Walking across scars
I hurt as I love
The memories float up At first unseen
The tendrils of grief snake & grow Strangling
Until they grab my heart Turning it blue
Losses piled up on top of losses Snagging at the fragments I call me
Threads of love frayed and worn Love calling back and forth Stretched to breaking point
The temptation to run takes me (again)
Grief is the price of love. A friend said this to me after Charley, one of our cats died a couple of years ago. I always want to write lost instead of died, as if then she may come back to us. But, sadly she is gone. Her words helped; I just wish it wasn’t that way. I am left thinking of my comment, how can such sorrow come from such love when feeling broken after another miscarriage. Our dream of children has passed, still the nightmares are as real. They are less frequent, but of late they have been popping up again. Perhaps it is my age. Perhaps it is a sense of missed firsts and milestones. Perhaps it is as I am reaching the end of my PhD (a plan b) and have to decide what is next. Whatever the reason, it is there, and I know I need to be with and process my childless grief before the elastic breaks. But, it isn’t easy. I feel it stretching once more. That is why I am writing and sharing these words.
For me, movement helps me be with and process my griefs. Though these movements I leave traces of my losses behind, which can provide relief by effusing a place with meaning - becoming a memorial to return to. However, at other times, these traces become silent hauntings – redrawing happy memories, cracked through with pain. A month or so ago, walking with friends, was one such occasion. We were walking a route I have walked and ran a few times. Traces of my memories criss-crossed the landscape, becoming entangled with new imaginations as I saw our children running through the woods. I let the image go. I walked on. We chatted as we went. I kept my sorrow to myself. We later laughed as we ate and drunk. It was a good day, but I struggled to take it in and allow myself those smiles.
The next day, the tracings bounded me in my grief. I scribbled down ‘Walking across scars’. I left it alone, unexamined. Instead, I felt that calling to escape my entanglements – perhaps there could be somewhere where life would be simpler for us. A place not scarred with hauntings. The call increased until I stagnated. I went numb and afraid. I didn’t want to run. As despite my losses I have a life here. We have created something very special and haven’t given up, even so that would have been so easy on many an occasion. We continue to shape our adventures. For love is here, even if at times I feel out of its reach, behind a veil of grief. A veil of my making. Yet, I also wanted to just move and keep moving, to displace my hurt, leave it behind scattered over the fells and along the coast, adding to the spectres left behind. Until nothing remained. Did this include me? It has done on occasions, but not now.
I stagnated that day, as I have on many other days, as I knew running away wouldn’t help me. For I carry my hauntings with me, but I was also afraid to be with my grief, fearing my pain would flood me. So I ran away by retreating inwards instead. In those drawn-out moments I reject myself, rejecting my capacity to be with the complexity of emotions that accompany grief. I also reject myself before others can, thinking I have failed as I haven’t ‘moved on’ yet. This action is deeply ingrained in me and runs counter to what would happen as my wife would listen, hold and love me. A numb nothingness abounds and surrounds me. Another thread of elastic breaks.
I had previously reached an acceptance that we don’t have children and that doesn’t mean we have failed, but different, and to live isn’t betraying our lost children, but honouring our love. Yet my hold on that acceptance has been slipping of late, probably for all the above and a little more from my past. The elastic frays just a little more. Yet, through this reflection, I see, what I have seen before, that elusive place, that allows me and us to live, both doesn’t exist and already exists. Here, can be simple and pleasurable – I have known those times. It is not an unscarred place I am looking for; it is wanting to leave behind my scars. But, to do that would mean to leave behind my love. To empty myself and fade is no way to live. I have fought against that all my life. Fought against the conditions placed on me and internalised, unpicking those threads, but enough remain to keep calling to me. So, I trick myself into thinking that breaking the elastic formed of love is the way to go - that way I would be pain free - instead of slicing through the conditional love that has left me full of shame. A shame that doesn’t belong to me. A shame I have to hand back to those that wrapped me in it through not accepting me and meeting me as me. It is this shame that leads me to rejecting myself, especially when I am struggling behind that veil and am estranged from the love present. This shame also distorts my traces, my days, and removes me from my emotions – turning movement into avoidance.
I share my words publicly as part of my healing is to say this is me. That I have been thwarted by shame and my unhelpful behaviours to combat this rejection. That my shame complicates my grief. Holding back my tears doesn’t stop their flow, instead they pool together, drawing me under and contributing to that veil. Behind my veil of grief being childless not by choice overwhelms me, it is no longer just a part of me (just as being a parent would only have been, as being a parent wouldn’t have solved my shame) and shreds my love. I return to my unnecessary shame and turn away or run away from my grief rather than being with it. Being childless not by choice is then no longer about not being a dad – the loving dad I wanted to be. Instead, I feel a failure, less than and untethered. Then my love doesn’t leave traces, instead I become a spectre, removed from the core of my grief, of my being. Staying with my shame would hide away these words, but I am not my shame. Even so shame complicates my grief, my grief isn’t shameful, but painful as it comes from love, and so I need to meet myself with self-compassion. I need to reject the ingrained rejection.
These words (re)trace a route I know well, but each time I notice something new. Each time I move towards a hope that I can let go of the unnecessary shame. Each time I move towards accepting myself and my life as complex, emotional, and rich. A life enhanced by love – my grief shows me how much I have enjoyed and gained. Actually, a life without grief would be a lonely life. Each time I gather my love, picking up the frayed threads and tie them anew. I regain my connection with movement. Being childless not by choice is complicated, as it is not just an end result, but interweaved with other aspects of a person’s biography, and forms part of their becoming. A becoming that is complicated by taking place in a society that doesn’t often understand the impact of being childless not by choice, but that is a blog for another day.