Letting Go

The heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
-- Stanly Kunitz, "The Testing Tree"

I found this quote on the frontispiece to the Marvelous Adventures of Edward Tulane, a book I bought for my kids last year. Like many of the best children's books it is a good read for adults, too. I won't spoil it by telling the story, but I recommend reading it. The author, Kate DiCamilo, also wrote the Tale of Despereaux.

It is a story of growing through loss, not only growing but becoming at home with the idea of loss. Elizabeth Bishop was not merely ironic when she wrote that "the art of losing isn't hard to master." It is our natural inclination to fight against loss, clinging desperately to what we have and know.

Often, it isn't the loss itself that overpowers us but the fear that comes with it, the fear that nothing else will ever be so good as what we have right now or what we planned to have, or the fear that somehow I as a human being am lacking and will experience nothing but continual losses. In learning to be my own best friend, I realized that I can let go and be all right. Sure, I still struggle against it, and sometimes life needs to take a circumstance or a person from my path because I am not that good at letting go (yet; I am getting better).

I can weather even grief so sharp that there are moments when all I can think is "Breathe in. Breathe out." My picture of the future is gone and I am not sure yet how to make the new picture. Somehow, I had developed an aberrative coping mechanism, that if I was hard enough on myself either things would get better faster or wouldn't hurt so much. So, I got very, very good at being hard on myself. "No wonder things have gone this way... if I wasn't so stupid... it will never get better." I am not sure how the belief developed -it may be too easy to say that it was in my upbringing. I notice, for example, that my son who has Asperger's has an inborn perfectionism which frequently makes him painfully hard on himself. It matters less how it developed than what can done about it now.

In the relationship I have with myself now, derogatory thoughts make no sense. The good news is that I don't even have to stop myself from "going there." New thought patterns aren't yet in place (that's why I just manage to remind myself to breathe), but the destructive ones are just gone. Without the savage self-injury the real hurt is bearable. Not fun but bearable, and clean. I can feel it and keep breathing, and even have genuine joy in the day.

Incidentally, I found that Kunitz is a poet I like. You never know what you can learn from children's books.

Saying Goodbye

It happened Friday, the last day of school for my boys, that the Peanut asked me "Will I ever see Mr. Mike again?" Mr. Mike is the TSS ("wraparound") who has worked with Peanut at school, almost every afternoon since November. I had written about this in an earlier post, that Mr. Mike had accepted a full-day assignment with another child, at a school much nearer to his home. It was a sound decision for him, but I anticipated a struggle for my son, who is having so many changes in his life, changes that he experiences as losses.

"Why? why?" he kept asking me, crying himself to sleep Friday night. He had asked "why couldn't I have him for just one more year? He was a best friend." Grief rides this little one hard.

We are so fortunate that the worker assigned to Peanut has been senstive, intelligent and positive. I am thankful we have had him at all. There was no way I was going to say that to my son in that moment, though. Nor was I going to tell him he can't get so upset when he has to say goodbye. Well-intentioned people said those things to me when I was a sensitive, hurting child. It doesn't help the hurt, and only tells the child there is something wrong with him or her, on top of hurting.

I told him it is hard to say goodbye to people. I told him we can ask Mr. Mike if he'd like to come have dinner with us once in a while. And I rubbed his back and let him cry. By the time he was asleep, I was crying, too. Loss is so personal with children, as if who they are dictates what happens in their lives. I can remember feeling that.

I had no experience other than love disappearing, however long that took. -- Nuala O'Faolain, Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman

There will be a new TSS for Peanut this summer, or in the fall. I pray for another person who will work well with him, and care about how he does. Over time, I hope my son learns to accept and move with the flow of people in our lives; there are people who will be with him for the long haul, and some people, who may be very special, that may only be part of life for a little while.

There have been in the past couple of years, people who have moved away, like the best friend from pre-K. His parents have separated, and now this person who has very much functioned as a personal coach and mentor will move on. I can't control what comes into Peanut's life next (I have heard from my Al-Anon friends that everyone we love "has a higher power, too, and I'm not it"), but I can allow him to express his grief, see that loss comes to all of us in different forms, but new relationships come, too. They are never the same, but they can be great in a different way.