Grief is such a tricky emotion. There are several faces of grief, I’ve written about it before. Grief isn’t a response solely for the death of a loved one, however that would be the deepest sorrow to me but personally I feel that grief can be a response to the loss of anything. Deep sadness over situations, change of circumstance, goals not yet achieved, the diminishing of relationships, and the transitions of new seasons of life.
At this moment I am processing a double grief if you will. There are changes going on in my family that are exciting and are rewarding to witness as a parent. When I found myself pregnant with my 3 kids, I never looked down the road 20 years, I looked months at a time. I remember moms telling me, “enjoy every chaotic moment, it flies by.” While you’re in the gauntlet of parenting you don’t think it will ever end, but somehow 25 years go by so fast and then you have adult children that you’re GREAT friends with, you love being in their company, and you enjoy seeing all their accomplishments and are filled with immense pride and joy.
Here is the tricky part of grief. My son has achieved a personal milestone of buying his first house and is moving out. I’m so excited for him but then the other side is that I’m sad that my dad is not alive to be part of this, to witness this amazing thing happening in his life. It’s like a double whammy of grief, the seasons of change in life give way to some sadness and then I find myself reliving the loss of my dad and all the secondary losses that come along with that. It’s difficult.
Moving day in my home has so many consequences for me. I feel like I have been in a highly emotional state for the last 8 weeks due to the impending thought of my son moving out. I know our kids can’t stay with us forever, we raise them to become amazing individuals and then we let them go. We’ve managed to create a “beautiful” home for our kids. It may not be aesthetically beautiful to some, because she’s mature, not all the new bells and whistles like a fully loaded car, but to me she’s gorgeous. It’s been updated several times over our almost 26 years in the home we built. My mature home, the ONLY home my kids have ever known, the home we raised our 3 kids in, also helped raise other close friends of my kids, many celebrations, and our fair share of discouragement BUT again this is the only home they have ever known…I am grieving this season. We sat down to dinner last week and I started to cry at the table and said, “this is our last meal together at this table while everyone still lives under one roof.” It was a very heavy moment for me, looking at my adult children and remembering highchairs and booster seats in this kitchen nook.
I feel because I have firsthand experience of how death of a loved one affected me (the grief of that loss), I maintain, that with that knowledge, I can take some liberties and can draw different comparisons/conclusions to circumstances of my life. Today I’m writing as a mom who is grieving this new stage. It is not lost on me that there are some parents that I know personally and some quite close to me in fact, that are enduring daily, the loss of a child to death, I am NOT comparing my emotional state right now to that in any way. There are no words that I can say to a bereaved parent other than I am profoundly sorry for your loss. Know my heart.
As parents, we experience several different types of losses with our growing and maturing children, as they graduate from stage to stage. I am wanting to share the heart of a mom who is particularly close to her son(s). My sons are thriving, independent, successful young men but at one time all they needed was the nourishment that only I alone could provide and produce at my breast and that was where my love story with my boys began and over the years has changed. Australian writer Mia Freedman gets it, in an essay that she wrote and titled it, “Your Son Growing Up Will Feel Like the Slowest Breakup You’ve Ever Known.” Seeing that line in print was so accurate. Mia also went on to share, “…you don’t actually parent one person, you parent many, many different people who are all your child. There’s the newborn, the baby, the toddler, the pre-schooler, the primary aged kid, the pre-teen, the adolescent, the full-blown teen, the young adult and then the adult. They all answer to the same name. They all call you Mum. And you never ever notice the inflection point where one of those people turns into the next.” I believe in this very moment I am recognizing this very pivotal and necessary change in my life. As a mom, I have been moving from one stage to another in rapid succession and now I am watching it in slow motion and living it in real time. I feel as though I am grieving over my son’s whole life. When the U Haul arrived and they all started loading up all his belongings, I said out loud, “my sons 24 years all in the back of a U Haul…”, that was a sobering moment for me as a mom.
I feel like I have been in a constant state of conflict over the past few months, trying to process the changes happening in my family which are all exciting, however they are bittersweet for me. As I mentioned earlier, I’m disappointed that my dad is no longer here to be part of all that is happening in my family, and that causes my grief to swell in a different way. Shirley L. Thiessen, the author of “The Little Black Funeral Dress” said it best, “Grieving is not an event. It’s a lifetime of absorbing the reality of multiple losses.”. It’s 100% true. While the U Haul is full of boxes being moved from one place to another, I ascertain that our grief moves around as well. Some boxes are heavier than others, some are taped so well that you can’t reopen them without getting a knife, some fall apart at the bottom as soon as you pick them up, in spite of that, all of these boxes are part of your life, your losses, your grief, the highs and the lows. That’s what makes up the story of our existence on earth. Processing, transitioning, and moving forward with all the boxes, that’s what’s important.
I leave you with this amazing and philosophical (smirking as I type) quote from one of our greatest fictional minds in the last few years, “Change is a good thing I think, that’s what it’s all about, embracing change, being brave, doing whatever you have to so everyone in your life can move forward there…”
~ Ted Lasso ~
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