Thin Skin

I've been struggling a bit lately.

Getting ready to go back to school has felt super overwhelming for some reason, and I don't know if it's because I'm teaching something totally new, albeit for one period (12:1:1 social studies), or because it marks the passing of another year, or if I've procrastinated too long on getting everything but my room ready, or I'm nervous about meeting a new group of students and parents and facing the questions that that brings. My anxiety suffered a bit of an uptick in the last month.

I know it's normal for grief to be nonlinear, to go around and around like a crazy squiggle rather than in a straight line of healing, going from A to B, Mess to Well-Adjusted, without any bumps or setbacks along the way.

But a few things reminded me that it's only been a year since we made our decision to end our parenthood quest, and our lives took a turn that will impact us for the rest of our lives.

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Most recently, we were at our favorite Mexican restaurant when a friend was celebrating her 60th birthday. It was a huge family celebration -- 17 people -- filled with kids and grandkids and a lot of joyful noise. There was singing and talking and laughing, and we felt honored to be called over to say hello during such a family-oriented celebration. BUT. When the cake came out, when the singing happened, 15 voices of progeny in two generations... I found my eyes welling up against my will and tears spilling over down my face.

We'll never have that.

When we turn 60, we can throw ourselves a party, we can celebrate quietly via a weekend away, but we will never be surrounded by our kids and grandkids, wishing us well on another trip around the sun, reminding us that after we go there's people who will live on with a little piece of us inside them, remembering us, putting our pictures on their walls, talking about that time we celebrated Grandma with enchiladas and cake.

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Another moment was when we were showing Bryce's mom and stepfather, in for a visit, the display box that Bryce's dad built to house the WWII watches and other small paraphernalia from both his grandfathers. It goes perfectly in his fancypants office, all mission-y quarter-sawn oak. It's incredibly cool to have actual history in our home, these relics from a war I teach 8th graders about, that we have personal connections to. (My grandfather and one of his grandfathers were both at Guadal Canal, although at slightly different times.) I will admit that the whole watch thing always makes me giggle, thanks to Pulp Fiction and Christopher Walken, but the piece is absolutely beautiful and it's truly an heirloom.

Except. I made a joke that we had an heirloom with no heirs, and then it sort of stuck with me. We have this amazing hand-crafted display box for amazing personal war paraphernalia, and where will it go when we're gone? Do we see if there's a museum that wants it, with one of those plaques that says where it came from and whose it was so that there's a little piece of our family history living out there somewhere?

I know that having "heirs" (like we live in Windsor or something) doesn't guarantee that they will want your stuff or take any of it upon your demise. We were just visiting with a friend who was lamenting that she has all these amazing international dolls that she herself inherited, and her children don't want them, so who knows what will become of them? It was a little reassuring to see that "who will want my stuff" is more of a universal question, one that having children doesn't necessarily solve. But it still made me sad to think of the pile of things that meant something to us, that will just become "stuff" for lack of a place to leave them to.

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My hardest day, the one where I truly felt the thin membrane of healing rupture and ooze, was earlier in August. It started with an ill-advised trip to our local humane society. I do not enjoy going to check out cats and dogs up for adoption unless I am planning to bring one home. It's a weird thing where Bryce and I are at total opposite ends of the spectrum -- he can go and check out cats in the adoption area of the pet food store, or at the ASPCA location, and it doesn't fill him with sadness. I WANT TO TAKE THEM ALL HOME. I can't stop thinking about what will happen if no one chooses them, and I tend to get real sad thinking about the older cats in particular. And dogs... dogs look at you with those knowing eyes and just break your heart into tiny pieces. IT IS NOT FUN FOR ME.

But we went, as visitors wanted to check it out, and I felt my well-being start to crackle around the edges like ice on a spring pond. There was this one cat, either Lydia or Layla (I think I'd name her Lydia if that's not right anyway), and she was in a bigger room having some "quiet time" and her story typed up and taped to the glass read, "Lydia is very confused to be here -- she is 9 years old and her owner had to surrender her, so she is feeling lost and uncomfortable and wants to be back home." JUST STAB ME THROUGH THE HEART AND TWIST THE KNIFE. I know why those are written that way, but it still felt emotionally manipulative and all I wanted to do was to break Lydia out of her glass prison and introduce her to Lucky and Abner. She was super sweet. I failed miserably at not thinking about how this is NOT a no-kill shelter, and so decided that was the point where I'd leave the cat area and stand out in the main hall/reception area where maybe I wouldn't fall apart into tiny pieces.

I also tried to go to the dog area, but was definitely not feeling it, and I walked into one "suite" (they separate the dogs out in groups of 2-3 so it's not as stressful) and walked right the fuck back out. Their eyes just bore into you and beg you to take them home, and they look so dejected and so wanting out of their sterile cells. Of course, this shelter does a great job with volunteers who come to walk the dogs and they get a lot of love, but in the end they are still living in bare cells that echo, not curled up on a couch next to a person.

Understandably this put me in a big fat funk. I was not in a good place. And then a situation unfolded later that same day where I felt like I should be okay, where I felt like I could play along and see other people's babies, but what I could handle (seeing a picture or two of this particular other person's baby) became a barrage of pictures of a super sweet little baby whose story is not mine to tell but opened those spidery cracks into big fissures that just dropped me into dark icy water and left me to drown.

The baby had one of those hooded animal towels, a little frog, and is seriously one of the most photogenic babies ever, so at first it was like, "awww, look at that sweet little guy!" But then, it reminded me of the little crab towel we had for our own nonexistent baby, that has probably already aged out of the baby it was donated for and has either been passed on or tossed out. This was not a particularly pleasant thought. As the pictures just kept coming and they involved parents holding the baby and just a bum rush of gushing and oohing and ahhing, it sort of passed over "I can handle this" to "holy shit I CANNOT handle this but I don't want to be that sad sap person so I think I'll just stuff all these feelings deep down into my gut and smile my frozen smile and hmmmm, this is not a good feeling and doesn't bring me back to good times, but it's what I've got right now."

I got up and found a few board books that were appropriate for this baby's location and really, really wanted to give the baby these books, and get the books out of the house, and have them serve a better purpose than relics stuffed in a basket under my chaise lounge because I can't bear to look at them. I wanted them to be useful. I wanted to give some goodwill. I wanted to squash these feelings of emptiness and grief and what-will-never-be with a gesture of love and "see, I'm totally okay right now."

Except I wasn't.

Once we were alone in the house I fell spectacularly apart and sobbed like I haven't sobbed in months, and felt just how thin my skin of well-adjustedness is. I honestly thought it was thicker, more that thick, shiny scar tissue than translucent membrane.

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A friend at lunch recently told me not to give myself such a hard time. That these things will happen, that it's only been a year since a life-changing turn of events that separates our lives from every TV commercial ever. That I AM well-adjusted, because I didn't lay facedown on the floor as much as I may have wanted to. I let the feelings wash over me and some lingered longer than others, but I could still be a functioning human. Sometimes I feel more functioning than others, but that's okay.

I think what upset me most about the last two moments, the animal shelter and the photo blitz, was that I did not feel that I could really stand my ground and say "nope, I've had enough." I could have said "I'll meet you by the car, I'm going to go look at the horses outside/walk the nature trail/read the kindle that's always in my purse on a bench." I could have said, "You know what, I think this tiny human is adorable but I can handle maybe TWO photos and then I need you to stop, not because I can't appreciate this baby but because it makes me surprisingly desperately sad for what we've lost." I don't know why I couldn't just say those things and save myself some serious mental anguish.

And the thing with the baby is that I DON'T WANT A BABY ANYMORE. That's not about jealousy, that's not about wanting what I can't have. I don't want it anymore. I have passed the point where that is reasonable, for a million reasons. But there is a huge difference between being sad because you want what someone else has and being sad because you feel that loss acutely, what you'll never have and don't want anymore, what could have been but is never, ever going to be reality. It's like peeking into an alternate universe without actually wanting that alternate reality anymore. And there's also a huge sense of unfairness, of having WANTED something so very much and having TRIED so hard to make it happen, and then having it happen elsewhere with no effort at all although surrounded with difficulties of other kinds.

It was so, so hard.

There are solutions to the other things -- we can do advance planning and figure out who we can gift our things to, who would appreciate our massive collection of books, our instruments, even our LeCreuset dutch oven. We can figure out if there's not a person, then maybe there's an organization that would put these things to use. A library. A museum (more for the historical stuff than say the dutch oven).

Or maybe an asteroid will hit us and everything will go up in a fiery explosion and we won't have to even think about that. Or, with the state of climate change, any number of apocalyptic events could make these worries obsolete and silly.

The 60th birthday one? We can decide how we want to celebrate milestone birthdays and not feel guilty if it's to celebrate in Iceland, or Tuscany, or Hawaii, just the two of us, reflecting on the lives we've lived so far. May we be that fortunate. We could have a party where we surround ourselves with friends and family, like we did for our 40th celebrations. I kind of like the first option though, for right now. We do have to turn 50 first, so this is way off, and asteroids could hit and whatnot, so there's really no point in perseverating too much on a birthday that's so far off.

But it doesn't hurt to think about contingencies. Especially if it helps my thin skin build another layer, heal up from this strange parade of assaults on my armor, It doesn't hurt to really think about how we can build up our life and our experiences to feel like those alternate realities aren't even as attractive as we once thought they were. And it really doesn't hurt to forgive myself for feeling so sad when really, we are so fresh in our loss. I think sometimes I try so hard to be well adjusted and to work on my healing that I forget just how recent everything is, just how fresh this transition is from maybe-parent to never-parent, just how different it makes our life from those who have children and perhaps future grandchildren, just how separate from the standard narrative we feel.

All I can do is my best to figure out how to do all this -- how to face down those moments of "oh god we've lost so much" and honor them, and then celebrate all that we do have, all the possibilities that are open to us because our trajectory shifted. And to know that as Bryce said when I was a sobbing mess on the couch, that that skin over the hurt isn't thin, it's like the Earth's crust -- super thick in some places but ready to rupture and erupt in others, but really it's strong all the way around.