Here come the holidays, again: a kitchen table post
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For many babylost parents, holidays are hard, sometimes almost impossible. As many of us begin to be inundated with holiday music and decorations, as invitations to parties we might not want to go to and the expectations of family and friends start to pile up, we invite you to our kitchen table — a safe space to talk about how holidays feel and what you really want to say in the face of all this bloody cheer.
This post is an extension to last year’s holidays-themed kitchen table talk, where we talked about what helps us get through holidays and traditions we’ve created (or tried to) to keep our babies present. In this year’s kitchen table, we’re focusing on how to balance participating in holiday festivities and taking moments for personal reflection, balancing the busy-ness with our own need to sit with our feelings and grief. This is often very stressful for new and ‘old’ bereaved parents. This stress doesn’t only pop up around the holidays, and it exists no matter what or when you celebrate. We hope this conversation is helpful, and we invite you to join in in the comments.
Pull up a chair. Let us fill your mug, and you can warm your feet by the fire, while we talk holidays around the Glow In The Woods kitchen table.
How do you balance participating in holiday festivities and taking moments for personal reflection?
Jo-Anne: For far too long I participated with a fake smile, all the while biting my cheek, but then I stopped hiding how I truly felt, which is conflicted, sad, tired, guilty even, that I was here and she would never be. If being around too much family became too much I told my husband I would rather do the holidays alone, or take a vacation. The more I did that, the more I learned to enjoy these seasons. It became a time to enjoy the family before me, and remember, with great love, my daughter.
Emily: I participate in all the holiday stuff with my family and when that becomes too much, I steal away to hide in my closet for a moment. Maybe not the healthiest coping strategy, but you have to do what you can.
Kathy: I don’t know that I do balance this….historically what has happened is that I wrap myself in all those activities and then eventually implode from not creating enough space for myself to access my grief. I will acknowledge it with my head but not my heart. But since Tinsley died Dec 4th, the week between Thanksgiving and the first weekend of December is actually the worst week of the year for me. After I get that behind me, the rest of December is not as heavy. It is complicated, as my rainbow and pot of gold have December birthdays, so the month holds gratitude and joy as well. And as a Christian, this season is ultimately about hope. For me, the true balancing act is not about festivities vs me time – it’s about practicing holding joy and grief in the same breath.
Jen: I am notoriously bad at this. My first (and living) daughter’s birthday is two days before Christmas and I work as a professor, which means that December is a chaotic and overwhelming month of wrapping up a term, marking heaps of papers, and planning for the next term. Although it’s not as hectic now that my eldest is fifteen and I don’t really have to try to throw a magical birthday party as well as pull of Christmas in the midst of all that stress, I have still never really figured out how to make proper time for myself to reflect and grieve. I also associate Christmas with Anja because she died so soon after the holidays, and those last holidays feel like they are forever captured in a beautiful snow globe: the simple happiness of those days is trapped under glass so that I can see it but never access that pure feeling again. This makes the time of the year extra hard. I don’t really have an answer to this question. I suck at it. And I know I should have figured it out a long time ago, because what ends up happening when I don’t get that time is that I feel frustrated, more stressed, and deeply resentful. I think, almost twelve years later, I am finally figuring out that feeling resentful is an utter waste of energy: no matter how much I’ve resented people for not giving me space over the years, nothing has changed and I can see now, why would it? The person who has to make the space is me.
Nori: Like some of the others, I don’t think I actually have this figured out at all.. Maybe no one does. For the first couple of years I hid from the holidays altogether and just focused on grieving. Now that I have a living child, it feels like the focus has shifted to participating 100% in the holiday festivities. At some point I’ll probably feel overwhelmed because I didn’t create any balance and I’ll have to step out and cry. So that’s the balance - it’s not exactly planned. I try to build in rituals to acknowledge Olivia, but it’s harder to do in a big group of extended family.
Samantha: It’s taken me a long time (ten years) to find a balance that works for me, and it’s certainly ever evolving as our family grows and changes. At this season of my life, I’ve found that what works best for me is steadfastly incorporating Alana in small moments that the whole family can participate in if they choose, but at the same time, not putting pressure on myself or others for these rituals to be “perfect.” For example, every year I buy a grave blanket and then update the decorations on it to be something that feels more personal to her and our family. This year I invited her living siblings to join me in doing this, which they were enthusiastic about for all of four minutes, and then moved on, and I finished it up myself. In the past, I probably would have been upset that we didn’t focus more on their sister or treat this tradition with the reverence it’s due. But as Alana’s memory and impact has become further integrated with our family over the past decade, these “special” times of year have taken on less and less significance, and have become like any other day - a day when she is missed and loved and remembered by all of us, and however we choose to honor that sentiment that day (or not), it doesn’t negate the overall picture which is that she is never forgotten.
How do you manage this type of balance throughout the year? Have you grown better at balancing over the years, or does it get harder? What helps?
Jo-Anne: Balance is not something I have ever been good at, that is until I literally became the balance between living and honoring, celebrating and grieving, hurting and healing. I honestly don't know if I've gotten better. It's as if living between worlds just became a part of who I am. Ingrained in me. I do know that over the years I've unclogged the lump in my throat, pulled down the barriers that kept me from truly expressing my feelings and emotions. It isn't easy. It takes practice, hard work, honesty, getting through the ugly and a lot of pitfalls but I constantly remind myself that I need to be kinder to myself. I need to do what's best for me and my family. And that means putting on my oxygen mask first.
Emily: I don’t know that I’m getting better at balancing it, but at about ten years out, Henry’s death is not at the forefront of my mind most of the time anymore—which can make me feel incredibly guilty. I do try to take time to remember him and we talk about him as a family which helps.
Kathy: About six years later, I think the sharp edges where I judged my grief and my ability (or inability) to make space for her has softened. My grief also doesn’t tend to take me by surprise anymore. I might have a sudden outburst of sadness or rage (disguised sadness) but I’ve come to expect the unexpected on that front. Especially around holidays, when love and family are so abundant, it makes sense that out of the blue the reality of her being gone might clobber me over the head. But it’s not a constant clobbering anymore. Having a few rituals to integrate Tinsley into important holidays has been incredibly helpful for me – it’s a way of putting my grief into action and keeping her present in our lives….and that has always been good for me.
Jen: I have never been very good at finding balance, especially at creating space for myself to just sit with grief and be with Anja. I think in some ways it’s grown easier over time to find space. When Anja died, her older sister was three years old and most of my time and energy went into parenting. I was also finishing a PhD and then, a couple years later, parenting another child, too, and hustling on the tenure track. I usually felt like I had no time to stop and grieve or reflect. Everything was GO all the time and even then I was constantly behind, perpetually frazzled. Now, with my kids more grown and independent, I see more possibilities to create space but I feel less sure about what to do with them. This makes me regret not being more protective of that space in the early years; maybe if I had been more fierce in claiming it I would be connected in a different way now, more able to access something I feel I have trouble grasping now. I don’t know. I do know that there are a million ways to blame ourselves and feel guilty. I think what I am aiming for now is gentleness. We’ve been through so much. For me, gentleness now looks like low expectations, low pressure. Anja is a much quieter presence in my life now, and sometimes, for a few minutes here and there, I get to be quiet with her.
Nori: Having Olivia’s photo and mementos displayed prominently in the house helps bring thoughts and discussions of her into our lives. Visitors might comment on them, which invites conversation. Our living child will choose seemingly random times to engage with Olivia’s keepsakes, so I’ll take a few minutes to sit down and look at photos and talk about her. Then when he decides he’s done he puts her things back and moves on to the next thing, and so do I. And of course having a regular schedule with writing for Glow forces me to sit down and have a few hours of contemplation about my grieving process every couple of months when I have a post due. That’s probably one of the most helpful things for me. When thoughts of Olivia come up, I allow myself to follow the train of thought rather than pushing it away, because that idea might become a piece for Glow.
Samantha: It’s definitely gotten easier over the years, and especially as I’ve become more involved with the stillbirth advocacy community, which has a) made Alana a fixture of our daily lives in a way that feels meaningful and uplifting, because positive change is coming about as a result of her death, and b) led me to be connected to many, many loss families who are now our close friends, so that that “new normal” people are always talking about in early grief has really become just NORMAL for me and my husband and our living kids. It’s only very rarely now when I am in a space where being a loss parent is NOT the norm when I feel that creeping sense of being “other.” I don’t know if it’s entirely healthy or advisable that I’ve apparently insulated myself this way, but the positive outcome is that balance isn’t something I have to work at anymore, because there is no separation anymore between myself as a bereaved mother and myself as myself. We are one and the same. And while I would have really bristled at that early on in my grief (because who wants to be defined by the death of their child?), now it feels good and reaffirming to just be who I am, unapologetically, and surround myself with people who see me and appreciate me for being just that: me, babyloss and all.
How do you do it?