Dark Clouds

Although I have my own experiences with grief, I would not begin to express a knowing of someone else’s deep grief over a miscarriage, of losing a life you have felt growing within you. My infertility grief is only loss of imagined life, as in moments like now when my body taunts me with lateness and possibility that will never come to be. Different grief. We can only catch glimpses of each others pain. When someone’s pain is laid bare publicly such as in a blog, I fear treading on that grief through the awkward medium of blog comments. Hopefully, posting on my own blog instead creates adequate distance as to show the respect intended.

So I hesitate and yet feel compelled to comment about UUMomma’s post because I feel so strongly about the need to allow moments of fog and darkness in our lives. Without a need for apology or to try to chase them away. These moments are more often reacted to with alarm, by individuals and society-at-large, with the unnatural model that happiness = wholeness. Whenever I try to imagine a life filled with constant happiness, it always appears “plastic” and superficial in my mind. In American culture, we are encouraged to hide our pain and numb ourselves with busyness, consumerism, food and other cultural obsessions.

We should not feel shame nor fear making others feel bad about our pain. Those around us should have a comfort level with dark times so they can support us through them. We should be able to deal with it in our own time too. If then we find the fog getting too thick or that we become lost in it, we should be able to seek the help we need using medication only as a last resort. Perhaps if we didn’t approach dark times from the assumption that they should be avoided, we would be better equipped to deal with them and not be as easily overwhelmed when they take us to the depths. We lose something, individually and collectively, when we hide from the painful moments or fear to share them.

P.S. I had to come back and add that one of the reasons I almost posted a comment on UUMomma’s post was because I could relate to the note written to her mother saying that she is OK. I often hesitate to write about painful aspects in my life because my mother reads my blogs. I wish it wasn’t so upsetting for her because writing about them has become part of my healing process.