inside the broken

There are things which broke on that day which will never be repaired.

My ability to give a toss, for one thing. I walked out of the hospital wearing pyjamas, clutching a yoghurt. Less than an hour after watching my 11 day old son die, I left the building having forgotten to dress but feeling it was important to not waste the money spent on a breakfast yoghurt that my throat had been too constricted to eat.

A million times I have reconstructed that morning, imagined that I screamed and howled and refused to be parted from him, imagined myself cradling him - illegally outside a car seat - on the journey home. Imagined his breathless body in our home, loved by us all, for a few hours. Just a few. Long enough for all of us to hold him.

A piece of me broke when I laid the body of my child upon the bed, turned my back, walked away, left him forever. I went quietly. I walked with measured steps, climbed inside my car, composed myself for breaking the news at home.

I stared at the car in front of us, proclaiming in a jolly yellow sign "baby on board" from the back window.

I didn't cry, or snarl, or instruct my husband to ram their smug, unknowing selves off the road with their sneering, crowing, baby sign.

I don't miss the drama queen, nor the woman who put her own needs and wants first and had a baby to suit herself. She broke. She is long gone.

The mother who arrived labouring and optimistic was not the one who walked out empty armed and brokenhearted. I wonder at what became of her on those haunted corridor days, the long nights hovering above a SCBU crib. I wonder at the mother who left, grief already put to one side, able to turn her back to a beloved but dead son and focus on the living.

I would not have believed that I had that in me. I would not have believed that my soft soul, so often such a shaken and shifting thing, would have hardened, frozen, stiffened and done the deed.

I am not sure if I want to be the mother who walked away. It does not feel honourable nor does the walking illustrate the love, or the desire to stay forever, suck him inside of me, curl up upon that bed with him inside my arms and keep him warm with my warmth until we both grew cold.

But the one who arrived home. Broken, yes, but strong. So very, very much stronger than anyone believed. Least of all me.

There are things that broke inside of me that day; faith, trust, patience and tolerance. Energy for the small worries, some measure of mercy for human foibles are long gone. I do not wish to be troubled by the minutiae of petty irritations. I do not suffer them gladly.

What was left, when all that cracked and fell away, was new, pressured hardened, solid, changed.

I survived.

My son died, in my arms, under my gaze.

But I survived. I changed, changed deeply to my core, but I have survived. Sometimes, I rather resent that it is possible to do so.

Can you identify parts of your personality that have changed since the loss of your child? Are there changes you welcome in some way or do you resent them utterly? People talk about 'becoming a better person' as an aspiration after experiencing loss; is it possible for that to happen? Is it damaging to even try? In what ways has grief been a journey for your 'self', your character and how do you feel about it if it has?

Attitude-shamtitude

I've thought about writing some version of this post many-many times over the years. The post where I'd let go and let fly about just how much I dislike-- scratch that-- how much I hate positive thinking. Because oh yes, I do. In my imaginary post, I'd rage on about how insidious the movement is, essentially blaming those who end up in unhappy circumstances for their own fate. Negative emotions, the story goes, cause bad things to happen. Staying positive, usually with the help of some set of specified exercises, will bring you all the good things you need. Money, health, everything. Bulltshit! A pile of crap. A big, stinking pile of crap.

And it stinks worse every time you try to poke a stick at it to see whether it really is a pile of solid crap, or whether maybe there's some substance mixed in or buried underneath. Because really, from where I sit, to tell people struggling with cancer and the effects of cancer treatments, or people in tough economic circumstances, or people-- let's just say, entirely hypothetically-- grieving their dead child that they "have to stay positive," to have the gall to tell people how they should deal with their own physical and mental anguish, well, one must be high. Perhaps on the noxious vapors from that giant pile of crap. Have to? You don't say! Because what? Puking ones guts out is supposed to be fun? Or enlightening? Or because worrying about making rent or having enough to feed one's family is just silly? Or because continuing to grieve is what? Preventing us from "moving forward"? Oh, I see-- because if you don't, you might succumb to the disease, make your economic matters worse, or not get to have another child (because remember-- children, much like purses, are fungible). Only if you stay positive will you recover, improve your money situation, or bring home that bundle of joy. Bullshit! And also? Insidious and just plain mean. 

And, unfortunately, all too common. It wears many hats, sometimes technicolor bright, making it impossible to miss what it's all about. "I ate right and exercised all through my pregnancy" it proclaims loudly on the playground, "I only gained 20 pounds, and labor was this transcendent experience, and he is just the healthiest baby I've ever known!" And sometimes it's a lot more subtle, whispering doubts into our fragile souls-- "maybe he died because I didn't want him enough," "maybe it's because I ate sushi," or "maybe I was so worried about having to take time off from work that I caused this to happen." No, no you didn't. (You know you didn't, right? Our thoughts don't make things happen. Not good things, and not bad things. You didn't cause this.)

So you know what? I hate positive thinking. Not only for what it does to the vulnerable people directly, but also for what it does to the social fabric that surrounds them (us). For some mind-bending examples of finding oneself in an environment where such thinking is normalized and even promoted you really can't beat Barbara Ehrenreich's 2009 book Bright-sided. The book was prompted by and starts with Ehrenreich's own experience of getting breast cancer and suddenly finding herself in the "pink ribbon culture," where there really isn't a word for a woman who never made it to "survivor" or has fallen off that wagon, so to speak, where "[w]hat does not destroy you.... makes you a spunkier, more evolved sort of a person." and where the book titles such as The Gift of Cancer: A Call to Awakening do not raise an eyebrow.  And what if you don't want to sing an ode to breast cancer, either because you see it as a disease that took a significant physical and psychological toll, or because you yourself are not and will not be a "survivor"? Well, then, you're doing it wrong.

Bright-sided came out when I was barely two years out from A's death and somewhat acutely sensitive to the positive thinking bullshit that kept popping up all around me. So I cheered the masterful takedowns of the individual piles of crappola, starting with the world of breast cancer and going wider and deeper. I found the history lesson on the roots of positive thinking in America to be fascinating. I found tracing of the role of positive thinking in bringing about the financial crash of 2008 fascinating too-- in a way that watching a slow-motion replay of a test car crashes is fascinating (except, of course, it wasn't dummies being crumpled by the financial crash). The chapter I thought at the time was the weakest in the book was the one on positive psychology.

I went back this week to re-read that chapter (and re-skim the rest of the book). This time it seemed less removed from the rest of the book, less like it was picking on an individual human with somewhat obvious character flaws, that person being the then-President of the American Psychological Association Martin Seligman. This time the chapter seemed downright prescient, much like that kid who pointed out the fairly profound lack of layers that a certain monarch was employing in his wardrobe. Prescient of what, say you, and why reread the chapter? Glad you asked.

Recently a friend pointed me to an article (which contained a link to another article on the same subject, this one much shorter) about a recent takedown by an unlikely band of takers-of-no-shit of something of a centerpiece of the discipline of positive psychology, advancing which Martin Seligman has made the defining mission of his tenure as the President of APA. What takers-of-no-shit took down was a seemingly super-important paper, published in 2005 and since referenced over 350 times, including in popular psychology books by one of the paper's authors, Barbara Fredrickson, a star of positive psychology if there ever was one, and by Seligman himself. The paper, see, claimed to have found a ratio of positive to negative statements or emotions that separates "flourishing" people and groups from "languishing" ones. The ratio was supposed to be, I shit you not, a straight up exact number. 2.91013:1.

You know what that ratio and the whole bloody cottage industry that grew up around it turned out to be? If you guessed crap-encrusted filet of crap with crap demi-glaze and some whipped crap on the side, you are absolutely correct. It was fake. A stopped clock derived from fudged messing around with equations of certain aspects of fluid mechanics. The paper that took it down was called in the original manuscript "The Complex Dynamics of an Intellectual Imposture." Sadly, the authors changed it to "The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking" before publication to step on less academic toes.

The person who first smelled the crap, and who was able to claw his way through enough complicated math to determine that the number was fake, is my new personal hero, Nick Brown, a then-50 year old master's student of the University of East London where he was studying, wait for it-- applied positive psychology. Yeah, he was paying money to study this stuff. And he is not the only one. Martin Seligman runs a one year program at UPenn that costs nearly nothing to attend, chump change really, a mere 45 grand. Yup, for one year. He is also at the heart of a project with the Army that is running United States taxpayers a cool $125 million plus, though it seems to have done nothing to reduce PTSD-- a prominent goal of the thing.

It bothers me to no end when science and math are misused. It undermines public confidence in the whole enterprise, making it harder for good research to be taken seriously. I've talked to my students many times about examples of bad research or bad reporting of research (or both at the same time). And more often than not I find that as I talk about these things my voice starts to shake. It's not nerves-- it's indignation. I guess I am still enough of a science idealist to think that doing research the right way really-really matters. And in this particular case, holy crap does this burn me! This is not a victimless little fudge, a small shading of data to advance one's career. This has real consequences for real people-- it spreads the reach of mandatorily bright-sided environment, making it more likely that more people will be told by some positive psychology devotee somewhere that they need to adjust their attitudes. You know, find 2.9103 positive emotions to counterweigh the bummer of their kid still being dead. And isn't that the kind of advice we all need more of in our lives?

This is my opinion. What's yours? Tell us, please.

Oh, and by the way, the articles I linked above are well worth the read. Enjoy!

Community Voices: Ritual

I am incredibly honored and pleased to present two readers' voices today as guest posts on Glow.

The first piece is by Juliet Spear Gardener. Juliet is the mother of Peregrine Elan, who died and was born at 39 weeks gestation in January, 2013. She lives in Northern California.

Each week, I keep an eye out for the right stone and slide it into my pocket.

Each week, we bring the stone, water, and flowers from our garden. Once, we brought an antler: old, fragile, gnawed. Once, a cutting from a plant that is a cutting from a plant that P.’s grandmother grew. Once, wildflower seeds—only one took root, an orange California poppy whose abundant blooms open for the day but are closed during evening visits. After weeks of checking my favorite nursery, they finally had blue lupines; that week, I remembered the shovel.

Each week, we walk down the stone path, the steep slope. Each week, I remember that first walk: me still wearing a black maternity dress, P. carrying the tiny casket he built, my hand on his back, our families trailing behind.

Each week, we water the plants. I pull out the rocks and recount their origins. I arrange the flowers and explain their names and attributes—jasmine wafting through our bedroom window, the summer joy of chewing sourgrass, wisteria’s delicate drips and Kool-Aid breath.

Some weeks I cry; some I listen to the Eucalyptus leaves. Some weeks I hold P. while he cries; some I wander nearby, restless. One week I pounded the earth. Some weeks I don't want to go. Twice I lay back and felt the sun and wind on my skin.

There are 32 stones there now, each from a place I wish he could have seen with me.

This second piece is by Tamara. She writes: I thought I knew what the future looked like. I didn't. Learning to live without my son is the hardest thing I've ever tried to do. My wife and I are putting one foot in front of the other after losing Ezra on August 6, 2013. I try to make sense of it at Queerly Trying.

My wife and I picked out our son's name before he was conceived, an initial each for our lost mothers. In a different reality, the reality we were supposed to have, where my son had his whole brain intact and we welcomed him joyfully in December, we would have had a naming ceremony. I was already planning it, this welcome to the world for the boy we wanted so much.

In August we sat instead in the geneticist's office signing a stack of papers authorizing the induction of labour at 22 weeks. In order to spare our baby a terrible death, I consented to each form, pausing when I got to the one allowing autopsy. Stillborn was printed neatly in the space for our son's name. Nameless. Stillborn OurLastName, the baby that wasn't.

Under Jewish law, if a baby doesn't live for 30 days, there are no rituals performed. In my personal pick-and-choose brand of agnosticism, I had never thought much about this. I made Chanukah latkes and taught my students to play dreidel. I threw a feminist Seder every year. I didn't really believe in God, but I believed in community, in history. I had never considered what I believed about infant death. I didn't know, until I held my beautiful still son in my arms, how much I was going to need my Jewishness. He needed his name.

The hospital's one rabbi was on vacation. Every rabbi I contacted pointed to the law and said no. You don't even believe, said whispered voice in my head. I insisted. Finally, a friend reached a cousin who is married to a Jew who knew a rabbi who was willing to help. That good man got in his car and drove across town to bless the stillborn son of a couple he had never met.

The rabbi shook my wife's hand. He sat at my bedside and murmured condolences. He tenderly held my baby, wrapped in a blue blanket, and intoned the words given for healing, given in welcome. Welcome, little one.

I only understood snatches of the Hebrew. I caught "r’fuah shleimah"—complete recovery. And the most important part of all. Ezra ben Tamar. Ezra, son of Tamara. Named, in that drafty hospital room, before me and my wife and the God I'm never sure about. Named. He existed.

I can't explain the comfort that those prayers gave me. I won't try. What I know is that I wasn't ready to give my baby to the nurse until it was done. Ezra George, the son of Lauren and Tamara, named for his grandmothers Elizabeth and Gloria. Our son.

What rituals have you done for the one(s) you have lost, little or big? Who have you invited to be part of these rituals?