Ambivalence

This weekend, listening to NPR, I learned that someone you feel ambivalent about makes your blood pressure rise more than someone you actively loathe.

I have struggled a great deal since Lucy died with friends and support. Some people I wanted to be there weren't and others I didn't were. It felt so strange to reject support when I felt so fucking lonely. Or to send emails to people I still wanted in my life when I didn't hear squat. So much thought went into emails and correspondence in the early months. I think Catherine nailed it in her blog post about trust. Trusting others with your baby, with your vulnerability, with your memory and with your grief is so overwhelming and scary. It needs to feel one hundred percent safe to talk and share and be. I heard someone say once, your story and your emotions are gifts. You need to choose people who are worthy of receiving them.

When I began writing this blog, it felt like something "devastating" happened to me everyday. My daughter's death put me on a precipice and after that, everything felt like a strong gust of wind that may push me into the abyss. A new way to miss my daughter. Shopping became a testament to my strength and will. Something occurred to me in public that floored me and brought those searing tears of shame. Someone else's child. Some else's pregnancy. Someone else's failed comfort. My vulnerability was so obvious.

It's not really like that anymore. People ask me frequently now how many children I have, when Beatrice is getting siblings--I just have my answers ready. I steel myself for the most invasive questions when I go out in public. I am not getting tougher. Just more accustomed to this life. Sometimes, though, when those tough new moments come, I find myself back in that emotional abyss of the early days. It is like the cellular memory of my grief is just below the surface ready to cramp my muscles and leave me incapacitated on the floor. My post yesterday was one of those posts that set my flux capacitor for January 2009. It felt so painful and hard to write, and I cried through it. It probably doesn't seem like it. It was kind of goofy after all. But it was hard to admit the amount of time and effort I spent thinking about my weight, the way my behavior verges on eating disorder thinking, and, honestly, to admit the abuse I reaped on myself in the last nine months. So much shame is tied into our grief. The shame before our losses becomes multiplied. Part of me is coming to a place of peace, forgiveness and compassion with myself. It is both healing and incredibly painful. My father used to say to me when I would talk about fretting all night about a bad grade, or a lost basketball game, "If someone said to me what I say to me, I would knock that asshole out."

After all this time, I am still not exactly sure how to manage my relationships, repair old ones or start new ones. I thought I would have some insight by this point. I'm not sure how to pick up the pieces of lost friendships, how to move on and forgive someone who didn't acknowledge my loss, how to distant myself...I'm not even exactly sure how to survive for the rest of my life without my baby. Sometimes the idea that my baby is gone still knocks the wind out of me. My energy these past months has been focused on that, surviving her death and how that affected every aspect of my life.

The part that felt most difficult about relationships was the sort of drama of the early months. Like constantly something felt crushing and overdone. And they were things like someone's words, or an email or...I wasn't like this before. I rejected the theatrics, you know. "Save the drama for your mama" felt like an apt kind of thesis sentence for my relationships. I would sort of cull the dramatic sorts out of my life, and let go of small offenses by those I cared about. And suddenly, after my daughter died, it seemed like I embodied the drama. I remembered petty little grievances for months, and could not forgive. Upset by the clumsy way people announce a new birth, or ask about our lives, or complain about their newborn's sleeping habits. Now, I've just become incredibly ambivalent about most of my relationships. It just doesn't matter to me. That feels cruel.

And it is not even like I hate these people, or am deeply hurt by them, now it is just this "whatever" attitude has settled into my feelings. Why are they still in my life? And yet culling them feels like so much more drama than I want to take on anymore. So much fucking work to tell someone if you can't be there in my worst moment, I don't really want you there in my best. It is not part of the new Angie that I like very much. I was many things, but ambivalent wasn't a word I ever would have used to describe myself before.

But what I was talking about yesterday, and maybe today, is getting to this point where I do like myself. I do want to accept this person I am now. Not the person who would have cooed with Lucy, but the one who mourns her. Not the thin person, but the person who works hard despite the reward. Maybe the ambivalence is there, because the one relationship I need to focus on right now is a forgiving, compassionate relationship with myself. And after that relationship begins healing, the way to deal with this ambivalence will be clear, or maybe the ambivalence will change into an emotion I can actually work with. I want to be positive and up and not so dramatic and sad, paranoid and angry. These last weeks, I have wanted to bathe myself in light, because everything has felt so damned dark. And I acknowledge that I played a significant role in the darkness. Instead of distance, I jumped right into the abyss, a comfortable place I have known very well these past months. And so I sit cross-legged and repeat in this crazy person sort of way. "Breathing the love in(inhale), breathing the darkness out (exhale)."

Even I sometimes think I sound insane, believe me.




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On a separate note, East Coasters, travelers and friends, some spots for the Babylost Mama Retreat in November (November 20-22) have opened up. Are you interested in connecting in real life for a weekend of healing, relaxing, sharing and listening? Please email me at uberangie (at) gmail (dot) com for some more information.