October 2014

I have just been blindsided by children. I don’t mean to say that I have recently experienced a surprise pregnancy (though I did once experience the stunned viv of that moment). I don’t mean that my kids have somehow surprised me with big news or a great discovery (though those moments seem to happen constantly). However, I am blindsided nonetheless. If you, dear reader, have a pulse or are currently breathing in front of this text, you could have predicted with ease the situation that is rocking my world right now.

Here is what they have done: they have grown into kids. They have suddenly and startlingly outgrown every baby and toddler activity, piece of clothing, toy and accouterment. They wake up and play together and ask little of me aside from some breakfast. (And yes, that is in stark contrast to my life for the past 6 years when every morning began with extensive ritual: breast-feeding, bottles, sippy cups, mashed-up food, cuddles, entertaining, exhaustive coffee making, some amusement on the rug and then wrangling and finagling and bribing into clothes, strollers, cars, strollers, and hopefully a trip to the gym, zoo, a run, a playdate with friends, a stroll in the park, an all-important music class, anything that would require extensive snack packing, diapers, changes of clothes, sunglasses, hats, boots and a travel potty.)

It was exhausting. It was fast-paced, and sometimes so frustrating, or eye-gougingly boring. I was so tired that I developed a weird tic where I tugged at my eyebrow hair.

It hit me like a punch to the jaw yesterday that I will never again attend the tot music class. Never again will my little babe flap her arms with excitement on my lap as someone sings a song I will have stuck in my head for days. Never again will I sing that same song to said babe over and over and over again to her absolute, drooly, toothless delight.

And I cried. I cried to my husband who said, “wait, I thought we decided we weren’t having more babies…” We did make that decision. And it’s the right one for us for so, so, so many reasons. But I could not shake the terrible yearning, so deep it made my arm-skin tingle.

I went to the library to distract myself after dropping my younger (and youngest) girl at preschool and inadvertently walked into story time. A mother only a year behind me on the child-raising spectrum walked into the library with a baby on her hip and a fairy-winged, curly hair girl. More tears.

That’s when I finally recognized it: Grief. How could I have forgotten that old, uncomfortable friend? I am grieving this change in the life of my family.

If you let it, Life will teach you how to grieve. There are the huge, encompassing griefs that set in like a fog for years after such a huge life-shifting change or loss that leaves us empty, soul-destitute, half-mad, half-terrified at how our world has altered. Those are, if I’m honest, wrenching and awful. They are, at the very least, recognizable.

But even if you never (and I truly pray that you never) experience horrific loss or trauma, there are so many other little griefs along the way that never, ever feel little: a friend moving away, changing jobs, getting pregnant and saying goodbye to a life you will never have again, getting older, divorcing, a child graduating.

In divinity school I read a book called All Our Losses, All Our Grief about exactly that: all the little things we love and must grieve before moving on, slightly altered through our lives. I think of the title often because the title alone is a piece of wisdom I can grasp when I’m flapping around in the wind of grief-ful change.

And that’s how I’m here. I am grieving that our life will never again be about bringing new life into the world. We will never again have a baby or a toddler or someone constantly hanging on my hip teething and keeping me up all night. I’m not even sure I really miss it, but it shakes me to know that it will never be there again.

I know, this is a tiny grief. I have dear friends who are struggling with fertility, friends who are repairing tears in their lives from abusive relationships, divorces, deaths, children with illnesses. I have been there, and I know that this is a tiny grief. But it’s real.

At least now that I know it’s grief, I can move through it. Because if I don’t, it’ll come and swallow me up somehow. That’s how it works. You can ignore it, if you really want, but then it will never stop hurting and you will never be able to acknowledge the bizarre truth that it would not hurt so much, had your heart not been entirely in it. Love and grief are intertwined like veins in a flower stem.

So I’m sharing this with you, so that none of us shoulder our griefs, big or small, by ourselves. We walk a path that goes into the shadows, and it will take a turn you never expected and come out in the sun in a totally different place that you never could have imagined beforehand. And we’ll know grief, and we’ll somehow know ourselves a bit better, and know Joy and come a bit closer to opening our hearts to God.