You Can’t Outsmart Grief
Parenting is full of grief.
Adoption, relinquishment, loss, abandonment, neglect, abuse, are full of grief.
Infertility and miscarriage are full of grief.
And no one type of grief can trump the other.
I have read so many posts (and I’m not going to link them) and angry and hurtful comments this past week and I am ashamed at some of the words people have said to each other. The kinds of things that people will write because they can’t see the hurt in each other’s eyes or hear the anguish in their voices when they talk about relinquishing their child or having social services take him away, or they don’t know what it is like to never be able to conceive, or they have never experienced a miscarriage (or 6), or they have never been told their child has been “given” to someone else.
I have lived through the grief of infertility and it sucked. And I have seen and felt the grief of my own son. And that was even harder. He has still not come to terms with his own birth mother issues (and I certainly don’t expect him to at 4 years old) and we have learned that we can not talk about his Russia Mama (we can only talk fleetingly about Russia).
However, I can’t imagine what it would be like to make an adoption plan for a child and I don’t understand how other people can trivialize it or dwindle it down to the “see ya, have a good life” mentality that the movie Juno seems to have done (note: still have not seen it…just going off of reviews). And I can’t even imagine AJ’s birth mother never thinking about him or The Bebe’s birth mother never thinking about him (who is with him this very day in Family Court). How could that EVER be possible?
The one thing about life is that no one person can ever outsmart grief no matter what the source because grief comes from the core of a person, from the very soul. And no matter how hard one tries to outsmart it and push it away it will fester and breed, and fight to get to the surface.
Grief is often one of those emotions that causes people to not be able to see things from others’ perspective (love does that too I think). Your grief or my grief always feels like the worst grief one can feel. The funny thing for me is, the longer I live with my specific brand of grief, the more I am able to feel the pain in other people’s grief even if it totally different than my own. I think that is God’s process of healing in me and a sort of redeeming aspect to the whole thing.
You are right that you can’t escape it. It catches you and consumes you if you aren’t willing to face it and encorporate it into you.
Sharing it with others helps too, at least for me. I would really love to hear more about your grief someday so we can share that with each other and be all the richer because of it.