Three years on: liberation through loss

This last weekend I commemorated the third anniversary of my mother’s death.  At the same time, the suicide bereavement group Solace held their annual candle lighting service.

I went along to this in order to mark this anniversary, to think of Mum, to be in solidarity with others who had experienced similar loss, and because I like the idea of ritual.

It turned out to be a different experience than I thought it would be.

What would have been Mum’s 80^th birthday marked a turning point for me in terms of thinking about the direction I’m headed.  I covered this in my previous post, and in several others I talked about my loss of autonomy early in adulthood.

Before this anniversary I had already had issues come up for me around areas fundamental to my identity.  These were already turning over in my head before her birthday anniversary came up.

I have begun a retrospective journey and begun to question everything I have known since I was a child.  Naturally, one’s mother is the predominant guide through the early years while ideas about how life might look like are forming.  As I grew I decided that I wanted my life to look like hers. 

But looking back now, I wonder if I decided that, or if it was decided for me. I made conscious choices that led to a life like hers, but was I really fully informed about what those choices might mean?

Retrospection has meant looking at some experiences of my teenage years, and wondering ‘what if?’ 

I am fortunate to have detailed diaries from the age of 11 to about 18 where I have laid bare my soul.  I have to read between the lines of adolescent angst, but there is plenty to draw from.

As I sat in the church while everyone took their turns to light their memorial candle, it dawned on me that sitting here was not about Mum.  It had become about me.

With her passing I had been freed from all the constraints of the life she conditioned me to live.  Of believing that was the only way.  Of disappointing her if I didn't live that way.

I had been freed from the pain of her loss, but it’s possible that the pain isn't over yet.  Now it’s time to deal with the pain of self-examination.  It’s time to figure out who I am, what I believe and what I want my life to look like now that I no longer have the trellis of her life to grow against.

It’s made me realize that I don’t really know and that it’s not going to be an easy process to find out.  Until now, for the last twelve years at least, my identity has been tied to other people, and it’s a struggle to figure out where and who *I* am.

So now I begin.  Books.  Space.  Reflection.  Dreaming.  Thinking.  Crying.  Confusion.  It’s all there.

It’s going to be hell of a ride.

"Just enjoy who you are"

Today would have been my mother's 80th birthday.  Landmark events associated with my parents are always interesting, as they make me pause for reflection and think about how I am progressing through the odd journey that is grief.  

Today I acknowledged that I am no longer consumed with feelings of loss, but rather moving into a positive period of looking forward.

After a huge amount of time dwelling in the land of glass-is-half-empty, devoid of motivation and enthusiasm, this is great progress.

A friend and I had a conversation the other night in which she said I was an overthinker - a deep thinker...and that I should 'just enjoy who you are.'

 But what if I don't know who I am?  Huge shifts in my life have made me a different person and I have to get to know her all over again.

What are my goals? What are my values?  What do I want to do and be beyond someone's wife and mother?  What do I want to change in the world?  How can I find the means to do that?  Who are the important people in my life?

Who am I.....really?

Some of these questions require a bit of looking back.  How I respond and react to my present has roots in my past.  Most of the questions aren't perplexing - they're exciting gateways to new possibilities.  Some of them are puzzling and bewildering and are taking me on a journey to the past and back again.  My life from the age of twelve is being re-examined with eyes open to new possibilities and doors I never opened because they were so firmly sealed shut I was not even aware they existed.

All of this culminates in a buzzing turbulence.  Soaring highs of the excitement of self discovery coupled with swooping lows when contemplating  the complexity of change.

In my last post I talked about my revelation about my lack of autonomy. There was no period of figuring out my place the world without that place being shared by someone else.  The revelation that day left me in tears....and then I locked the thoughts about it away in that box of jumbled emotions I couldn't deal with right then.

I think now it might be ok to open the box.  I feel like a teenager on the cusp of discovering what life is about...of figuring out how to be a grown up.  I have to do it with a lot of people's needs to take into account...not just mine.  

It won't be easy but I think its time.

Doors close; doors open

Last weekend I attended a baby shower for my brother's wife, who is expecting their first child next month.  This is a big event for our family.  All our children's cousins (all on my husband's side) are grown up, and live in the South Island.  They adore them, of course, and there are advantages to having big cousins, but the idea of having a baby cousin that they can see more often than once a year (or less) is particularly thrilling. 

The excitement for me is that its my only sibling's child;  a little boy that will be able to carry on our family's name; someone besides my own children to hope and dream about.

The baby shower was delightful - silly games sit alongside the beginning of the induction of a new member to a special part of society.  A number of the party were mothers themselves, and were able to reminisce about birthing their babies, and their experiences of early motherhood.  We partook in the important social ritual of giving gifts, and admiring those that others had given.  The mother-to-be could try to comprehend that these clothes and cuddly blankets are for a real person - the person currently curled up inside her, but soon to be in her arms.

On the drive home, I had the time and distance to reflect on the experience - the joy, the anticipation, the laughter.  And then I cried.

I cried for my mother and how she threw this experience away.  Although she found social experiences awkward, particularly with people she didn't know, she would have come to this gathering.  She might have sat quietly, observing.  She would have chatted with the Oma (Grandma)-to-be, she would have had a cup of tea and ate cake and had a lovely time in her own, low key-way. 

Mum absolutely loved babies.  In her extensive writing, she includes touching diary entries about times she has cared for my children as babies, describing things like a baby falling asleep in your arms as being one of the best feelings in the world.   It does bring me to understand the depth of her desire to leave.  My brother and his wife got married in March 2010.  Mum knew how determined my sister-in-law was to have a baby, and soon.  If she knew all this - knew that there were more grandchildren in her future, more babies to rock to sleep - yet still needed to go, it is clear to us that she was suffering a despair deep enough that she felt no other way out.

I don't cry for my little unborn nephew.  He will have an Oma and Opa.  He will have uncles and aunts and cousins to love him.  So I'm not angry at Mum for leaving him before he existed, before he could even meet and know her...just incredibly sad for her. 

My last post - and the one before that, too - were an study in self-pity and melancholy.  I was in a loop of self-absorbed self-consciousness, and it had to stop.  After the realisation that I had dwelled on these feelings for so long, I pulled myself up by my figurative bootstraps and began to think about life beyond being worried about my appearance and beyond being a Mum of small children.  My youngest child will start school in February and I'll no longer have a pre-schooler.   I have begun thinking about a new career and what steps I might have to take to begin on that road.

Some doors are closing, but others are opening.  After a time of incredible devastation for our family, my unborn nephew is a sign of a rebalancing.    

He is hope.  He is love.  He is a new beginning.

Fear and loathing in Central Auckland

As I write this, my iPod is set to 'melancholy' and Lana del Rey is asking in her sultry tones, "Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful?"

There is a reason there are crises defined as occurring in middle age. I'm not quite sure what "middle age" is these days....perhaps this "crisis" has more to do with stage than age.

Maybe it comes later in life, but with losing one's parents comes some rapid growing up whether you are 14 or 40.

We are forced to stare down the inevitability of ageing and mortality. At 14 you might have the advantage of youthful enthusiasm and sense of indestructibility to see you through this unscathed, but the experience on the other side of 35 is quite different. Your gym trainer looks at you earnestly and uses terms like 'peri-menopause.' The mirror tells you that your metabolism and collagen stores are not what they once were.

But why do I even care? I am past husband hunting stage by about nineteen years. My friends are genuine and more concerned with the content of my character than what the scales tell me of my worth.

Because the person looking back at me from the mirror with the wrinkles and the thirty pound weight gain isn't me. Looking back at photos of me in my teens, I was skinny as a rake and had a face that exuded confidence. But I don't remember being at all concerned about my appearance. For all the warnings about teens and self image, mine was more secure at 14 than nearly 40.

My therapist has helped me explore some of these issues. I still remember the gasp when I said my mother told me I'd never be beautiful. But is it important to be beautiful anyway? Apparently....yes. Or at least in my head.

There are things that just come with the passage of time. Lines on my face as a legacy of teenage sun worshipping are something I do just have to learn to accept. A whole new body shape thanks to affluenza is not something I should accept, especially with spectres like diabetes and heart disease tapping on the window asking to be let in.

Acceptance. It's a difficult place to find. My mind wrestles with the desire to duplicate my confident, beautiful teenage self, and the reality that those days are left behind in the photo albums stashed in my late mother-in-law's china cabinet. Even necessary change for my own self-preservation is hard. I have to be convinced I'm worth it.

Lana del Rey is on the melancholic playlist, but the answer to her question is "I know you will."

If only I were so sure.

Am I predjudiced....towards myself?

Once upon a time, I was the self assured young woman who declared that I would age gracefully, not mind the wrinkles that would mark my worldly experience, not dye my grey hairs.  But then something happened.  I got older.  And I got fat.

I always objected to fatism.  I could find loveliness in fatness.  I admired curvy beauties with the confidence to sing or act and not demonstrate the need to adhere to society's slim ideal.

The combination of anxiety, depression, medication, lack of exercise, lack of sleep and a new financial position that resulted in more lunches out, more coffee and more takeaways was a recipe for disaster weight wise.

My self esteem plummeted, and I found myself out to be a complete hypocrite when it came to my own feelings about appearance.  I started a major program of compensation for the fact that I now wore tunics and leggings.  I might have no waist, but I also was not going to have straggly eyebrows or a lady moustache.  I primped, preened, dyed, plucked and painted what I could.  But I still look in the mirror and see ugly.

I know in my mind that this perception is wrong.  My own thoughts on my appearance or personality are not necessarily true.

As a new year approaches, I always think of it as a time of reflection and thinking ahead.  There are lots of great things happening in 2013, none of which requires me to be skinny and pretty.  Perhaps my first resolution should be to stop being so damned self absorbed. I have had a year of wallowing self indulgence - now it's time to find more of a balance between enough self care so as to maintain a certain level of tidiness in my appearance and physical fitness, but also think about figuring out the difference between that, and pandering to my own negative self talk.

As the new year unfolds, I'll share how I get on!

Catharsis

Today I finally did it.  I got my butterfly tattoo.  It is very small, pretty and delicate...probably even Mum would approve.

 I started getting piercings done in my ears just to piss Mum off.  She had given me permission to have the first one when I was 13, but thereafter I just started adding holes just to push up hard against my boundaries.  In my 20s I got my navel pierced, and then I got a tattoo on my shoulder.  "That's quite nice" Mum said.  That took the wind out of my sails.  The shock value was gone.

That first tattoo was acquired so long ago I can hardly remember when it was.  But I do remember that it didn't hurt as much as getting my navel pierced.  So today when I went to visit the tattoo parlour with my design in mind, I was feeling confident that it would be super easy.  I've birthed four children - pain....I laugh in the face of pain.

 

I wasn't laughing.  It HURT.  A lot.  I found it was easier to look at the tattooist while she worked rather than look away.  It made the pain bearable.

 

But there is something to be said for the whole process of getting a symbol irreversably marked on your skin.  I chose a monarch butterfly - its a memory, but its also hope.  Mum loved raising monarch butterflies in our family home after we had left home.  It became a hobby.  Mum would take caterpillars inside the house to protect them from wasps, and chrysalises to protect them from the cold.  She was a supporter of the Monarch Butterfly Trust and in the last summer in the old house, she was participating in a butterfly tagging project.

 

Its a symbol of something lost, but its a symbol of looking forward, too.   Remember The Butterfly of Happiness?   This butterfly will be a constant reminder to be on the lookout for it, and to not chase it, and just wait, patiently, for it to alight upon me.

 

The pain was like a symbolic tug - something that could bring that emotional pain to the surface to manifest itself in something physical that would have a positive outcome.

 

Bringing emotional pain to the surface is a constant challenge.  A few weeks ago I embarked on a relaxing weekend away from the family in which to simply DO nothing, and have time for some solitude that I had been sorely missing for ten years.  I'm not sure that I did much 'reflecting' but it was for the most part, relaxing and enjoyable.

 

Late on Sunday morning I had brunch with my brother and his wife at Mission Bay, then decided I would just take a drive and see where the day took me.  I wound my way along the coast, through parts of Auckland I had never been before.  My route ended up with me heading towards Pakuranga - my old stomping ground - and I was irresistably drawn to carrying on driving there, and onwards to my old home.  Visiting Pakuranga has become very strange, now.  I have no family or close friends there, so I do not go there often.  Around every corner is a ghost of the former me, my former life.  Nothing remarkable had happened to the old house, except for a maple tree that had been cut down.  And then it happened.  The floodgates opened, and I started to cry.  Not to look like a loiterer, I drove away, and parked at a nearby council playing field, and wept and wept.  I didn't just weep - I howled.  I screamed.  There was nobody to hear me, and this needed to get out!

 

The loss of a tree on a piece of land that I no longer had any claim to knocked me for six.  This is a tree that appears as a little sapling in our old family photos of the house when we first moved in.  Before Mum moved, it was big enough for my two boys to climb.  And now its gone.

 

Finally, the tears that I needed to cry in November 2010 were here.  They were brutal and uncompromising, and I didn't resist them.

 

Perhaps I am learning to deal with pain.  I can allow it to happen to me - welcome it, in fact - understanding that the outcome is worth it.  I can also allow it to rise from the inside, and be released.  And feel relief.  Finally. 

 

 



Reaching the 'anger' phase

So a while ago, I was thinking everything was peachy keen, and it was time to come off my anti-depressant medication.  I was feeling much more positive, much more motivated about life, had much more zing.

Of course Murphy's Law dictates that as soon as I started to feel that way, I'd have a little downward spiral.

Someone at Solace said that the journey through suicide survival is a rollercoaster.  Its inevitable that what goes up comes down.  For a while at least.  Considering how numb I  was in the first year, I suppose I am, in a way, experiencing the 'first year' rollercoaster.  But not so much as gripping the bar with white knuckled fear as gasping at my stomach leaping into my throat...thank goodness.

Therapy has taught me how to stand back and look at what is going on, and what is setting feelings like this off.  My older son is in his last year at primary school, and is beginning to prepare for intermediate school.  We have enrolment packs and he's been on visits to two prospective schools.  He is old enough to take part in the decision making process, and so we have, together, chosen where he will go.

I am also very aware of having clear memories of my own about starting intermediate.  As he gets older, those memories of the same stages seem less and less in the distant past.

It occurred to me that I don't have anyone to discuss this big milestone with.  Most of my friends either have no children, or they are younger.  My brother has no children yet, my sisters-in-law have no children, and my brothers-in-law have much older children or they live far away. 

There is nothing specific about M. starting intermediate that worries me, but its simply that its happening that is a trigger.  This is the sort of thing I would have just chatted to Mum about over tea on a Sunday afternoon.  Just shooting the breeze. Just tapping her memories of what it was like when I (as the oldest child) started intermediate and meshing them with my own.  Reminding each other of things we had forgotten from our different perspectives.  Maybe even sharing her own experiences of things that happened during her schooling.  M. will have to take a bus - I've never bussed to school, but Mum had.  That passing on wisdom from a parent to someone who is one now.  You are a first time parent for the rest of your life, and this transition from child to pre-teen is just as scary, if not more so, than the transition from toddler to preschooler as they start stepping into the world with growing independence.

My husband already did anger - right after Mum died, he was angry.  I put off anger until now.  I am angry at her for leaving me alone to face big life events.  I am angry at being deserted when I need a wise mother.I am angry that M. can't share his experiences with her either. 

The anger is undirected, though.  I am not mad at her as such...she was unwell, and not in a position to realise the impact her choice would have on all of us.  So my anger just has to dissipate into the great wide open. 

I suppose I'm glad I feel it.  I can work with something I feel.  Its better than being numb.