Back to school

Thomas would have started grade two this week. On the first day of school, I lay in bed and told him about the day that would have been. The special breakfast I would have cooked, the way we'd have walked to school together, the treat I'd have made him to snack on after school while he told me about all the adventures he'd had as a big boy in grade two.

Then I got up and carried on with my day. I don't remember what I did, I just know it was painfully ordinary.

Back to school pictures, which began popping up on Facebook back in mid August as children of my American friends headed back, reached their agonizing peak this week. The annual assault.

I would have done it too, of course. Thomas all dressed up in his first-day best, smiling at the camera as he headed out the door to grade two. I would have sent the picture to his grandma and his Auntie Kathy. And his bubby and nonno too.

I would have.

Ha. Would.

It was wearying. My last grief-frayed nerve about to snap on Tuesday, when a new friend e-mailed me and asked how I was coping with the onslaught. She barely knows me. We've met once. But she has been a staunch supporter of Thomas' Random Act of Kindness Day since a mutual friend told her about it a few years ago, and she has a rare kind of sensitivity that I'm discovering is like a cooling balm on a sunburn.

A blissful salve on time-worn grief.

It didn't occur to anyone else. And nor should it, really. I'm not the centre of anyone's universe but my own. At seven-years old, my grief is seasoned. And besides, I don't tell people that eleventy-billion milestone pictures coming at me for two solid weeks eventually starts to erode the stitches holding my heart together. So how could anyone have known?

But thank God for that one friend who did think to ask. It's all I needed.

All the bereaved moms I know say the same thing: every once in a while we just want someone to acknowledge our loss. Not all the time and not out of guilt or obligation. But maybe once in a blue moon; just a quiet nod to the ongoing agony of loss that ebbs and flows as life marches on. Especially as life marches on.

Because grief marches in place.

Perspective

Time has given me the ability to understand that what I see - and the way I see it - is coloured by the lens of loss.

This notion is true for everyone, of course. We all see the world based on things that have happened to us: people we've met, jobs we've had, loves we've lost, struggles we've faced, triumphs we've celebrated - our life experiences make us see things in a way unique only to us.

So I'm biased, is what I'm saying.

I see a mother wishing away her weekend because she's tired of being with her kids and I want to scream. I hear conversations about how parenting is mostly joyless drudgery (at lot - it seems like a trendy opinion these days) and I reel with the force of a hand slap to the face.

I stand mute while these conversations swirl around me because I know that my opinion won't count. I am the one who sees motherhood through rose coloured glasses. They know that, and I know that. I can still conjure that dreamy, once-upon-a-time vision of a warm, sleepy baby tucked into my arms while I rock him gently back to sleep in the middle of the night, singing softly and marveling at his beauty while my heart bursts with love and pride.

Seriously, I can still see it, plain as day. 

In that vision I am beautiful, love radiating from my glowing face in the dim light of the man-in-the-moon lamp, tendrils of hair cascading just so, my robe crisply white, my slippers fluffy and new. I am not haggard, half-asleep, dirty, disheveled, or vomited-upon. I'm not even in a bad mood. I'm happy to be up in the middle of the night. Happy.

Is that how it would have been? I'm guessing probably no. Not every time. Maybe not even once (except for the glowing with love bit - I'm sure that would always have been true).

But in the absence of any personal evidence to prove this vision fraudulent, that's the movie that plays in my head. And so to hear parenting so cruelly maligned is always a bit of a shock. Almost a personal affront to the life I wanted so very, very badly - and to that lovely vision I hold so dear. It flat out makes me angry to hear those who have it treat it like a head cold they wish they could medicate away.

But I understand it's not fair of me to judge. I really do, despite evidence to the contrary. And I understand that I can't help but see the experience of parenting in a way those with living children never will. It's just that all that annoying understanding creates such a war between my head and my heart.

The worst of it is that I can't say anything. Obviously I can't contribute to conversations about the difficulty of day-to-day parenting (although it's not like I don't have a clue how hard parenting can be; I had to take my child off life support. I get that it's hard). And if I chose to point out that parents should shut up and be grateful for the gifts they were lucky enough to be given every time someone within earshot complained about their kid, I'm sure I'd find my Christmas card list diminish rather quickly.

Parents who have living children see their lives through that lens. They aren't supposed to put on my glasses and see it my way. They can't. They have their perspective, I have mine.

So I stay quiet. Mostly. You know, except for blogging.

And I try - I really, really do try - to keep it all in perspective, knowing that my vision of motherhood is still, and always will be, just a lovely dream playing quietly in my head.

My mother's kitchen

I was standing at my mom & dad's kitchen sink this afternoon, washing up the dishes I'd used to make a meatloaf for their dinner, when the smell of browning meat and simmering chili sauce bubbling from the oven carried me back to another time. To the same place, my parents' kitchen, but to a time when I was a child and my parents were young - and they were looking after me.

And the warmth of that scent memory flowed through me, slowing my breathing, relaxing my body.

I inhaled deeply, trying to pull more comfort from the air in my mother's kitchen. I looked out into the yard where I used to skate on rinks my mom flooded every winter, where my grandma shoveled paths in the deep snow, where I played in the sandbox and lay on a blanket in the sun listening to 45s on my sister's Mickey Mouse record player.

I remember my dad with black hair, taking steps two at a time. I remember my mom wallpapering the stairway, standing on homemade scaffolding without a trace of fear.

And now they are old. And I have woken up 1964 times without Thomas. And life is so different than it was, and every day I find myself sorting through some sort of grief. Sometimes newly realized, sometimes familiar and worn.

There are moments of peace and moments of despair. Moments of joy and moments of sorrow. Always, there is light and dark.

And that's the way it is. Right now, in this aching time as I watch my parents failing and I look into my future and see just a handful of us left and no one following behind; that's the way it is.

This, as it turns out, is what it means to be a grown up: feeling pain, but taking strength from lovely memories and finding moments of comfort in my mother's kitchen.