Motherhood

I wrote for the first year and then I didn't for a long time. I didn't plan to stop. I expected the writing would fade slowly, a few more days passing between sessions.  There wasn't a reason to stop, or maybe there were many reasons.  A year in, it seemed there was nothing new to say. The feelings weren't evolving, the images that came with them were a repeating scroll. I told myself it would be good for me to write, but I didn't want to, so I told myself I had nothing left to say. 

Having moved from the place I lived with him, there was less to remind me, less to bring back memories of him, less to bring up loss and grief. I had found places for the things of his that I chose to keep, all except for the box with his name that stayed taped closed in the closet. It's still taped closed. I haven't faced it yet. 

Maybe the biggest reason is that I was so very tired. Grief is exhausting and after a year, I just didn't want to do the work any more. So I didn't. I didn't work through the emotions. I didn't write. I didn't hold myself in the space of knowing he was gone, that I was helpless, that all I could do for him wasn't enough. 

It's not that I haven't thought about him, or that I've stopped feeling sad. I haven't stopped having moments when my heart aches and my eyes fill up with tears and for a time all I know is the pain of missing him. That happens, but it's less often and most of the time I let it pass or push it away. A year was enough and I haven't wanted to do it any more.

So most of the time I'm resting my grief, building a life in the new reality that doesn't have him in it.

In that space of rest and renewal, I'm looking forward to the life to come. I've turned 50, taken sabbatical, thought a lot about what's next. I'm not finding many answers. I'm ready for what life brings to me, but I don't have the energy to go out looking. It turns out that I'm not done with grief.

The grief about Ryan is lighter. The things they say about time are true. Grief doesn't go away but it does get easier to live with.

And in the space that opens up, I find I'm grieving something else. I've lost my role as mother. I'm grieving motherhood. For two decades mothering was who I was and what I did. I've known all my life that I would be a mother. Before I was ready, before I married, before there was any plan for how I'd get there, I knew that I would be a mother - maybe a wife, maybe a teacher, but with more certainty than sense I knew motherhood was in my future. 

And then I was, and mothering was my whole world. And now

it's not, and I don't know what to do and I don't know who to be. What do I do with the nurturing and caring, the planning and problem solving, the creativity and passion that for so long and in so many ways I have poured into mothering? 

This is a very different kind of grief. I don't know what will come of it or when it might fade. For today it is enough that I've chosen to feel it, to pick up my pen and stay in the loss and the longing. It is exhausting, and real, and enough.