Sick and tired
A year ago, I had lunch with some female friends, one of whom is also a widow. I had been telling them about the man I had recently dated and how I wasn’t sure I was even ready to date yet, even though it has been several years since my husband died. She asked me how long it had been, and I said “Five years.”
“Oh….” she responded. “It’s still fresh.”
Her comment both surprised me and made me annoyed. Five years is “fresh?” Why? It seems like an eternity. I want to move on, I want to get out of grief and into joy. I’ve been slogging through this walking flu for five years– living holiday after holiday without him, watching birthdays and anniversaries tick by, attending weddings, becoming a grandmother, creating a life for myself alone for five years– how can it still be “fresh?” I don’t WANT it to be fresh anymore! I want to be done!
And yet, the grief just keeps coming. In the past five years, my marriage fell apart, my husband moved out of our house and then died, my daughter moved out on her own, my mother died, and my son J went off to college. The nest has been slowly, gradually, painfully emptying, although J was still coming home for summers and vacations. Two weeks ago, my son– who has always been a kind, thoughtful, communicative young man– picked a huge fight with me over text and moved in with his girlfriend. We have not spoken face to face since.
Now, I know that it is developmentally appropriate for him to move out. He’ll be 24 years old in two days. I understand his desire to be independent and to live with the first serious love of his life. I support his need to do this. What I don’t understand is why he had to pick a huge fight with me and call me names. We have never talked that way to each other; we’ve always worked out our differences with kindness toward each other. Everyone I speak to says “He’ll figure it out. He’ll come back.” I have faith that he will– he has always come around eventually and talked to me about what was bothering him. I trust that he will again. But I can’t pretend it doesn’t hurt in the meantime.
I’m writing today not because I’m hurting so much about my son that I need to vent. I’m writing today because I’m having trouble getting myself motivated to leave the house. It’s rainy and cold and I’m not looking forward to being around people. I feel like I’m back to the grief I felt after Anson died all over again. Like six years later, I’m still grieving just as hard. I feel like a failure as a parent and as a spouse, and maybe just as a human being in general. I don’t want to hear people talking about their families visiting and their vacations. I don’t want to see parents walking through town with their adult children. I don’t want anyone to ask me “How are your kids?” I know this will pass. I know it’s a temporary condition. But I’m so sick of it. I’m sick of feeling bad. I’m sick of talking about feeling bad. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. I can’t pretend like I’m not hurting and I’m tired of talking about hurting.
I know I need to get back to my gratitude journal, and I will. But maybe I need to feel ungrateful for a while. Maybe I just need to sit with the injustice and the unfairness of life, and just be stinky by myself. Like when you’re really sick and you don’t shower for a couple of days. Because, man….when you start to feel better, doesn’t that first shower feel great? I’ll get there.
Yes, and….
My son J moved out of our house this week. His decision was sudden but not completely unexpected. He’s twenty-three, after all, and has a steady girlfriend. I’m at a good place in my grief process to deal with this– I’m sad, but I’m going to be okay. It’s hard when I think about my household shrinking from five people to one over five years as my kids moved out and my husband died. Most moms who talk about the empty nest syndrome still have their husbands around. This normal and difficult “launch process” is even more painful for a widow.
Before my son moved out, I had the idea that I might sell the house and downsize to a condo, and J was both stressed out by that idea and grateful. He felt like he needed to get rid of stuff he wasn’t using any more, like when he was a child and we would “update” his toys to get rid of the transformers and LEGOs he wasn’t using. Now it was tools and a home brewing kit and other big “toys” that he had bought and tried out and then outgrown. We had cleaned and tossed, made multiple trips to the dump, and J had a yard sale.
Today, I cleaned out a closet as I prepare for workers to put a new floor in my living room. I found a few more items I could sell or get rid of– two wind chimes, two kites, a basketball and a tennis racket. As I cleaned them up and got them ready for selling, I remembered that one of the kites had been a wedding present from my sister. I tried to think of how many times we had used the kite over the 21 years my husband and I were married. Maybe three? Thinking about the kite brought up memories of the other gifts we had received and rarely used, like the picnic basket that still sits in our garage. I remember getting those gifts as a young bride with a new husband and a step-daughter. I envisioned wind-swept hill-top picnics and days spent in the park flying kites. The same for the basketball and the tennis racket– they came with a cluster of expectations about what my kids and my family would be like.
When I talk to other widows about their grief, we find that we have a common feeling– the idea that marriage and family is in large part an illusion. Widows talk about death lifting a “veil” that covers the eyes of those who are still happily married or happily single. What we think of, before grief, as permanent, solid, and reliable is shaken and ripped apart in grief. Nothing is permanent. Relationships are temporary. The world is not solid, but precarious and liable to go out from under you without warning. Losing an alcoholic spouse in a car accident most certainly adds to that sense of precariousness. Drunk driving takes lives without warning; in the blink of an eye, a happy family enters a vortex of grief, trauma, confusion and pain. Nothing seems stable.
Discovering the kites today reminded me of this illusion. I had the sudden feeling that these were props in a play that I had been trying to stage for the past 30 years. The scene was “family life” and there would be games of “horse” in the driveway, swimming pools and beach vacations, game nights and laughter, sledding in the wintertime, school band concerts, and cozy Christmas mornings. I feel like some families pull off this scene well– maybe they have stronger directors than my family had. It seems like, in some families, all the actors know their lines and play their roles with committment. In an alcoholic family, at least one of the actors shows up on opening night drunk or stoned, or both. Lines are forgotten, and the play veers off into a totally new production while the other actors struggle to improvise, or walk off the stage completely.
And this is why life– especially life with an alcoholic– is not like a play. Or if “all the world’s a stage,” and we are merely players, it is a play without rehearsal. In many ways, it is all improvised. We can bring props to the stage, but they might not be used. And so, I decided, I can let these props go. I can let my son go. Five years ago, that idea would have brought me to tears as I mourned what I had wanted for my family and didn’t achieve. That scene didn’t come off the way I had hoped. I’m still sad about that, but today I feel like I have another scene coming up. I don’t know what the scene will look like– a soliloquy? a dialogue? To a large extent, it’s going to be improv. But isn’t the rule of thumb in improv to say “Yes, and…”? That would be a good mantra for the next phase of life.
And yet, we persevere
I’m sitting here typing this with a feeling in my lower abdomen that I can only describe as being punched in the cervix. For those of you without a cervix, imagine having a splitting headache in the deepest, most inaccessible part of your body. I just returned from the gynecologist– I have had some abnormal cervical cells on my pap smears for the past few years, and they’re not going away. They’re not getting worse and I do not have HPV, so that’s the good news. But my doctor advised that I have them looked at every six months just to be on the safe side.
Today the gynocologist and I discussed my IUD and whether to leave it in for two more years or take it out now. I told him I preferred to leave it in– I’m only 52, I still have occassional spotting, so I think I’m still ovulating from time to time. He agreed, and he proceeded to do the biopsy which suddenly felt like a balloon had exploded inside my body. Then he calmly said, “Your IUD came out. It was attached to the biopsy piece.”
Here’s what I get to take home: 1. Cramps like I haven’t had since I was a teenage girl getting her period. 2. Two requests for blood work– one three weeks from now after my hormones regulate and one for three weeks after that to see what my follicle stimluating hormones are doing. Based on those results, my gynocologist will tell me if I still need and IUD. 3. The gyno’s suggestion that I use a condom if I have sex between now and the last blood work results. (Thanks for the reminder that I haven’t had sex in six months and have no good prospects in sight.) 4. A nagging question– When will there be a MALE birth control pill or device?? and 5. An overwhelming sense of shock and awe that any women my age have a positive attitude toward life.
Being an aging woman is hard enough. Being a middle-aged woman who is going through a divorce and then grief is indescribably difficult. I remember one day when my husband had just moved out of our house and I was cleaning up the piles of stuff he had left behind. I was feeling sad and angry and scared about the future and wondering if anyone would ever find me attractive again. I picked up a beautiful wooden hand mirror that I had received as a gift in my twenties, and in my reflection I saw my neck skin, loose and crepey and old looking. I literally fell to my knees and cried in a heap on the floor. Why now? Why did I have to be “resingled” when the ravages of old age were just around the corner?
After that, it seemed like one slap in the face after another. My ex got a girlfriend right away and was flying to Baltimore every other weekend at her expense. Then his lawyer decided he should ask for alimony from me since his hearing loss might prevent him from working in the future. The first man I slept with was less than forthcoming about his sexual history, and when I learned the truth, I rushed to a walk-in clinic to be tested for everything, crying as I sat in the exam room. The nurse who did the tests said quietly “Maybe you’re not ready to be dating yet?” She was right. Five months after my husband died, when I did feel ready for dating, I ended up with a genital wart (which, by the way, condoms do not prevent) and an abnormal pap smear.
I got the IUD when I met a decent guy who was patient with me as I tried various methods of birth control and finally opted for the Mirena. I feel like the hormones in the IUD screwed up my emotions for the first six months I had it in, although my doctor assures me that it is too small a dose of hormones to do that. My emotions have been rocky for six years– is it because my marriage ended? Is it grief due to the tragic death of my soon-to-be-ex-husband? Grief over my mom’s death a year later? The empty nest syndrome? Peri-menopause? Birth control? Who the hell knows? Now I am going cold-turkey on the hormones my body had become accustomed to– what hormonal joys do I have to look forward to next?
All I know is this– aging is not for sissies. Older women are portrayed in our culture as weak, out of touch, clingy, and useless. (They are not. If they persevere and keep their heads up, they are the strongest creatures on earth.) Men write articles about why they date younger women, saying “Older women are so negative.” Really? I wonder why? It’s not as if biology and society hit women with a double whammy at mid-life. Women are the ones who deal with birth control, pregnancy, breast feeding, and the bulk of child rearing. Then at mid-life, after we’ve given our best reproductive years, many of us are left by the fathers of our children so that they can puruse younger women. And yet we persevere. We keep caring for our children and grandchildren, we keep learning new things and exploring the world. We keep showing up.
So if you see me, or any woman my age, and we have a positive attitude about life, give us a pat on the back. If you don’t, I’ll punch you in the cervix.
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