Attachment Living

We hear a lot about “attachment parenting.” There are varying schools of thought, but I embraced much of it my first year with H. because several of its tenants—babywearing, breastfeeding, responding to baby’s cues—fell in line with my instincts. It wasn’t a how-to program to follow as much as it just felt like mothering.

If, in my opinion, such benefit can hinge on attachment, what does it mean to detach from our immediate environment? What does it mean to do so swiftly and frequently?

 

 

We have moved again. Not far from where we’ve spent the past year since leaving Chile. It wasn’t our choice, but a hazard of renting. Our landlord sold the sweet house we were so comfortable in, where H. learned to walk… and talk… and eat… and sleep through the night… and play in the grass with Ruby.

Since H.’s birth, we have lived in four residences, one briefly, but for long enough to unpack and find the grocery store and tread new paths. As usual, we don’t know how long we will live here in the new house with the new, beautiful yard.

 

 

The other night on Mad Men, Roger Sterling waxed nostalgic over his company, SC&P, and its absorption by the behemoth ad agency. He and Peggy are sitting in what remains of his office, now a dilapidated thrown of sorts. They split a bottle of vermouth and talk about the business as an empty floor echoes with what once was. “Even if your name’s on the damn door,” Roger says, “you should know better than to get attached to some walls.” There’s nothing they can do to stop the flow of time through that door and into the next, unknown chapter.

Even with all the moves this lifestyle has asked (and will continue to ask) of my family, you might say I, too, should know better than to get attached. Yet, attachment—the early, instant kind—may be the only way I know how to manage it. To say, okay, these four walls are shelter for my family. Whether it’s for one month or one year, it’s home. It’s where H. will continue to learn, Ryan will plant seeds in the soil even if we don’t know how tall we’ll get to see the plants grow, and I will hunt for more hearts. Hopefully, Ruby will find a new best friend amongst our neighbors.

 

 

Still, it’s hard to start over, to feel rootless. Ruby has been jumping on our bed in the middle of the night, something she’s never really done. She has weathered all these moves, too, and perhaps wants closeness to what has stayed the same. I sure don’t blame her. I miss the old walls as much as I’m attaching to the new ones. I left a heart behind, the sparkler we used to light the night for Lorenzo last June. I never tread with him there, just as I won’t here. I miss Chile, where I did. And California and the home I grew up in. But like any cleansing, a new vantage point can liberate and lighten. Confidence grows from continuing to find your way.

 

 

Last Saturday, our new neighbors had a yard sale. I introduced myself and spent a dollar on a porcelain Victorian lady’s boot because my grandmother had one just like it. She used it to store pens and pencils and kept it by her rotary phone. I brought it home, filled it with pens, and set it on my desk. Then things felt a little more familiar.

New walls can still embrace the past. Roots aren’t always a result of time.

 

Why I Flew Across the Country to Talk About Loss

When Dr. Jessica Zucker first asked if I was planning to come to L.A. for BinderCon, I thought the clear answer was, “No.” The professional development conference, which launched in New York last year for women and gender non-conforming writers, sounded like what my career needed. But it was also across the country. My 14-month-old daughter needed me, I reasoned. I needed her.

Jessica is another writer and loss mom. We originally connected through essays we’ve published about our children. (Sharing begets sharing.) “There is a panel on loss that I’ll be attending,” she continued.

And then I knew I had to go.

Still, I hesitated. I hadn’t left H. for much longer than three hours, let alone three days. Technically, I could go. My body is my own again. After giving it willingly through 55 weeks of nursing, we successfully weaned. The infection that lurked and surfaced for a year finally receded, its root cause never found because it may well have been this grief, too. The emotional trauma lodged in the physical body, unscathed by round after round of western medicine. H.’s body is also her own. I’ve watched in inverse wonder as everything that goes in is now independent of me. Just a couple of months ago, it was the opposite. The crisis has passed.

So last weekend, I woke early, listened to H.’s breathing in her dark room, drove to the airport, and flew to California for the very first BinderCon L.A. The Facebook group sensation turned bicoastal, biannual conference was born in reaction to Mitt Romney’s reference to “binders full of women” when speaking of his hiring process. The chance to attend this symposium meant far more than talking about my book.

With speakers like The OpEd Project founder Katie Orenstein, it was a true call to action, to make sure our stories, opinions, and perspectives—disproportionately represented across media—get out of the binders. According to the Project’s research, as of 2014, women’s voices accounted for 21 percent of opinion writing—and that’s a greater percentage than their current contributions to Television (16 percent), Congress (20 percent), or Corporate Boards (15 percent).

Why is it so vital to ask, “Who narrates the world?”

“Because the stories we tell determine what we think about what happens, which determines what happens next,” Orenstein said.

Then came the final panel on the second day and a chance to listen to writers I admire talk about what has happened to them, the Death & Loss that has impacted their lives and their writing:

• “What helped me the most were other people’s stories… I have a debt to repay to do that for others.” —Nicole Belanger

• “I just didn’t care what anybody else thought and that was incredibly liberating.” —Emily Rapp Black

• “I wanted the loneliness.” —Niva Dorell Smith

• “Write because it feels good, because you need to, and because it helps you. It will turn out perfect at some point.” —Claire Bidwell Smith

• “Go from a perspective of abundance. We need all the stories. Yours, too, will be a gift.” —Mattea E. Kramer

• “Women are opening up the conversation about grief.” —Rebecca Soffer

I stood and told them they were why I was there. I asked a question about writing such as ours and the risk of sentimentality. It was and wasn’t what I wanted to say. One question couldn’t encapsulate what it really meant to be standing before them, after three years of writing about Lorenzo and leaving H. at home for the first time and wondering if I am ready to publish my memoir purely because the manuscript is. I wanted to ask so much more about audience and editing and memory and individual loss vs. universal relatability. Our losses and circumstances differed, but my pulse accelerated because we shared the same motivation to turn raw grief into meaning this way. And energy comes from harnessing that strength in shared company.

I sat next to a woman I’d met a few hours earlier—conversely, plenty of time to share our stories.

“Your son?” she leaned over and asked. “Did you name him?”

#chainlinkheartproject at BinderCon.

Lorenzo, I wrote with pride in my notebook and showed her. He was why I was sitting in that chair at all.

I drew a heart next to the second “o”. I am doing this more lately. Leaving hearts in my wake, giving them away. For so long I have been collecting and photographing them, craving the connection. The search lives on, but perhaps now, so filled am I of heart, I can spare some.

Back home with H., I am using the energy and the overflow to push the story farther. To. Pitch. The. Book. To remember that creative health can feel as important as physical health. To model that for my daughter.

I must narrate the story for her sake, too.

To a Friend Who Just Lost

Last week, my friend lost her baby girl at 20 weeks. Another rare complication. Another week of fear and hope and discussions with doctors and ultimately nothing that could be done to save her.

 

 

When she told me, I wanted to get on a plane to hold her hand and sit through what is so impossibly hard to endure, like breathing anything but oxygen. I still will the moment she says the word. So I sent what I could: words of support and solidarity and suggestions on how to relieve her milk coming in. I let her know she and her partner are not alone while respecting how unique these loss journeys are because our babies are. I relived a lot of our own week losing Lorenzo. I realized even I can do little to help them through what they have to walk through now without their first child.

 

 

We have known each other for nine years, which means we met in San Francisco when our responsibilities were mainly to do our jobs well and pay our rent and be there for one another through the dramas and delights of our mid-twenties. It means we have known each other longer than we’ve known our partners. We met at a time when getting pregnant would have been very unplanned. Instead, we danced through Golden Gate Park and cruised on the Bay and dressed up for Halloween and celebrated birthdays with flourish and lived the experiences that became the stories we reminisce about and spent entire weekends in the company of our friends. Our friends, on a certain level, were everything.

 

 

She told me she was pregnant in person. I got to hug her and, in that way, embrace her baby. I am grateful for that as I am devastated and irate over the unfairness of this. That such good people should have to lose. That innocence has been swept away. Not gone if I am to believe what I do about energy: that it does not disappear, that it recycles in some way and maybe even returns.

There is so much more I want to tell her, to tell anybody right after they lose:

1. This is the hardest part. The hardest part may last a long time. Some aspects of it last forever.

2. Your baby’s life (however long) and loss (endless now) are SIGNIFICANT EVENTS, to borrow a term from my grief guidepost, Tara May. They deserve as much care and compassion as any life, as any loss. But our culture isn’t well-equipped at providing that. As I’ve read before, our language defines someone who loses a parent or a spouse, but not someone who loses a child. There is no word for that, so defining our experience of it is up to us.

3. Get a dog or some creature to love and nurture. A dog, especially, needs to be walked outside, which will also help. If you don’t have other children, do this as soon as possible. Animals don’t need words to show their love and that’s a good lesson for all of us.

4. Listen to music you have loved for a long time. It will both sound familiar and mean something new.

5. Don’t put pressure on yourself to be “on” for others or prove you are “OK” when you are not. You are not responsible for making others feel comfortable in your grief.

6. Accept help if you can. A meal at your doorstep. When you are ready for more, someone to sit and listen.

7. And when you are ready to talk, find someone who knows something of your experience firsthand. You won’t have to explain so much about how you are feeling. There won’t be “everything happens for a reason” or “time heals” or “at least you can get pregnant.” As Brené Brown says in this incredible video on empathy, “Rarely, if ever, does an empathic response begin with ‘at least.'” We humans are as limited as we are compassionate. While limitations don’t mean people don’t care, they can still hurt.

8. Read other stories. Essays, books, articles. Especially when you are feeling alone because they can remind you that you have company. A terrible kind of company, but one of the deepest sources of connections I have experienced on this earth. They can also help when you feel triggered by the world going on as is when yours has changed so profoundly. Oh yeah, triggers. They are different for all of us and hard to define. They aren’t straightforward reminders of your loss. I, for one, love when others talk with me about Lorenzo, tell me they thought about him for this reason or that, or ask how my grief is doing. Triggers are something else. The pregnant woman you meet who complains about her morning sickness. The family of three or four you see at the park while you’re walking your dog. The little boy with blond hair because you are pretty convinced his hair was blond, too. The first time someone you know delivers a baby girl. Go easy on yourself when they come. They don’t mean you aren’t happy for them and grateful their children are here safely. They just mean something sharp has gone off inside, a little churning of what could have been, a haunting wish that it had all gone differently.

9. Consider it a good day if you bathe and eat and get some fresh air. It can still be an awful day even if you do those things. It can still be a good day if you don’t.

10. When you are ready, create rituals. They lead to a sense of meaning. Your baby’s name on a stone thrown in the ocean, even if you are the only one who knew her name. A candle lit at a certain time. A poem written and revised for months. A memory book worked on during the holidays (the holidays, when they come, may be very hard). A symbol found…. a heart, a butterfly, a fallen leaf… whatever it is that represents your baby. They become little bread crumbs to follow, stones to step upon as you find your way across.

 

I’ll stop there for now. When you need more, I am here. I love you and your baby so very much.

Permission

It comes on fast. First, acute, undeniable soreness. I go into action: apply heat, take Advil, drink water, rest as soon as I can. Maybe, this time, I can keep it away. By night, the fever begins to climb. By morning, when I can call the doctor, the fever has spiked and my whole body feels hit. The fatigue is overwhelming.

I’m describing mastitis, an infection us breastfeeding moms are most susceptible to when milk stagnates. I produce a lot of milk, and I’ve had mastitis ten times since H. was one week old.

Now she is one year! She says versions of “Mama” and “Dada” and “that” and “dog” (could be another version of “Dada” :). On Christmas Eve, she took her first two steps. She moved with quick bursts after that—three steps here, six there, then just one and a giggly plop to the floor. A month later, she walks from one side of the room to the other, her destination not only in her sights but within her reach.

In today’s culture, we share these proud moments, don’t we? Upload the video, introduce a blog post. Much has been written about how we depict our lives online. There was the recent controversy over Facebook’s “Year in Review” highlighting aspects of people’s years they perhaps didn’t want to relive, or rather didn’t want to relive with such a jovial tone of celebration. I get that. I have been off Facebook since Lorenzo died. As most anyone reading this knows, that does not mean I hide my struggle, online or off. It just means it’s a trigger and we try to minimize those when we grieve.

So I found it refreshing when a friend I have long admired posted a picture on Instagram that did not depict the first steps or the lost-tooth grin or the face covered in birthday cake, but the willful child who has been kicked out of three ballet classes and won’t comb her hair and has otherwise tested her parents in ways her well-behaved sister simply hasn’t. The photo garnered 41 comments of solidarity.

After Lorenzo and before H., I didn’t understand parental complaint. I still don’t if it’s about the standard motions of childrearing. What my friend posted and the gratitude with which she shared wasn’t complaint, however. It was vulnerability. It was permitting herself to capture where parenthood is also hard, to show that we don’t have to pretend that it isn’t, in order to also make her way back to the place where she could “practice more patience, more determination, more unconditional love.”

It took so long for Ryan and I to get to these joys and challenges and their mixture. That striving for parenthood in all its messy glory has led to some self-censorship, some dismissal of the struggle. Because I am so lucky to have H. Because I am so heartbroken not to have Lorenzo. When I am up in the night, I am grateful to be sharing the darkness with a breathing child. When I am treating my infection, I power through because good God, how fortunate I am to be breastfeeding at all. This restriction and constant reframing is not unique to parenting after loss.

The ultimate reframe? These struggles are nowhere near the struggle we would have faced. Our child’s chest is not being cut open. His severely malformed heart is not being put on bypass. His brain is not being deprived of oxygen. I am so starkly aware of this contrast that it has been hard to acknowledge how rundown I am here in this “normal” parenthood. That help would, well, help.

Because we do anything for our children, we sacrifice elsewhere. We miss the family gatherings and side-trips around our new home. We stay close instead. I take every test in the book and the doctors don’t find an underlying cause. Mystified, they send me home with something slightly different to try. But I have accepted that it is a constellation of factors that likely won’t change until the milk is gone.

So, why don’t I wean? I need to, but H. no longer accepts bottles since breastfeeding was advised over pumping, which I had been doing too much of in an effort to outrun the infection. She won’t take a cup. She hasn’t taken readily to solids. She explores and is coming along, but not in a way that is nutritious on its own. So we are at the center of a perfect little storm. My milk is what she needs most and I need least, but until we get a few more bridges in place, we can’t break the cycle. We have tried everything and are working with professionals. Incremental progress is being made. I also see how strong-willed this walking, talking one-year-old is. There are no magic tricks to pull. Had I weaned six months ago, forgoing my own will to nurse for the full year the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends for breastfeeding, how differently the rest might have gone. But we don’t get to go back even if we feel like we are walking in circles. We make the best move we can according to the facts we have at the present moment. That is the crux of decision.

Right now, only a matter of hours can go by before one of us is in physical need of the other. That is at once a beautiful and frightful connection. What is more primal than the means to survive, to nourish our children and ourselves? And what would happen if I couldn’t get to her? When the emotion builds, it helps to remember that “one of the common myths about eating is that it is easy and instinctive. Eating is actually the most complex physical task humans engage in… Just swallowing, for example, requires the coordination of 26 muscles and six cranial nerves.” (“Feeding Strategies for Older Infants and Toddlers,” by Kay Toomey, PhD.) Our body prioritizes its importance third, behind breathing and balance. We all have to learn how to do it. As with anything learned, we go at our own pace. And we may protest.

What all this comes down to is permission. Permission to ask for help, to acknowledge where things are hard and where they are beautiful. I see the same mix in that photo of my friend’s daughter—face in playful defiance, body crouched as if she is ready to bound into the air, free tendrils of hair harnessing a similar energy. She is flanked by two poised ballerinas, but she is the one you can’t take your eyes off of—her wildness seems like a green shoot of power that may take her much farther than the obedience required of ballet class, farther than her parents imagined as they struggle with and cherish these longs days, but short years of parenthood, as the saying goes.

None of us know ahead of time just how our hardships shape or prepare us. We take one step at a time, unaware if we are painting ourselves into a corner or if the picture we end up with will set us free.

 

Three Thousand Hearts & Two and a Half Years & One Conversation

It’s been a while since I wrote here. H.’s mobility has skyrocketed (how thankful we are), so neither one of us is often still. I dive in when time permits, like now, when H. is sleeping and I can see far more of the sky through naked branches. The rest of the time, memoir progress hovers, in my thoughts as H. and I go about our day. In notes I scribble and tuck back in a pile. Words, just like hearts, are everywhere, yet they form one at a time.

 

 

And your hearts have not slowed down one bit. I’m thrilled to announce that the Chain-Link Heart Project has reached (and already surpassed) 3,000 hearts! (Not counting my own.) Two Decembers ago it launched, after many a heart had begun appearing at my feet and Ruby’s paws. Please keep them coming. They are such a perfect symbol for Lorenzo, for love, for hope, for all the things we think of when a heart invites us to pause.

 

 

It’s also taken this time to start putting together another kind of book for Lorenzo. A book of memories, the idea inspired by a friend who also lost recently, the scrapbook itself from Italy and given over a decade ago. Who knew its pages were waiting for this story? I thought it would just include all of the beautiful cards that were sent by many of you, both before and after. But as I started compiling, I added all I could that reminds me of him: calendars of late May and early June, that postcard there on my story board, those photos of my pregnancy, the last ones where I still see my innocence. And that deserves to be celebrated, too. I had that with him, after all, only him. There is poetry, too. There are dry leaves and hearts galore and certain colors. H. played at my feet as I cut and collaged—giving me a rare sense of what it is like to tend to my children simultaneously.

 

 

I’ve left blank pages, too, because Lorenzo’s story isn’t finished. Outwardly, a post from this blog will be published in a bereavement newsletter from the hospital where I delivered him. Another will be included in an educational anthology. Inwardly, I recognize him as clearly as I do my own consciousness. We mark anniversaries and holidays without him here. I design a Christmas card and wonder how best to include him. The simplest things aren’t so. As Ryan says over dinner one night, “Somewhere, he’s two.” I surprise even myself with how many of the words are still about him. I worry that may wear on you and sometimes that keeps me away from here, too. Then I update my Recommended Reading page with other loss blogs and see how many moms are writing one and two and five years on.

 

 

Two and a half years on. One of my cousins asks me if I’ve written about that, about how I’m not fixed, even with H. And perhaps I haven’t so overtly. Or perhaps it’s all I can write about. H. has fulfilled me. She is the focus of my life. I look at her and think, Of course you are here. Like her dad, she likes music, to play it, to hear it. Like me, she likes books, particularly the kinds where part of the page folds back to reveal a surprise. She snuggles with bath toys, a quirk all her own. She crawls over to me to check in before scaling the hill of my crossed legs back to her toys, then to me, and so on for an afternoon. But she also adds to my need to discuss Lorenzo when conversation turns to our children, to say I knew he was a boy just as I knew she was a girl, that my belly looked different with each, that I labored both, that I try to see where they look alike, that I wonder what H. will say when we turn the pages of this book together one day. Isn’t that only natural, mothers of many? Don’t you, mothers of the lost, take opportunity to bring them into the light? Isn’t that fulfilling, too?

 

 

I recently read an incredible book about how other cultures grieve their children, and I wonder if it would be any easier somewhere else. If I were Japanese, say, and offering gifts to a Mizuko jizo statue so my child, my water baby, may be protected in his afterlife. If that ritual, created solely for children like Lorenzo, was embedded in the culture so it made sense to all of us. The whole book switches the Western perspective of grief from something we focus on within to something we act upon on behalf of our lost children and their well-being—now. So I continue to raise Lorenzo. I ask you to help me collect hearts. I assemble a memory book over back-to-back days and bask in the teary warmth of it. I take a map Ryan’s mom gave us long ago from the top shelf of H.’s closet. It bears a faraway star named for him. Quite suddenly, I want it framed. Once the heart is added or the book bursting at its seams or the map hung, things are still again. Then H. crawls with glee down the hall. And we are off.