Healing Ain't Easy

There are no shortage of people in the world who aim to be helpful when others are grieving. Sometimes, people's way of being helpful is to give you space. Sometimes, they want to give you copious amounts of baked goods. Others want to dispense with advice. While well-intended, the advice-givers tend to be the ones that, despite their best efforts to be helpful, just aren't.

Advice and "tidbits" that either I or my husband have been given since our loss:

• "You'll get over it soon." Let's break that sentence down. On the surface, it seems pretty benign. But let's put the lens of grief on and take a second look. The phrase, "you'll get over it" is a brush-off, disregarding how painful and difficult it is (or maybe even impossible it is) for a person, in that moment of grief, to be able to see the other side of the mountain. And "soon" is relative, friends.
• "You can always have another one." This isn't like a car I really liked and just need to get a new one. This isn't even a favored pet that just died. This was a child. My child. And along with the hopes and dreams that go along with a pregnancy, all of those things died with him or her.
• "Did you know if it was a boy or girl?" I don't hate this entirely. Asking questions are better than assuming one knows everything ever and tries to share this amazing knowledge. But I am not at a place where I can consider the possibilities of a son or daughter that I will never know. The development stopped well before any sex organs would have been visible. So, in addition to not knowing the sex of my child, I have the pleasurable agony of adding to that thought that I will never know.
• "Have you thought about adopting?" Yes, we have. In fact, we'd considered doing that instead of/in addition to/before/after/whatever having a third biological child. We made a choice to expand our family biologically one more time (or whatever, maybe two more times). It doesn't mean we can't adopt. It doesn't mean we don't want to. But now isn't the time for me to prepare the mountain of documentation for an adoption. I'm just trying to get my taxes done for now, thanks.
• "Oh, I had a few of those [miscarriages], and I'm okay." First, okay, that really sucks for the individual who said this. Second, having anything bad happen to you once, twice, or seventeen times and surviving doesn't mean that everyone can, should, or will be able to just "be okay" with what happened, just like that.

One thing I am worried about is the gradual disappearance of compassion when I share my story. I'm struggling right now. Struggling to keep my temper in check with my kids, struggling to get all my work done, struggling to meet some milestones, just struggling. And I wonder how long the clock of compassion will tick inside the heads of those around me before they think, "Okay, she should have grieved long enough." How long before the expectations that I am "over it" start to change the way I interact with people who have these expectations? Or the way they interact with me?

How long is the timeline for grieving?

Grief is not finite. I'm learning that there are some days when I wake up and it feels like some kind of surreal dream, where I'm not even really sure if anything happened to me at all. Sometimes, I wake up and feel like the wound is wide open and raw, the pain so real and awful that I want to just scream into my pillow. Sometimes, I do. There will be days like each of these. There will be days when I feel "normal" again. There will be days when I don't think about the baby I wanted to hold. But not right now.

Right now, I block people's Facebook posts who have just announced their pregnancy. And the due date is too close to mine. In my head, I still have a due date. I imagine that when August comes, I will grieve some more. And by then, people will have decided that my deadlines are more important than whatever else is going on. By then, most people will probably think I should be "over it."