grateful. aware.
Posted: July 14, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized 10 Comments »I don't know if this is helpful to say out loud. I don't know if it is instead offensive or weird. All I know is that I often, when dealing with things like my mother's death or my miscarriage, wished people would acknowledge how good they had it, how lucky they were to have their mothers living or their babies easily conceived and born.
So I am saying it here. I am grateful for my healthy child. I hope that he stays that way. I know how much I have in him.
Lately, I think of people I know in real life and in blogworld every. single. day. At least once. Often more. I think of my dear real life friend, meanmama, who has had three preemies in NICU and has to deal with the ongoing issues. I think of bloggers, like Cecily and Alexa who have been through the hell of babies dying in utero and of prematurity. I think of my friend whose son recently died in utero at 38 weeks. And I think of Maddie Spohr. I think of her constantly.
I am not exaggerating. It is an overwhelming wave of awareness that sweeps over me several times daily, most often in my most gleeful moments with Beck.
It is overwhelming. But I am grateful for their stories and for the opportunity to be a conduit for them. And to be made aware of things like The March of Dimes, which can hopefully work on the bottomline common thread for most of these stories.
Does anyone else find that the Internet has made scary and sad things seem awfully close and present all the time? And that they find themselves more grateful because of it? And compelled to do something to try to help, like donate or help spread awareness? Go for it.
That is exactly it. If I may quote…The Internet has made scary and sad things seem awfully close and present all the time. Precisely. I too think daily I am LUCKY to have my two healthy (knock wood) girls. To make it out of the woods. To have survived three miscarriages. Those days of yearning seem so far away and yet when I read these stories (like the Spohrs) it feels so fresh and alive. Which maybe is why I keep reading these stories.
I still wonder when on the street how many women I am passing who are going through infertility and look upon me with a mix of envy/anger/bitterness, like I did. I want a giant INFERTILITY SURVIVOR sticker on my stroller, so those women know I wasn’t one of the ones who had it good and easy, but rather one of the lucky ones.
YES! I also do that on the street. I am always reading in to the glances of other women, wondering if I am hurting them just by existing. The other night I could barely eat my dinner because I convinced myself that the fact that the single man reading a book at the restaurant where we were dining was studiously ignoring Beck because his child had recently died. It couldn’t have been that he was just involved in his book, right? I had to construct a whole scenario. Wes thinks I am crazy. Are we just totally neurotic? The answer could easily be yes.
Thanks for acknowledging my family’s issues. It always feels good to know that people, especially friends and family, recognize I’ve had some hard knocks. And that recognition is rarer than I would think. And I know what you mean about wanting others to realize that they are lucky.
It’s interesting, though, because I have mixed feelings about being a person that might make others feel grateful. I know when J was going through the whole biopsy/”maybe he has cancer” thing, we were on the receiving end of people saying how they could not imagine what it must be like for us and that it made them not take their children’s health for granted. Those were all acceptable things to say, but I felt really alienated. I guess no one really wants to be that person who makes others feel grateful, because hearing that you are others’ reference point when they think of bad things happening to someone can be depressing.
As you so well know, everyone who goes through really tough things has their own way of dealing
(and not dealing) and their own thoughts about what happened and how it affects their lives. A lot has happened in my life over the past 4 years, and I have really changed because of it. What I took away from my experiences was that *I* need to try, even on bad days, to see the humor or beauty in my life/my kids/my husband. I took away that there are no guarantees and that NO one is safe from bad things happening ANY day, ANY time— but, that instead of thinking about how fragile life is, I need to proactively try to enjoy myself and make things better for those around me. I say “proactively” because I really get caught up in the stresses of everyday life and sometimes let them eat me up if I am not careful to self-talk myself out of it. Personally, when I find myself reading a lot of blogs about grief or trouble, and crying over my computer, it is usually a sign to me that I’m using others’ grief to process my own and that maybe I need to limit my reading for the time being for my own mental health. Others might choose to keep reading, and I am not judging that choice. But for me, I need to step away from it all sometimes and get out of that fog.
absolutely. i think i wouldn’t have made it through infertility without the support of women i found on the web (pre-blog).
I think of Maddie Spohr everyday. Multiple times a day. I think Heather is an amazing woman to have gone through all that she’s gone through and to continue to share it all, but I have to brace myself to read her blog, and though I’m not really a crier, more often than not, her blog makes me cry.
meanmama – “Personally, when I find myself reading a lot of blogs about grief or trouble, and crying over my computer, it is usually a sign to me that I’m using others’ grief to process my own”
That is interesting. I should think about that. I use lots of external sources for the continual grief processing, for sure. This particular onslaught might have been the end of the school year, also. That colleague’s 38 wk baby’s death hit me like a ton of bricks.
I second meanmama’s “Personally, when I find myself reading a lot of blogs about grief or trouble, and crying over my computer, it is usually a sign to me that I’m using others’ grief to process my own”
Thanks for giving me something to chew on.
Without the Internet, I wouldn’t be as strong as I am. I never, NEVER forget how lucky I am. EVER.
yes. what you said.
First off, yes. In a good way, yes.
I have connected to other people, and tried very hard to also get them to see the same thing that you do: how much we take for granted each moment of grace, and how precious it is, because of its tenuousness. Over and over again I think of this not as morbidity, but gratitude. As you do.
Interestingly, Lindsay Ferrier wrote about the same stuff a coupla days later: On Death. Mebbe you have mutual friends and folks you read. I know the topic’s on my mind.