As the days in my pregnancy move a long my belly keeps the questions coming from strangers.
Is this my first baby?
How old is my first?
These questions are not easy for me at all. In fact they torture me on a daily basis.
I have never been a liar, i have always been very honest until Truman died. Lying for this answer is necessary sometimes depending on the circumstances but it always makes me feel absolutely awful and filled with guilt.
Yesterday i learned my lesson. I will never lie about Truman again.
I was at work and a woman started asking me all about my pregnancy, like any other day and any other customer... this time I decided to lie. Next thing I know this woman is literally crying on my shoulder about her husband of 13 years that left her. Her first husband did the same thing. It turned into a straight up counseling session... one that made me feel like i needed therapy just from listening to her crazy.
Her pain is real. But she dumped it on me not knowing my truth and my truth might have helped her put some things into perspective.
I realized that i made things much much harder on myself by not being honest with her and protecting my and Remy's emotional space.
Towards the end i started to become less compassionate and more stand offish because she was really getting into way too much personal detail with a stranger... i resorted to shrugs and "yup, life has a way of doing that doesn't it?" after 20 mins in.
Then I started resenting her for being so devastated that some douche bag who tells her horrible things and does horrible things has left her and she is so pathetic about it all. She wants him back, etc. Who the hell I am to resent someone else for their struggles and pain?
I don't know but i definitely do it, i acknowledge that it's happening and try not to.
There is plenty of suffering going around in this world.
I guess maybe I just think there is a MAJOR difference between suffering that we choose and suffering that just happens to us.
You choose your husband.
I've read that many people believe that losing their child has made them more compassionate. In some ways it has for me.... like obviously i know what it means to be a mother to a sick child in the hospital where before i didn't.... and i know what it's like now to be both motherless and childless on Mother's Day.....
So i am more compassionate in some aspects due to new understanding and severity....
but i have lost compassion in other areas. Pain is pain and grief is grief and often when someone is in the thick of it it's hard to tell them that there is a difference in all of it.
But i know now that there is a difference because i have lived through many different kinds of grief myself and i do not have as much compassion for people who act flat out weak.
It sounds awful, but it's true.
The amount of effort it took just to open my eyes in the morning and continue to breathe... when my only goal of the day was to make the short but heavy walk to the mail box and back.... and to the bathroom and then back to bed. The grief was just so heavy and the fact that there are people out there walking around, freshly showered, with food and coffee in their stomachs, make up on, shopping around town and stop in somewhere to emotionally dump on anyone who has to listen to them?? It's really hard for me to be super compassionate to their pain.
I have never liked those people who just respond with "buck up, things will get better, just stay positive." But here I am emotionally exhausted... with the biggest case of compassion fatigue EVER, finding myself just wanting to shut people the hell up.
New territory for me.
When I am honest about Truman, it tends to shut people the hell up. Double edged sword.
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Many of you know that i am adopted.
I have always been SO grateful for this. I am very close with my family and i can't imagine my life any other way even though it hasn't been perfect- i wouldn't trade a thing.
One person that I have lost compassion for is my birth mother, "C".
She victimizes herself constantly and after Truman died she wrote to me saying "I know how you feel right now, I felt the same pain when I gave you up for adoption."
I didn't even continue to read the rest of the letter.
I wrote back explaining that anyone who ever says that to a mother who just held her child in her arms as he died and then had to leave the hospital without him can say that while typing a letter to their very alive offspring is absolutely clueless and it's inappropriate.
One involves choices, many choices.
The other doesn't involve many choices at all, if any.
On mother's day my biological grandmother (C's mom) echoed a statement like this on facebook. I obviously could not keep my mouth shut.
How can you explain to people who really think that they know what this kind of pain feels like?
Without having to bury a child?
I basically explained that she made choices when she was younger. Then she gave me up for adoption.
Then she met me when i was 13 years old.
and since then she'd had even more choices to make on how she would develop a relationship with me and she has had pictures and conversations, and moments and chances to be involved in my life and see how i am developing and you simply can not compare any of that to a a woman who has a dead child.
because there is NONE of that for them, for us. There are no options at all for any of it.
and they simply just do not understand any of it. good for them.
Because they are so radically Christian they believe that i will have all those chances again. It must be nice to know something so completely in your heart to the point where nothing about death really bothers you all that much. Those deep beliefs keep them from really thinking about how other people deal with life without their children here.
I am not close to my birth family because with all of the chances that I gave C to be a part of my life she made bad decisions over and over again. Given the chance to be a mother figure, she just acted crazy instead.
She has such deep seeded mental issues and spent years alienating me because she could not get a grip on reality and the now. She is stuck in the past on constantly puts her issues with giving me up onto me.... which is beyond frustrating.... because i seriously love the fact that i was put up for adoption. I would never want her as my mother, as mean as that sounds, it's the truth.
I do think that it takes a special kind of crazy for someone to be able to carry their child for 9 months and then birth it and give it away... it may be loving and kind and i respect it but i also think it's insane. That is just my opinion though. It made it even more clear for me after being with Truman. I'm not saying that she didn't grieve or go through a lot... but there are just way too many differences to list to clump them into the same pain category. There is a huge difference between her loss and mine. To bad i'm the only one who sees it.
When I hear her and her family put me and her into the same category i feel disrespected and misunderstood.
I really do not think they will ever really figure any of it out.
