Letting Go: Mourning the Right Decision

We like to think of things as simple. If we choose the right career, the bills will get paid and vacations will be possible. If we find the right life partner, the birds will sing us awake in the morning and we will fall asleep with the sounds of love and laughter in our ears.

But life is not clean and straight-lines. It isn't fluffy clouds and rainbows. And, most of all, it isn't simple.

At the deepest level, we want our decisions to be clear. We want to make the right choice and feel the rightness. We want weights to be lifted from our shoulders. We want a smile to creep across our faces with how right we were.

Right decisions should make us feel good. But they don't always. Sometimes, we are faced -  with an impossible choice and, no matter what path we choose, it won't feel good. We will still need to mourn the death of that other possibility.

I once lived in a house with a great bedroom. My bedroom had a 3/4 bath attached. My bedroom had a (non-functioning) fireplace. My bedroom had a closet under the stairs, so the ceiling - and even the closet door - had a severe angle in it. My bedroom had a broken doorknob, so I could take the doorknob with me as a kind of lock on my bedroom door.

When we moved, we moved to a farmhouse. I picked out my bedroom, which had a vent through which I could see down into the living room. Even better, I could listen to the movies and TV shows my parents watched after I went to bed. My brother and I could pack up snacks in a back pack and roam the large hills in which this new home was nestled. When the rotation was right in the summer, the mooing of cows would wake us too early and set us on our adventures. We touched electric fences, stared down bulls, climbed to the tops of the tiny mountains around us.

The choice to move was a good one. Never for one moment did I think it was the wrong choice. Yet, as we packed up to move out of my bedroom with it's angled closet, 3/4 bath, and broken doorknob, I cried.

Looking back, I see the wisdom that my 10 year old self had in that moment. Even when it's the right thing to do, you may still need to mourn the path you did not take.

I have made a decision. I have several dreams for my life. Most of them are possible to do at the same time, but I realized that dividing my time and resources as they currently are will result in neither of them being fully realized.

I have to give one of them up to let the other come to fruition.

It's the right choice that I've made. I am also pretty certain that I will eventually pick the other dream up again. In the meantime, I am sad.

I'm sad that I had to make the choice. I'm sad that I can't carry both dreams right now. I'm sad that all the work I've put into the dream left behind has been, well, left behind. I am sad, but I made the right choice.

We need to allow ourselves to give vent to the negative emotions without worrying about whether it's appropriate to HAVE those emotions. Emotions are always appropriate. Behaviors based on those emotions are a different story.

Let yourself mourn the right choice. You can be scared when you move. You can be sad when you had to cut a toxic person from your life. You can feel guilt when you can't afford to help someone out.

These feelings are okay. Feel them. Honor them. Then move on with your right choice.

A Tale of Two C-Sections

My first child, my son, was an emergency c-section. A combination of "problems" conspired with a lack of knowledgeable labor support to send me racing to the OR. I put "problems" in quotes because while macrosomia ("big baby") and failure to progress SOUND medically fear-inducing, they are seldom the emergency that cut-happy OBs make them out to be... they are more of a "problem" when something RARELY goes wrong and results in a malpractice suit.

The result was an emotionally devastating three HOURS of recovery time in which I was not ALLOWED to see my first child. Laying in bed alone, struggling to wriggle my toes in the hopes that such an action would get me back to my room faster...

I still think there was a lingering negative impact on my parenting. It seemed to me that from the start, I wasn't supposed to have had my baby. Nature itself tried to tell me by not letting me birth him.

Unsurprisingly, this thought came back with every parental doubt that entered my mind. I cried silently more times then I care to admit, wondering if I had done something that went against the laws of nature by conceiving and raising (but not birthing) this child. Or maybe the stress-filled rush of the c-section permanently turned my child from a trusting baby into the fussy, colicky creature that protested life's sudden changes at every turn. After all, I couldn't save him from the cutting, ripping entry he made into the world; how could I protect him from anything?

Years later, I had gotten past this little emotional issue... or so I had thought.

With the impending birth of my second child, I discovered to my horror that I wasn't ALLOWED to birth my second child either. In fact, I wasn't even ALLOWED to go into labor this time. This was made all the worse my a time-table set by the doctor's estimation of my due date, which I know for a fact was either a week late (unlikely) or THREE WEEKS TOO SOON. That's right, he not only wanted to rip my second child out of my body, he wanted to do it before she was ready... and no amount of protests on my part could convince him his precious ultrasound was wrong. Never mind that I knew when I had sex and when I didn't.

As I struggled with the stress of late pregnancy and raising a (still fussy/needy) pre-schooler, I tried to find a way out of this mess. However, it turns out that in my state (bass-ackwards Nebraska), my choices were to schedule a c-section, labor (alone) at home, or show up at the hospital in labor and hope they didn't FORCE me into surgery (they can and have done that). Enter more weeping...

In the end, I didn't have the strength to fight them and scheduled the c-section. As with the first, there were no complications during the surgery or during recovery. However, there is still the emotional problems that no one seems to care about as long as you don't murder your children.

Like the nagging suspicion that these aren't my kids... I mean, really, how would I know? And, with the second one, the more nagging suspicion that she is almost a preemie, taken weeks before she was ready. The doubts and worries that plague me with every cough and sniffle - c-section babies are more likely to have respiratory problems, even into adulthood. The sudden bouts of paranoia - increased chances of SIDS. Sometimes I go about parenting with a disconnect that frightens me - a disconnect that I feel comes from not feeling or even seeing my babies leave my body.

All of this is made worse by the so-called comforting words of well-intentioned people who just don't get it. "At least you're all healthy/alive." "She's so pretty, because she got taken out via c-section." "Congratulations!"

Yeah, "congratulations". Like I did anything more then not kill them in utero and then lay there like an incompetent log while someone else did the work of bringing them into the world. I didn't even get to see or touch them unless someone else allowed it and facilitated it.

And so the pain and doubt continues.