new moon

There is no moon tonight, yet the sky is not quite black. It is the grey of ambient light, filtered through clouds and exhaust. It is muddy orange. There is a sense of quiet in the complete blackness where the moon is, something more than just dark, that makes me ache again for somewhere far away from city. The night sky swallows you whole. It reminds you of nothing, allows the stars to be center stage, rather than the back-up band. They say the new moon banishes things. Pray for weight loss! Rid yourself of the philanderer! Quit the job! Banish the blemishes! Exorcise negative thoughts! Quiet the mind! Turn of the refrain. Stop talking endlessly to yourself about nothing important.

My uterus grips the insides of me. The pain stretches into my back, and out through my front. It is ovary, I'm sure of it. Or perhaps something overly...uh, diseased. An appendix four inches too low. It radiates into my thighs, my calves, my muscles are strong, but I cannot push the ache out. This process is so physical. Blood dripping out of me for weeks creating an ombre of pinks, reds, maroons, browns if I allow it. I lose tissue and energy and strength. Sometimes I think about this hippie women's herbal book I have that says to bleed into your garden each month to nourish your plants. I imagine squatting in my blueberries, waving at the neighbor. "Just bleeding over here, thank you very much." I flush my blood, feed it to nothing. It spreads tiny atoms of DNA to every part of the ocean. She is in everything now.

I never saw the baby. Every drop out of me, part of her, I imagine. I am ready to be done with this physical part, like I cut something out, and have to paste myself back into what I think I should be. My friend keeps bringing me potato soup. "It is vegan," she tells me. Add salt. Potatoes are good for the blood." The soup is delicious. She is mothering me, and I like to be mothered.

I took iron for a few days. It moves in me like rocks, in that, there is no movement. No matter how hard I push, I suffer. I quit the iron. I'd rather be anemic. I am exhausted by normal life, tired mentally from pretending that this is nothing that big. "It's all small stuff," someone said to me recently. "Don't sweat the small stuff. But how are you with God? That is the bigger question. Are you turning your will over to Him?"

"We are cool," I say. And we are. I don't have any problem with God. I don't think God has anything to do with death, honestly. Death is a corporeal thing. Hearts stop, lungs block, organs shut down. There is a messiness to death that is very un-Godlike. It is all human. It is all small stuff, I guess, when you compare it to the one all-powerful, omniscient, omnibenevolent God of casual conversation. But I am all-weak, ignorant, and vulnerably human. I want to toil over small things right now. If an almost-daughter is a small thing, then I want to sweat her. I want to weep for her almost-being.

I don't cry. I feel stuck, like an engine turning over, like a cloud in front of the hole where the moon should be. When I am depressed, I like to think of God as a buxom woman with large hips singing work songs in the garden. A frosty Mason jar of herbs and fruit that makes your brain quiet and loving. She's an ancient goddess from a Mediterranean island with low lying teats and a penchant for donkey-hung totems. She wears long skirts and gives birth in a hole filled with straw. She births the Stars, the Trees, Love, the Harvest, the platypus with its egg-laying mammalian faults. Some of her children die. (Think dodo.) She always coos and sings nonsense songs in Spanish to me, her smile as warm and inviting as the first full moon of Spring, filling me up with flowers and dew.

In the night, I think of morning. The children never know what they want for breakfast. It has been driving me crazy. I feel like a claw game every morning. Bagel? English Muffin? Cereal? Cheese? Yogurt and granola? I find this so exhausting. I vowed never to do this before I had children, and here I am, in the middle of the night, thinking about breakfast. Since the miscarriage, I have no patience for it. Beside the pain, it is the only discernible difference in my personality. I start off the day tired already from that one chore. Everyone knows what they don't want, but no one articulates what they are passionate for, what hungers in them. It seems more like an existential problem rather than a food one.

I decide that tomorrow, I will scuttle over to the fridge, legs bent in a kind of goddess birthing pose. I will draw a spiral on my belly and let my breasts hang over my deflated stomach. I'll reach up to the sky and double check my pose with the statue on our altar. I will grunt: "Mother. Goddess. Want. Berries." Because goddesses speak English-Neanderthal. Once I have fed the goddess, I will drink two cups of coffee in the garden, bleeding into the plants and ask myself questions about all the things I take for granted. Is this healing now? Is that healing in my life right now? Is this good for my soul? Is that good for my family? Is this good for mankind? Is that bringing me light or darkness?

The children will eat when they are ready. They will ask me for toast with butter and cheese. Peppermint tea with milk.  And I will mess their hair and sing nonsense songs in Spanish.

The night feels dark without a moon. Solemn and ancient, even though it is only four hours old. I feel lost. How long has she been gone? Either of them? Both of them? I drift in and out of sleep, in and out of pain. I search for quiet in my mind. It comes in wanting berries and knowing it. It comes in a dancing candle, and a moment in the dark muddy orange of a New Jersey new moon. It comes from knowing what you want for breakfast. It comes from hours in front of a project without checking my phone. It comes. Slowly. Steadily. But it comes.

peas

I feel empty of words now.

There is nothing to say. I feel emptied out, shelled, as it were. A pea pod, closed up, looks filled with meatiness. But I am an empty thing, torn in half. There is a stubbornness that is gone. A fight someone flicked from my insides and threw into a bowl for a soup.

It feels good to have no fight left in me. When a soldier surrenders, he sits, places his weapon behind him, and doesn't look back at it. He is done. That decision is made, and there are no second thoughts about overpowering the soldier he just held his hands up too. He just sits and waits for direction. 

The rain started this morning after midnight. First the wind, then the rain. I heard it coming, pulled another blanket out of the cupboard, and covered the boy and myself before it reached us properly. I thought about the meteor shower behind the clouds, and how all those wishes only come to those who see them. 

I can't sleep. My mind races, then I read and grow tired, then I put down the book, and my mind races. It starts again, the racing and reading and racing and reading.What I am thinking about is an unwinnable war. An endless war. A pointless war. A war from which I surrendered, but keep thinking of how much I loved my fucking rifle back when I would use it. So I listen to the rain and wait for direction.

I am sometimes in love with my defects. They are spicy and meaty and get me things I want, even as they come at the expense of others. I am a pacifist now. It feels empty, but I know it is filled with something else entirely. I sit beside the road and wait for an enemy to give me direction. I try not to give into the voice that tells me to turn around and look the man with the gun in the eye. Stare him down, defiant even as I am submissive, my mind saying, "I had a gun once. And when I had a gun, I should have used it."

There is nothing to be said, because I am empty of bitter fruit. I cannot rewrite the recipe that made me who I am. I cannot even say anything about it, because it is gone into the soup.I forget which spices. Which veggies.

The soup is unpalatable. The one made out of me. It contains a pound of flesh or six for a crime I committed lifetimes ago. She is gone. Into the soup. I kicked the witch into the fire and danced in the forest following a trail of bird scat in place of the bread we dropped ages ago. I am home, carrying the cauldron of me. It needs salt, or sugar. Perhaps both. I keep trying to take things away. Once something becomes part of a soup, it cannot be extracted. So, I add counter spices. Chants and spells and a candle for the new moon. It is a banishing spell. But the parts of me are still there, waiting to be shot despite the surrender.

I have no words left. And yet these fall out of me, like the man at a crossroads telling riddles to adventurers. One pathway leads to the beautiful princess and the pot of gold, or the other leads to certain death. I am either the one that always tells the truth, or never does. I don't know why I write like this when I am distressed. This was just about not having peas in me.

self-compassion

I had been having trouble sleeping. Lying in bed watching the night sky change as the hours pass. Planes fly overhead of our house, all hours of the night, low and coming in for landing or taking off from Philly. Heading somewhere else, or from somewhere else to here. I wonder who is gripping the armrest. Who is crying? Who is drunk and doesn't want to be? Who is annoyed? Who is grateful? Who is excited? Who is content? Who is indifferent? Where are they going?

I say up to them:

You are not the only person in the world to feel like this.

Perhaps I should write it on the roof of my house.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

That is the first step of tonglen, if it is a meditation practice you want to cultivate. Just to think that you are not the only person to suffer in this particular way that you are suffering. And further, since you are feeling it, perhaps you should feel it for all the people suffering from that particular brand of suffering. That is a kind of immediate tonglen practice.

Perhaps it is not comforting to be one of the many sufferers. I find it comforting to think tribally, act individually. By thinking as a tribe, I know someone has gone through what I have gone through and they have figured out a solution. All I have to do is ask for help. I find comfort in knowing that things will change, that my emotions do not come with a tattoo artist.

I have been thinking about suffering a great deal lately. As my friends suffer from differing experiences. I have been thinking about sitting in discomfort, anger, sadness, grief, resentment without reacting to it. And honestly, I don't know how to do that well. I think I linked to this piece once before by Pema Chodron about Anger and Aggression and she says that anger is such an uncomfortable emotion, it literally shakes us until it comes out. We want to change anger so desperately, we are willing to fight, yell, hurt people, just because dealing with having to make amends is easier than sitting in anger.

I have been fascinated with this idea of self-compassion since I got sober and realized self-pity is one of the defining characteristics of me and of most alcoholics. As they say, "Poor me. Poor me. Pour me another drink." I think of self-pity as self-compassion run riot. I'm trying not to let anything run riot in my life anymore. So, I am trying to change my self-pitying tendencies to self-compassionate habits.

Every time I call my sponsor about a problem, or a resentment, or an issue, she says the problem is me. It pisses me off, because I want people to agree with me. She is nice about it. She says she loves me. She listens, but then she tells me the problem is with me. And you know what, it is me. She said I have not accepted that life is exactly as it should be. Honestly, I never believed that life was exactly as it should be. I always thought that I should get the boy I want, the job I want, the house I want, and if I didn't, life wasn't as it should be. Hardest to accept is her death. I wanted Lucia here. And I thought she should be here. But she was not here.

People said it all the time to me in this community, "Your baby should be in your arms." I believed them, and I believed me. No amount of magical thinking, or righteous indignation, brought her back. I rewrote that book a thousand times in my head. And it always ended the same.

Conversely, everything that happened after--the bridges I burned, the people I hurt, the bottles of bourbon I drank, the tears I cried, the resentments I cultivated, the angry emails I sent, the self-pitying and unfair blog posts I wrote, the victimization--I cannot change any of those things. Even as I was plotting my course of isolation, I thought it shouldn't be this way. I thought I should be given a wide berth to be an asshole, grieve angrily, self-righteously, demand better behavior from people. I thought my bad behavior was justified and everyone else should be held to unrealistic standards of saintliness and compassion.

None of those things helped me grieve. None of those things helped me accept Lucia was dead. They distracted me from feeling the depth of her death. I couldn't control her death, so I tried to control everything else. It is not something I am proud of. I will not repeat those behaviors again, but I cannot change that part of my story. I could only be who I was. I didn't know what I didn't know.

And so three plus years out, my nights up late involve self-forgiveness. Apologizing to myself for being such an asshole. For not knowing what I didn't know. I am learning about my incredibly complex self-denial, and the ways in which I tried to deny feeling any kind of suffering even while I was in the middle of suffering.

Monday, on our local NPR station, Dr. Kristin Neff was the guest of Voices in the Family, talking about self-compassion. (You can listen to the show here. It is a good show. When Dr. Neff was speaking, she was asked how you sit in suffering, anger, resentment. And she said, you feel the emotion.

I made a Scooby-Doo sound, and twisted my head. And then it was like all of me felt afire. I don't feel. Not nearly at all. I don't let myself feel almost anything. I wiggle out of emotion. I tell the story over and over. I write it out. I pray about it, but I never quite feel it. I can't even quite describe my emotions. It is just flaming, brightly lit emotion.

And she said, you detach the feeling from the storyline. You stop telling yourself the story that led to the emotion. Despair resides in the storyline. She said every emotion, anger in particular, lasts at most twenty minutes. That is, if you don't feed it. If you feel it, and detach from the storyline, and sit with it, maybe you will stop feeling it in twenty minutes. You give yourself unlimited self-compassion because you are human, and all humans deserve compassion. Remove the judgments you have about your own behavior and sit with it. She said feel where the emotion resides in your body. Do you feel the anger in your ribs?

It was like she was speaking a different language, but one I wanted to learn and understand. As they say, "Suffering is inevitable. Misery is optional."





I thought I would share these thoughts as I am going through them, because in this tribe, someone else might be suffering in this way. What about you? What are you thinking about lately? Also open to answering questions, I haven't done that in a long time. Questions about religion, life, parenting, baby loss, art, writing, or anything really. You can leave it in the comments or email me directly, or Facebook me. And also wondering what everyone thinks about doing Right Where I Am again this year. I thought it would be cool to revisit it a year later. What do you think? 

an arm

I have an arm. It is this long.

It is the length of you from me. It is the length of a bourbon from my lips.

Bourbon. 
Lips. 
*swoon*

When I hear the word bourbon, I get all misty-eyed. I miss cracking the wax. I admit it. I miss the smell. I miss the burn, and the vanilla aftertones. After all, I drank bourbon primarily until I stopped drinking. The expensive kind. The small batches. Don't get me wrong, I probably would have drank the Thunderbird, but times were never that tough for me.


I am romancing the drink. You are witnessing it. The old drunks warn you about it. "Don't romance the drink. A drink is only an arm's length away."

Everything is only an arm length's away, Old Man. Self-pity is only a chewed fingernail length away.

My ass is still tender and mostly asleep from the terrible chairs in the basement tonight. But the stories were good tonight, the hope. I feel inspired to stop whining about my beautiful life and the state of my old ass. Then I come here and write it all back. Another shitty day in paradise. When I talk about connecting with people, it disconnects me from others. I am awkward. My arm is straight out and I am measuring people's distances from me. I hold onto my magical deer horn necklace.

Help me know, Magical Antler, whether I should just stop now. The first step is to admit that I am powerless over blogging.

I put out my arm. It is long for a woman my size. I keep blogging. I shake a hand. This is real life I am talking about now. I try to draw them closer, but I don't know how without typing my words. I am friendly, but awkward. Most people don't notice the awkward, they are simply pleased about the friendly. I am good at hiding the awkward. The church basement people know nothing about my daughter's death, or any of the other stuff. Sometimes when I think I have had a hard life, I tell someone about Lucy, and then they tell me about how they lost their child, then another, and their wife, then after some years of grief drinking, they lost their home, their car, their job. There is a lot of grief. You hear it night after night if you listen. It is sandwiched in between normal drinking and suicidal. My particular story sounds like someone who hasn't ever really suffered.

My dead baby. Boo hoo. And my expensive liquor. Boo hoo.


I have an arm. It dislocates when I move it like this.

Ouch.
Son Of A...God, that pain. All I can pay attention to is the pain of that...arm...and the weight of its length.
Is there a wall to bang into? Or a floor? 
Oh, right, OUCH, I am standing on it. I feel the hole in my shoulder, and the hole in my soul. I don't like you getting close to my arm hanging uselessly by the skin, except I want you close because i need help with this blasted arm.
BANG.
Oh, that is better, Arm. You in socket is better than you out of socket. 

It is so painful out that the relief of having it in is worth the pain of the out.  It is the Catch-22 of masochism. I like the pain when it stops, perhaps because it stops, but then I want to go right back into the pain so it can stop again. Perhaps I am a masochist at heart. After all, I have a hole in my soul.  I fill it with things that hurt, including the not-you.  I fill it with self-pity and overindulgent grief and impatience and righteous indignation and justified anger. I fill it with booze and ice cream with sea salt and coffee. I have a hole in me, and I want to fill it with my bloody arms and my goodness and my serenity and God.

I sometimes stay up late and stare at her picture. It doesn't change. I have changed however. She is differently beautiful. I wouldn't trade her for a live baby anymore. I wanted that baby, Lucia, and that baby happened to come dead. I don't get to trade places with people, or get a different life. This is fucking it. She is dead. I am not. I will reconcile that for the rest of my life. Her death doesn't mean I am special and get special rules about the world. It means I now have to learn decency while narcissistically obsessed with my dead daughter. It is so depressing to keep coming to the same obvious conclusion, but I need to remind myself. My default mode is self-pity and self-justification. That is what happens when you have a hole in you.

I lost many friends from the awkwardness of grief from the expectations that led to resentments that led to confrontations that led to me having an arm. And it is very very long.

Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed

As I waited to birth Lucia, I decided to open a grief package they give to parents who have lost a child. In it was a pamphlet of what to expect after birth, and a local grief support group's newsletter. The newsletter contained poems written by parents who had lost children through stillbirth or miscarriage. On the front page, a piece entitled “A Letter to Alex” caught my eye. I had read this before. It was written by someone I knew. She was my colleague at the job I had before becoming a stay at home mom. They had lost their son four years ago. He was born prematurely, and died three days later. When I sat in that bed, feeling waves of contractions through me, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I am not the first person to go through this pain. Here I was all wrapped up in my suffering, getting incredibly sort of narcissistic about my grief. "Why did this happen to ME? What did I do? Why did MY baby die?" Me. Me. Me. And here was this person who also lost her baby. A person I knew. The fact that I knew her humanized her. I remember her grief, and her sorrow. I remember running into her in the bathroom at work and crying with her. Did I tell her enough how sorry I was? Did I tell her that reading the email about her loss made me cry for the first time in my career in front of my colleagues? Did I even say anything? Was I the person to her that I needed now? No. I knew the answer without asking. But then it reminded me of a story I once read called Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed. It began obsessing me. I was anxious to find a copy right there in the hospital. But I just remembered that suffering affects everyone, in their own way. It calmed me. It made me strong to think of this story.

When I finally got home from the hospital, I googled the story of Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed. I am paraphrasing here, because it means something to me that might not be the true story that Buddhists have studied for years. It is a new story for me now. Kisa Gotami was a wise and kind woman. She married a man who was rich, though she was not. I cannot tell you why I remember that part, just simply perhaps, that it was because she was a wise, compassionate and kind woman, and not because she was beautiful, that she married a nobleman. She had one son with him. On a night while a storm raged, she realized that her baby wasn’t crying. I always remember this part, because it is exactly those types of details that us who have lost our children remember. He should have cried from the thunder, but he didn’t. The thunder. The fucking thunder.

When she realized her baby son had died, she prayed. She prayed to every God she could think of. She prayed to the devils too. She prayed all night, but still, her son was dead. So when morning came, she went into the marketplace with her son in her arms to find medicine to bring him back to life. The people took pity upon Kisa Gotami, because she was such a kind woman.

“Your son is dead, Kisa Gotami. There is no medicine to cure him.” The merchants tried to tell her the truth, but she couldn’t hear them. The entire city felt sorrow for her. Some even suggested killing her to stop her suffering. I like that part. Perhaps because it is morbid, or so unbelievably kind, depending on your perspective, that people would think to do that. Finally, she arrived at the apothecary who was expecting her. When she asked him if he had a cure, he pretended to think for a long time. I always imagine him scratching his chin, and looking up at the ceiling, maybe taking off his glasses, then and putting the stem in his mouth. He told her, “I don’t have the medicine your son needs, but Gautama (the Buddha) used to be a doctor before a monk. He can cure your son.” She took off at once, still carrying her son in her arms.

She ran and ran to the monastery where the Buddha was lecturing to the monks there. She ran in screaming, and disturbing the entire scene. She said, “Please, I was told you can cure my son. Please help him.” The monks chattered amongst themselves. Someone said, “Take her out.” Another said, “Have compassion, her son is dead.” She stared at him pleading. She said to the Buddha, “Please, my husband is amongst the wealthiest men in the city. He will pay you any price. Anything you want.” I can just see this scene in my head, though I am undoubtedly influenced by Hollywood movies.

The Buddha stared at her for a long time and said, “Yes, I know the cure for death.”

Of course, everyone gasped. I’m sure a thought passed through each of the monks heads that they were following a charlatan. I would think something along the lines of, “Sonofabitch, I thought this dude was the real deal and not another snake charmer.” She said, “I will give anything.”

He said, “I only need one thing. A mustard seed. One mustard seed. But it cannot be a common mustard seed. It must be a mustard seed from a family that has never known death. If you bring me that seed, I will prepare your cure.” Of course, she was enthusiastic. He then told her to do this alone, and leave her son. He said that he would prepare the rest of the cure while she was on her mission.

It was the first time in two days that Kisa Gotami did not hold her son, and as he lay there in front of the Buddha, they all saw that he was rotting and had maggots. After she left, they cremated the child in her absence.

That part always makes me shudder. It is so real. I actually thought after I birthed Lucy that I wanted to just keep her. That I didn't care if she was dead, I was going to carry her around with me. As morbid and gross as it sounds, it occurred to me as I was holding her that she would disintegrate and rot, like it occurred to me suddenly that this was just her body. Like that Magritte painting, "This is not a pipe." It is a picture of a pipe, but it is not a pipe. That thought calmed me, strange as that might sound. It reminded me that I couldn't hold on to my daughter's body forever, because it wasn't my daughter. It was the shell that housed my daughter.

She began her arduous search for a seed. She was thorough. She went to each house and asked each family for a mustard seed. The first house she knocked on the door, “Can you spare a mustard seed?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, wait, has your family ever known death?”
“Yes, my father died last month, Kisa Gotami, don’t you remember you were there?
And on and on, “My brother”
“My daughter.”
“My husband.”

Kisa Gotami exhausted her search through the city, and knelt in the mud crying, “My son is dead.”

She went back to the Buddha and he asked her if she has a mustard seed for him, and she said, “No. How selfish to think only I could be spared from death.” And I am going to quote one of the versions that I read, the Buddha says:
"Your observation is accurate in every way, Kisa Gotami. Neither those wise nor those foolish are immune to death. However great a father roars, he can never waken a dead daughter. However much a mother begs the gods, a dead son will never cry again. One by one, Gotami, we each die. "

After reading this story, I traveled about the world for the next few days looking at everyone as though they weren't "Bob" or "Michelle", but they were their suffering. Like Bob had become Prostate Cancer, and Michelle had become the one whose mother just died. Even those who were not grieving, I saw people that were insecure, nervous to talk to me, and I saw them simply in their suffering. I remember saying often in the first weeks, “I’m sorry” after someone would offer condolences. My husband Sam thought it was crazy, as though I were apologizing for our baby dying, or apologizing for receiving condolences, but it wasn’t that. They were suffering. I could hear it in their voices, I could smell it emanating from their bodies. Some of those people felt genuine grief at my daughter’s death, and some had felt genuine fear at having to talk to me. I was sorry for them too.

I also began seeing everyone as someone’s child. I remember having a glimpse of that when I gave birth to Beatrice, but this was different. I felt so kindly towards everyone. It is an incredibly healing way to imagine the world—compassionate, empathetic, vulnerable.

I often thought about my sanity, and if I was sane or not. I thought of Kisa Gotami not being able to see the maggots on her son, but only see her beautiful newborn son. She did not know she was gone. She only knew one thing—save him. I recognized that if I wanted to remain sane, I had to accept this world for what it is, not what I wanted it to be. People die. People we love die regardless of their goodness. Humans are fragile beings. We must be kind and good and compassionate and gentle with ourselves and others when we are not, people die, become wounded inside and out. People ask how us non-religious people move forward, how we deal with death. We deal because we do not pretend that someone will right all this suffering. It simply is. It is sometimes unjust. It is sometimes just. I didn’t much linger on the thought of “Why me?”, because the logical flipside of that coin is, “Why not me?”

I felt this amazing sense of connection with the universe. This calm emanated from me, and around me for two weeks. I sobbed often, but for all of our suffering. Sometimes thinking about my husband’s suffering made me cry more than my own suffering. It was one of the most spiritually profound periods of my life. I just saw everyone as their suffering, and I felt an amazing amount of love and compassion for every living thing. It lasted for two weeks or so. And now, some days, I can touch that again, (just writing about it makes me feel that warmth in my stomach) and other days, I feel like a Neanderthal. "What did I do to make Volcano Gods angry? Must sacrifice goat."