little strings of grief
kyra anderson | Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at 8:45PM
It's odd that what we lose stays with us. People tell us to let it go, let it float away like untying a balloon on a windy day but even then we’re left holding the strings that were once attached to what we had or never had.
I think these little strings are part of the whole package, this Life Package, like the errant threads at the seam of a hand-knit sweater. Life's not tidy. I keep thinking mine is getting shorter as time goes by, that one day it will be nothing more than lint.
Maybe.
But lately, mine is with me as I watch families at the beach. It’s with me as I hear one of my dearest friend's newborn baby make his tiny tender sounds over the phone line.
It comes in waves. Receding waves. The other day on the beach, the lifeguards made a rescue. They formed a line; the anchor guard clutched a bright yellow buoy burried in the sand. The nylon rescue rope reached from sand to hand to hand to the final guard as she swam out past the largest breakers to the little girl separated from her boogie board. When they secured the rope to her, they all began to pull, pull, a line of straining bronzed bodies in a serious tug of war. The little girl flew through the water as if propelled but my eyes were on her lost red board, drifting, farther and farther out to sea.
My sadness is like that.
How could I have answered my husband's questions all these years? You complain about how little time you have, how overwhelmed you are. Why would you want to have another? It doesn’t make sense. He was right and yet.
And still.
There was this longing.
Grief doesn’t always make sense. Why does it have to? I wanted more children. Was it because of Fluffy’s autism? that I want to have the ‘normal’ experience? that I want mothering to feel less intense, less focused on this one child as some people said? Or was that another misunderstanding about parenting kids on the spectrum?
Couldn’t it be that I wanted more children simply because I wanted more children?
I love having siblings. I love having someone to talk to about our parents. I wanted Fluffy to have that experience, that sibling experience in all its complicated glory. We’re old–when Fluffy’s in his thirties, we’ll be in our seventies. I wanted Fluffy to have someone to roll his eyes with when Dave or I do something embarrassing, like when we’re shuffling down the hall in our walkers, farts blurting out behind us like faulty mufflers.
Dave was game for children when we first married but changed his mind soon after Fluffy was born. For years, I tried to change it back, debating, cajoling, understanding, waiting, plotting, fantasizing. I even wondered allowed to my sister--Is it wrong to get hormone injections at the Infertility Clinic without your husband's consent? Is it honest and truly immoral to give him the blow-job of his life, race to the bathroom, spit back into a sterilized olive jar and then dash off in the car on a just remembered errand? ie off for a sort of drive-through insemination?
To be fair, I had my hands full with dear Fluffy. I barely kept up with my own needs. I tried to use that as salve enough. But it didn’t work. Entirely. As much as I worked it through intellectually, up until a couple of years ago, I hung on to the hope that somehow–somehow, it would happen. I'd get pregnant. Some fluke, like those menopausal grandmothers that burst with one last beautiful blossom. A sweep of largesse from the Goddesses and one day I'd sip my coffee, blanch at the taste and stagger to the sidewalk to wretch in front of the family of five, the mother smiling at me knowingly, Congratulations! flashing in her eyes.
Or maybe a change of heart--my husband would shake his head and say no, no, this doesn't fit, this can't be right, where are all the children? the children that should be slamming our screen on this summer day as they run in and out and in and out, breathless with reports of fireflies or some injustice? And we’d adopt.
Or Magic Realism would blow in on the morning fog bringing a bolt of lightening that would split our Japanese maple down the middle to reveal the pale inner bark and in that nook, a wriggling bundle of baby would materialize.
But no. None of it happened.
These days I hear the old adage about Meeting Life on Life’s Terms echo in my mind. I think it’s wise.
I really do.
But then I go to the beach and I squint out to the horizon and I see it, that spot of red, that board drifting on the swells and I hear it, that new baby, not yet a week old, latching on my friend’s body, his blood thickening with milk, his veins swooshing like the sound inside his first home, swoosh, swoosh, swoosh, and I feel it, my string between my fingers, once attached to that balloon I thought I released years ago.
Reader Comments (14)
I can't relate to your longing for another child, but even still, your honesty and the image you presented brought me right there, next to you. Wow.
Kyra, this is amazing - as always.
xoxo
Oh, Kyra.
What a wonderful, breathtaking piece. What an amazing woman you are.
love.
oh, kyra .. i'm so sorry. is that ok to say - that i'm sorry? it's not pity. it's something far different. i'm not sorry for YOU - i'm sorry for the pain. i'm sorry for the unfulfilled longing. my heart aches with you.
you are incredible and this writing .. pixie's word was perfect - 'breathtaking'
love - HUGE HUGE love
I've never been comfortable with the sentiment "everything happens for a reason". It probably does sometimes...but sometimes things just hurt and there's no way to transform it or change it. It's just painful. It's reason #1 that I love your writing, you're always able to acknowledge pain and not have to hide from it, brush it under the carpet the way a lot of people do. Still, it's difficult to read at times, I think the impulse is always to say something comforting, even when there are no comforting words. So, it makes responding difficult...but if a group of people suddenly show up at your place and start grouping hugging you to pieces, it's just your bloggy people.
touched and moved
wait, wait . i want to change my comment ..
'what M said'
yes, that's it
group hug MUST ensue
Your writing is stunning. Just stunning.
Nothing about the mothering process makes "sense." I longed for another child (a third) for years after my special needs son was born. I get it.
Ah. Not ahhhh.
Ah. The kind that aches around your heart, stirs your guts.
This -this is what is the essence of mothering. The bittersweet. No, that's not a good word for it.
The pain?
Yes.
There's that too, in this job of ours.
All of it.
Pain and and loss with endless permutations;
my (only and severely handicapped) child is
much older than yours, so I now add the loss
of the experience of grandchildren to the rest,
all of which are encountered daily.
Honest and beautiful writing.
Oh, God, Kyra. This hurts to read; resonates too much. Hugs, my friend. xo
Kyra, this is so beautifully said. I know just what you mean. I actually put up a post today on the same topic, triggered by dinner last night with the husband of a friend who had recently died. I was helping him get past his grief, using what I'd been through when Max was born.
The grief, some days, is still so fresh.
I don't know what to say, but want to say something. I guess just that you are awesome and Fluffy is lucky and that I wish you could have made more babies as lucky as him. Sorry :(