The Muddle in the Middle

I had a chance this week to briefly catch up online with a friend I have never met face-to-face, but have found to be an inspiration over and over again over the last few years -- especially when my going gets a bit tougher than usual. She has been through more challenges than I can imagine surviving -- let alone coming through with flying colors -- and still she exudes victory and wisdom well beyond her years and life station.

I found myself reaching out to her this week because I knew she would understand some of the things I have been facing lately. In addition to being a writer, a wife, a medical "survivor," a friend and the filler of any number of other roles large and small, this woman is also mother to several children... all but one of whom passed from this life too soon. This woman has held her living child and then kissed his lifeless form a few hours later, and she still finds hope, joy and a reason to fight to make life as rich as it can be. A brush with her spirit is a gentle reminder that sorrows, while deep and very real, do not need to remain festering wounds. A few words from her are like a gentle upward breeze when my hopes have started to plummet to earth.

When she tells me that I will make it through all of my current hurts, worries and confusion and emerge even stronger than before, I believe her. She really doesn't offer me any other choice, because her conviction is contagious, and I know she is speaking to me as me, not offering empty platitudes.

It's not that I really doubt that I will make it or that I will be strengthened by adversity... I have already been through some rather dark moments, and they haven't erased my hope. But I'm struggling in strange ways now, in part, I think, because I find it somewhat harder to define myself.

I've changed fundamentally. Then again, I haven't changed. I'm still the same old me. But sometimes I don't recognize myself when I gaze into my internal mirror. There are facts about me that are forever altered: I've been part of the creation of new life. I am a mother, even though there is no external signpost, no little person to chase around and no memorial plot to mark the few weeks that made up a life that I knew more intimately than anyone else this side of heaven. I've experienced an amazing gain... and a subsequent loss that surprises me at times with its strength and presence.

Under the circumstances, I can't help but be different somehow.

I'm really not inclined to dwell too much on the loss. It is absolutely real, and I feel it to my core. It inhabits my dreams and flits in and out of my consciousness during waking hours. It's never far away, even when I am busy with other things. That is just the way it is. But I don't want to be defined by what might have been or what was. I want to be in the present, not the imagined future or the actual past. I want to be here now, because, while being here hurts, here and now I am blessed -- and I have the opportunity to heal.

My friend and I discussed a woman we knew of who died in her 40s this week after a long battle with excess weight and a shorter battle with illness, and we both were struck by the feeling of unfairness that always comes with deaths like hers -- not unlike my feelings when we heard the telling silence in the ultrasound room. Circumstances are unfair... we can't help but feel that... especially when someone we think is too young, too good, too important, too long-suffering or too special to us exits life in ways or at times we would never have chosen. Perhaps it is a reflection of our deep knowledge that the world that we live in is not the world we were designed to inhabit and that we are not the people we were created to be. This world is flawed and fallen -- as we are -- but the spark of the divine in us shines through the darkness of life as it is to shows us life as it ought to be: whole and at one with our Creator and His creation. We can't help but long for things to be the other way -- we were made for that.

We look at the world as it is and we feel it is unfair. We are right. It isn't fair... but not in the way we think.

Fairness is destruction. Instead, our lives are bathed in mercy and we have absolutely been given reason to hope, no matter what unfairness life dishes out.

Most of the time when I really think about my situation and the feelings I've battled that tell me my circumstances are unfair, I end up deciding that I really can't complain. I said so to my friend in these words:
"I don't think I have suffered that deeply."
"Suffering is relative. You can't compare when you are living it," she replied.
She's probably right. I don't have the full picture yet. Still, our hurts, the big and small ones, are all part of what it is to live.

But, how am I to be here and now... who I am, now, changed and unchanged? Joyful and sorrowing? Eager to suck the marrow from life and yet burdened by loss and sometimes feeling unable to move?

It's easy to be defined by a pet project or a role or a relationship or a plan. It's easy to come up with pat answers to "Who are you, and what do you do?" It's not so easy to put the reality of all we are in context sometimes... especially when parts of who you are at your core cannot really be shared with the world in a way the world can understand.

I had begun to be defined by pregnancy and motherhood. That fact had so completely taken over my body and mind. So what am I now? Who or what defines me?

My friend has defined herself of late by one of her long-time personal battles. It's taken up incredible amounts of her time and space and thought and energy, and now she wants to finally be herself as a whole person, not herself as the crusader for a cause. I understood what she meant, somehow... especially when she said, "I didn't want to lose any of the other things I am... especially the mother to my bunch in heaven."

I don't want to either.

I don't want to lose sight of the blessing that was mine for a few weeks. Then again, I don't want to lose the joy of living now because of something that was for a time and that isn't now in a tangible way that anyone else can see and intuitively understand.

For now, anyway, I guess I just need to muddle through.

I'm still in the middle... in the middle of a rather deep transition from who I was to who I am and who I will yet be. In the muddle between what I thought life would be and what it actually will be -- the details of which are, mercifully, perhaps, hidden from me. It's hard to know how to be and what to think and how to feel when I am stuck here in these moments. Still... somehow... I know I am where I must be, and being here and now is good enough.