I have written before about secondary losses. One of those losses that has been hitting me really hard lately is the loss of the mother I used to think I could, and would, be.
I feel a lot of anxiety as a mother, and while I expected to feel some anxiety, I believe my higher-than-expected level of anxiety stems from my experience with loss. Loss is no longer “something that happens to someone else,” because it has happened to me. That is a fact, and it is one that will never change. That experience and that intimate knowledge of loss has changed me as a mother. First, I was the mother of a child with severe special needs. Then, after my daughter died, I became a mother with no living children. I next had to come to terms with yet another idea of my motherhood: the fact that I may never get to parent a healthy, living child. Now that I am a mother to a healthy, living child, I am having to come to terms with the fact that how I parent my living child is forever colored by my previous experience with loss.
Our experiences shape us into the people we are. They influence how we perceive others, and how we perceive our environments. I have known this about myself in the past, and I have seen how my experiences shaped my outlook, my actions, and my relationships. The difference with this loss experience is that it has cleaved my life into “before,” and “after.” Other experiences, even other trials, have not had such a profound impact on me in such a short period of time. I have witnessed myself change, and adapt, and come out the other side of other previous experiences, but never have I felt as disjointed as I do now. I always viewed traversing my pre-loss challenges as a part of a whole picture of my ever-evolving self. I don’t know if I would have ever considered stopping to grieve a future version of me that would no longer exist because of a challenge I experienced.
This feels like more than just a challenge in my life. This feels like an entirely different timeline.
I have written before that I mourn missed milestones for my daughter as if she were healthy. That is my other timeline. That is the other trajectory my life could have taken, the one that I used to expect. That version of myself, that version of my motherhood, is what I grieve.
This current version of my motherhood? It is anxiety-ridden, and full of fear. It borders the “helicopter parenting” style that I swore I hated. It often feels involuntary. It is not a picture of myself that I really like seeing, and yet it has somehow become my reality.
I have empathy for this person I am, yes. But I also grieve the person I thought I would be instead. I am working very hard to shape the few parts of my life that are actually within my control, and there are also many parts of my life that are beautiful as they are now. I also believe that there are beautiful things in my future. But that doesn’t change my grief. My grief is my companion now, and in my new future. My grief is my forever companion in this new reality.
One of the reasons I started this blog is because I wanted to be able to record snapshots of my grief at different moments in time. This is what my grief looks and feels like three years after my daughter’s death. I expect that I will continue to grow and evolve as a person and as a mother. It will be interesting to see how my identity as a mother will continue to change and evolve over time. I wonder if, years from now, I will continue to grieve my motherhood identity in the same way.
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