony of sounds.

But when you reach the Memorial, there’s an unusual sense of quiet and stillness, with the urban symphony dulled by the humming rush of eternal waterfalls. Millions of gallons of water rushing over cold, gray stone, into a deep, dark abyss. Two giant graves for the dead.

I know it sounds strange, but when I looked down into the massive holes, I could hear them and feel them all around me. And it made me weep.

We moved on to other beautiful sights, and still ended up having an amazing weekend. But New York is like that. Stubbornly, tenaciously optimistic and fabulous in its own right.

New York is a fascinating picture of the vastness of human potential- how humans can build to the heavens and also dig massive graves- and how we each hold the choice in our own hands.

Some people experience pain and allow it to burrow deep inside them, where the seeds of hatred and fear sprout invasive roots that poison their souls. These are the people who cause the greatest hurt. They’re the ones creating big black graves in the world around them, leaving cavernous paths of destruction in their wake.

But what I love about New York is that it keeps growing. It keeps building. And it never sleeps. It makes memorials out of the holes and plants groves of trees around them. It says, These wounds might not ever heal. But we will keep building. And we’ll never stop growing.

I think that’s the real beauty of humanity. Not just that humans can create, but they can continue creating after they have been hurt. We always have a choice, and our ability to choose love in the face of evil is what gives me hope.

We never forget. But more importantly still, we never give in to hate. And we never, ever stop growing.

Love is our greatest revenge. And love will always prevail.

Signposts of Joy

Last night I found myself crying. Like a lot. I’m not exactly sure why, but it might have had something to do with all the darling pregnant mamas and newborn babies in the park yesterday.

As I cried and then tried not to cry, at one point, I sat down on my daughter's bed with her. She looked up at me, put her hand on my shoulder, and said, “Mama, I know how you feel.”

Which made me cry even more, touched as I was by the sweet tenderness of her gesture.

Of course, she doesn’t know how I feel, but the meaning was there. She saw my pain, and reached across the void to make it better.

Just so, so sweet.

Growing up in a very dysfunctional home, parenting is a bit of an emotional minefield for me. Not the least of which because I have ridiculously high expectations of myself.

I don’t want to cry. I want to be happy and strong- all the time. I don’t want to be sad and wounded. I want to be positive and resilient- all the time.

And little kids often remind us of our own innocence, how we come out of the womb whole and kind and pure, untainted by the marks of what’s to come.

I once heard a quote that went something like this- you spend the first half of your life hiding the real you, and then you spend the second half getting the real you back. And sometimes that feels true.

The real me, that sweet, tender innocence, feels buried under the weight of a way of being that doesn’t fit for me anymore. I’m a grown-up, and the scary people of my childhood no longer pose a threat. But the hyper-arousal and vigilance persist.

Sometimes those scary people seem like wraiths, somewhere out there pacing the perimeter of my life. Waiting for an opening, to come in and feed on the health and positivity I’ve created.

This summer I planted a bunch of sunflowers in my garden. And not your average, run-of-the-mill flowers, but the giants. I got the biggest ones I could find, and watered those suckers like crazy.

I planted them along the perimeter of our little yard, so that they grew like sentinels. Providing a barrier of sunshine. Holding the line. Guarding the gate. With all the fierceness and beauty they could muster.

I loved those flowers. They attracted birds and squirrels and bees, and tilted their large, open faces towards the sun with all the openness of children.

They’re gone now. They didn’t last long. Their bright, shiny heads became so heavy that they drooped from the weight and faded away. And then they became giant dead trees that had to be chopped down and torn out of the ground.

Their roots came out in mammoth clumps, taking nearly the whole bed with them. Almost as if they still couldn’t let go. They were still trying to protect me.

I miss them, because they acted as a talisman on my journey. They were these giant signposts of joy, saying, "Greatness, just around the corner. Signs of life, just around the bend."

They meant something beautiful, because often in life there are great expanses of road in between, with no markers, and no signs. No indication of direction, one way or another.

In the garden, life changes with the seasons. And each bountiful creature is replaced with another in its time.

This week, we planted tomatoes. And I still don’t know what to put in place of the sunflowers.

But here’s the thing. There are no accidental blooms here. I planted those flowers. I tilled the dirt and sowed the seeds and watered the ground until they popped open and burst into life. I didn’t create the life, but I did have to create the conditions for it to thrive.

And I think sometimes that’s all the assurance we get, on the long stretches of road in between. No signpost. No markers. Just the belief and hope of tilling the earth. Tending the soil. Watering the seeds.

And waiting. For the next blazing talisman to appear.

This Is Love

This passed weekend my husband and I reconnected with some amazing friends we haven’t seen in a while. They have two darling little boys, and we spent a lovely Sunday afternoon relaxing by their pool.

Towards the end of the evening, we adults congregated around the table to chat while the kids played on the lawn. Their boys have this pretty impressive Jeep Power Wheels, and my daughter and their youngest son got in it together.

Among its many amenities, the Jeep had a radio, tuned to the nostalgic sounds of country music, and the littles spent a good half hour sitting together, still in their bathing suits, dancing and listening to tunes while their blonde heads glowed in the setting sunlight.

At one point, they both paused in the middle of it all and looked at each other. Their eyes met in this tender moment, and it was like they were really seeing each other, realizing they were sharing this beautiful moment together. These two tiny, innocent little hearts were bearing witness to all the beauty colliding in that one moment.

Then the moment passed, and they kept on playing.

Nineteen (yikes!) years ago, almost to the day, I went on a date with a quirky, energetic blonde kid I met at church. I think he had all of $10 in his pocket, and barely had enough money to pay for parking and the ice cream I asked for. He was emotionally healthy and stable in a way I didn’t know was possible, especially coming from the instability and chaos of my fragile home life.

We walked around for a while, then sat on one of those benches near the pond in the middle, where the ducks congregate on mounds of plushy, green Korean grass. We talked for hours, probably about our passion for our faith, and our dreams to make a different in the world. We might have made tentative plans, starting to make tiny promises to each other that would turn into big promises later.

I wonder, after seeing the sweet innocence of my daughter with her new friend, if we might have had that same look all those year ago, on that bench in Seaport Village. If someone passing by might have seen the tender innocence on our faces, untainted by the hits and bruises that life would bring our way.

It can be hard to remember that now, when love often seems to get lost in the muck and mire of everyday life, among all the unceasing demands of work and home and family. It’s that sweet innocence that gets lost, and sometimes, the longer the road, the harder it can be to find your way back.

A lot of life has happened since that first date. Most of it has been good, great, amazing. A little bit of it has been hard, and sometimes it’s those little bits that seem to take up the most room.

If I could go back and talk to that young girl sitting on the bench, I’d tell her that it’s going to be hard- harder than she could imagine. That life will make a battle-worn soldier out of her. And that it’ll cultivate a strength in her that will make her proud.

But most of all, I’d tell her to look closely at the face across the table from her, at the hands that are co-creating this life around her. To listen to the voice that returns home with stories of laughter and pain. I’d tell her not to forget that spunky boy she fell in love with. I’d tell her that he’s still right there, and that the journey is just getting started.

Empty Belly: The Lessons of Miscarriage

I’ve always known that miscarriage exists. Kind of like I’ve always known that aliens exist- in some hypothetical universe out there where people wear tinfoil hats and spend their lives staring at the stars. Basically in someone else’s reality- just not in mine.

When I decided to have kids, I thought I could approach it like any other worthwhile endeavor- set a goal, make a plan, and go for it. And to be honest, baby #1 was like that. Awesome pregnancy, standard birth, healthy baby.

I thought #2 would be the same, but I was wrong. I stepped into that alternate universe and got a harsh dose of its alternate reality.

I won’t belabor the point by reliving all the gory details. Suffice it to say, it was pretty tough. I had a dark couple of months, during which time I felt physically empty and demoralized by the heartbreaking setback.

Sometimes it’s hard to comprehend that in life, there will be times when you’ll go all in, you’ll play a brilliant hand, and you’ll lose. You’ll walk away from the table empty handed, defeated and alone.

It’s part of life, but it’s a difficult lesson, and it’s hard to bounce back. But here’s what I’m learning through this experience:

1.     Gratitude. Loss can have the paradoxical effect of magnifying the beauty of everything that remains- the heart that beats, the marriage that persists, the child that thrives. As long as there is life, there can be magic.

2.     Play hostess to grief. This is something my brilliant friend Audi wrote about in her blog post a few months ago, Grief and Gold. Welcome grief in, and give her the space and time she requires. Take what she brings, and give her full range, until she’s done what she came to do.

3.     Let your body heal. Give your body as long as it takes to knit itself back together, no judgments attached. Feed it nectarines and sunsets and copious amounts of any other beauty it desires. It will come back in its own good time.

4.     Be open to love. This was hard for me, but I made an effort to share my experience with the people around me. I discovered I’m not alone, that so many other women have gone through this, and they survived. I became the recipient of countless acts of tender kindness, and I felt incredibly loved.

There’s nothing that can fully remove the scars of adversity. Sometimes the best thing you can do is lie in bed for a while and cry, and that’s okay too. I definitely did a lot of that. Loss becomes an irrevocable part of you.

But I want to believe in healing and renewal, and the potential for life after loss. I want to believe that life can grow out of loss, if I can muster the courage to allow it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever try to have a second child. It may not be in the cards for me. But I will choose to live as gloriously as I can. And I’ll put my cards back on the table, in one way or another. I’ll play that brilliant hand, and let the cards fall where they will.