In all the ways I am changed, I honor him

Grief is hard work. I haven't blogged for the lat couple of weeks because I fell off the wagon. I stopped doing grief work. I didn't journal, or blog, or read. I neglected the tools I usually use for mental balance, oh and I was eating like shit. I am doing that seven week course on infant loss and grief, and well I am exhausted from grieving. It is hard work. But ignoring my grief work only made me feel worse. I once read a book about a girl who had Turrets, she described the overwhelming need to shout out and how exhausting it was to feel that way all day. Sometimes she would hold it in, trying to ignore it, but it would just build and build until the point where she literally felt she was going to implode and boom! She would shout at the top of her lungs, wondering why she ever even considered holding it in. Release. Oh yea, she was holding it in because she's exhausted. I have Turrets of the soul. Grief Turrets. And when I hold it in, it just builds and builds. I'm exhausted. Still, this week I decided to return to my practice, that while time consuming and energy consuming also give as much as they take. Consciousness and being present with my pain is not easy. It is so much easier to pretend I'm okay. But inside I am building and building up. Begging for release.

A friend once told me of a study she read where they explained why people slow down to look at car accidents. They mapped the brains of people and found that we don't slow down to stare at accidents on the side of the road because we are nosy or morbid, we have this built in impulse to look because our brains are trying to learn from it. We have this built mechanism to witness tragedy and to protect ourselves from it in the future. I think the need to talk about losing a child works similarly. At support group meetings we witness each other's wreckage, our heartbreaks and life changing accidents. We do this to learn from each other. Not to learn to not lose children in the future, but rather to learn everything we can about it right now so no matter what the future holds, we have learned something. I listen to some stories and think "I could never go through that" the same way I am sure someone thinks it about me. It forces you to unload some of your own pain and witness someone else's. It allows you to find some things to be grateful for in your own story, it teaches to cry with others through theirs. So I am not done retelling my story. I am not done learning from it or teaching from it. I "shouldn't" be over it by now. People who judge the status of my well being by pictures on Facebook, pictures of me smiling, and being a human being who feels a range of emotions, well I wish they would ask me how I am doing. But maybe it's easier to look at the pictures and say, oh good, she's fine, no need to check in with her. There will always be a need to check in with me. My baby died.

This weekend is the March of Dimes Walk. In our grief group we talked about honoring our children. We explored the reality that every time you do something in your life through the lens of your love for your child, your loss, being a parent, being someone who is changed, in those moments you honor your child. There are big public ways of honoring, like this walk. But there are also personal, daily ways. In every way you are changed and the decisions that come from that, you honor child. Wether it's made you a little kinder to your other children, a little more grateful to the people in your life, a little more humble about your place in the universe, a little more faith in your religious beliefs. All of it, any of it. You honor your child. Whenever I reach out and touch someone through the lens of my experience, I honor Mateo. And well in his honor I'd do anything, including keeping up and continuing to share with my grief work.