When grief comes in the shape of longing
When you're longing for, not missing something or someone in your life
There’s been alot to grieve these past few years.
But not grief in the traditional sense. Although we have lost loved ones, more recently this loss has been people at their later stages of life. Although it comes with its usual sadness, there’s some relief that they had a chance of a full life.
The grief I’m discussing here, is the grief of longing.
The obvious and long list of things to grieve that come with an unsuccessful motherhood journey being the biggie for me; the empty arms, aching heart, exclusion from belonging in the groups you thought were yours, the failed dreams, the bitterness, the longing, the memories that won’t get created and stored. The one bloody thing you really wanted in your life and the one thing you just weren’t able to make happen.
All those life experiences unattainable. The pregnancy experience, the birth story, the newborn phase, the fourth trimester, terrible two’s, school years, the teenage dramas, the start and end of school term photos, the birthday parcel mountains, the first love, the first heartbreak, the life skills, the weddings, their careers, the family holidays, the tantrums, the falls and cuts, the broken bones, the hugs, the snotty noses, the funny stories to share, the highs, the lows and everything in between. The family that didn’t materialise.
The end of motherhood I’ll be honest, has kicked my arse beyond what I thought I was capable of coping with. I knew it would be tough, refused to admit it for a long time. I kept saying I was done with the hope, the fertility options, exploring alternative motherhoods, and I was drawing a line in the sand. Willing for a life more magnificent to come along and fill the hole I was refusing to look at head on. But it didn’t. I was drawing the line in pencil, in dashes… so I could find my way back to hope rather than acceptance (and the grief that would follow).
Despite giving myself permission to really feel into all all the feels, knowing I felt more resourced and able to be with it all than ever before, I didn’t want to truly let go, to accept I’ll never be part of that gang, I’ll never get to accomplish that dream, the one dream that mattered most. I didn’t want to surrender to its messiness. I wanted to book it into my schedule. To parcel it into manageable chunks. But grief and busy lives don’t quite work like that.
It caught me out at times. Moments when I believed I was feeling better. An arranged reunion with two good friends from my university days and their little daughters. Two children’s theme parks over two days. Oh how our meet ups had changed. Those with their daughters, me with, well just me. A strange eery feeling of missing something, like an important bag I forgot to pick up. Feeling odd-one-out. Excluded. No longer were we on the same path. A sadness. And then the grief that bubbled up at the second theme park (chock full of parents and kids of course) that was just too much to contain. It was overwhelming, sobbing in the toilet. A riptide that caught me off guard and rendered that reunion done. A long drive home in tears and only the sadness, an empty nest and my love to be the tonic to my torture. Why couldn’t it be enough?
I lost a friend that weekend too. The sensitivities of navigating their child full life alongside my childless life. The lack of time to create the intimacy needed to connect in the way we’d been able to before to be able to navigate the differences more kindly. The mis-communication. The lost wires. The tiredness. The mid-life mess. The trials and tribulations of our lives would now be unaligned and pursuing their own future direction. No longer best friends in it together. Two different paths with different challenges to overcome.
Another unexpected loss. More debris of mid-life to grieve.
At points, I seemed to have suspended getting on with my own life, held in an alternative universe by my cannie grief. At the mercy of its ridiculous time management and diary planning skills. Like I’d shelved my ‘box of stuff to sort’ on the metaphorical shelf of ‘one day I’ll get to it, but this is more important now’. I was neither grieving or living at times. Limbo land.
Counselling, therapy, constellation, acupuncture have all played their part in helping me to nurture myself whilst facing into it. I knew that I’d have to go through it to come out the other end. Avoidance only makes you more sick when you’re grieving. If you’re in the boxing ring with grief, know this, grief will always win!
The end of motherhood seemed to be coming alongside my mid-life moment. I remember reading The Shift, by Sam Baker to prepare me for mid-life and she wrote beautifully about the pain of reaching the mid life finish line and for some women, perhaps the most difficult crossing is realising that you’d never fulfil your hope to mother in it’s traditional sense.
At this mid life point, I’m also noting a theme among my friends to grieve the longing of life dreams not yet accomplished. A reckoning of sorts. How you imagined it would be by now; effortless, abundant, secure, easy, more being, less doing, striving done, celebrating more, achieving more by doing less, regular holidays and adventures, the kitchen reno, time with your family, more space, less busy.
Mid life seems to offer a line in the sand moment.
I guess it’s what we’ve referred to as the mid life crisis (and mostly looked to men for this). For women, we have the full delights of menopause. I’m trying to consider my mid life moment as an opportunity for a revolution rather than a crisis. A rebirth of sorts. A shedding of the snake skin I wore to get me through my twenties and thirties. A real sense of what I might actually be able to leave behind. The baggage I may have picked up that no longer serves me. The friendships that no longer feel easy or nurturing. The work that weighs me down. The beliefs that hold me back.
In the end for me, it was a retreat in Perth that made me look my motherhood grief head on and face into the bleakness. There was no hope left. There were no options left to me that would work without a significant loss or cost that was too much to risk at this stage and phase of life. It was done. I was done. Motherhood in its traditional sense, was done for me.
The grief that followed was less brutal than I had been expecting. It passed through quite smoothly. A gentle tender rip tide, that wave after wave released more of my pain, and my longing. Perhaps I’d been micro grieving over the five or six years it had really felt tough. Whatever the case, once the line was finally drawn with marker pen and I’d given in to the release needed, a big space came. Not a comfortable space either. A space of ‘ok if not that then what instead?’. A tenderness was needed so as not to rush into busyness and ‘tadahhhh’s filling my life up with all the crap society tells you is needed to be good enough. So I sat with it. And I sat with it. And I’m still sitting with it now.
Other childfree and childless women talk of a creativity surging through you once you’re done with motherhood. I’m still waiting for mine.
It’s not an easy process. It’s a grief of sorts. But it’s a grief that comes with oh so many layers. I wrote about grief and it’s disorderly nature here.
Whether you’re grieving the death of someone or something, there’s a gap. A hole in your heart the shape of that being or thing, that makes you feel less whole for a while. When you’re grieving for something you’ll never have that you longed for, you also have a hole, only the shape is less well defined. You can’t get your hands around it in the same way. But the pain and the feels, oh they’re the same intensity. Slightly different and nuanced in ways, but it’s grief none the less. And I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.
The only way out of grief is through it my friend.
Jx