A Little Unsolicited Advice, On My Birthday

Despite its many pitfalls, one of the benefits of Facebook is that you never again have to worry that you'll forget someone's birthday.  You get a nifty little reminder that one of your friends has a birthday, and have an easy way to wish them well.  Never before Facebook have I had so many well-wishes on my birthday, which happens to be today.  To all of you who took a moment to say happy birthday, thank you for the kind thoughts.  Thank you especially to those who had the compassion to notice that this would be a tough day for me.

Unfortunately though, my birthday is not exactly what I would call a happy day anymore.  Last year on my birthday, I went out to dinner with my husband, spent the night relaxing with him, went to sleep, and woke up four hours later, to his last breaths.  It will be difficult for me to ever separate my birthday from that memory.  Today is the first birthday I'm having to be without him, and it also means that as of tomorrow, he will have been gone a whole year.  

I've tried, unsuccessfully, to think of a way I could celebrate my birthday under such circumstances.  When the birthday wishes started rolling in this morning, I started trying to think of something I could ask people to do in Ryan's memory, a donation to a cause, or something of the like, as a birthday gift to me.  If Ryan had died of cancer, a donation to cancer research would have been the thing, for example.  But Ryan didn't die of something that there is a research foundation for.  Though it was a heart problem, it wasn't really heart disease.  Research probably wouldn't have prevented his death, as we didn't know he was ill.

So, instead of being an activist for a cause on this day, I would instead ask that as a birthday present to me, you let me pass along some unsolicited, though well-intended, advice.  I advise everyone, today and every day, to follow the steps below.

1.  Think of the person you love the most.  It's probably a significant other, or a child.  If you're very lucky, you will have many people who you care intensely for.  Try, for now, to just focus on the one person who means the most to you. *

2.  Think of what your person means to you, and then, what you mean to him or her.  What would your life be like if that person wasn't here?  It's an impossible thing to imagine.  What would that person do without you, should something happen to you?

3.  Now, for that person, if not for yourself, take care of yourself.  Get a check-up.  Get up to date on your medications, vaccines, whatever it is.  We don't know for sure, but there's a chance that Ryan's death was a result of a post-viral infection that started with the flu.  At least once a week I wonder if things would be different if I'd have pushed for him to get a flu shot.  I got one.  Why didn't I insist that he do the same?  What's crazy is that he wasn't morally opposed to getting one; he just didn't see the point, and thought it was a waste of his time.  Taking care of yourself is never a waste of time.  The person you love most wouldn't think so.  For the record, I don't think that Ryan was negligent in his own health.  He took care of himself as well, or better, than most men his age do.  We can always do a bit more though, if only for our loved ones.

4.  Whenever possible, don't put things off.  It's a busy world we live in, and it's easy to think you'll get to things later.  There are so many things Ryan and I never got to, I can't even tell you.  It's a cliche to say you should live in the moment - that's hard to do.  It's hard to not plan things for the future, impossible even, and you should plan for the future as much as you can.  But if there's something that'd really important to you and your loved ones, do it.  I have a hard time taking my own advice here, especially now.  I don't know what it is that I'm supposed to not put off.  But before Ryan died, I knew what the important things were, and we put a lot of them off anyhow.  Try to not do that.

5.  Don't leave anything on the table.  Everyone says you should never go to bed angry, but that can be really difficult as much as you try.  But, even if you do fight with the person you love, still tell them how much you love them as often as possible.  At least every day.  That way you'll know that you did it, you'll know that your person knows how you feel about them, and hopefully your person will reciprocate.

After today, I can certainly say that one day, I'll be able to celebrate my birthday again.  That's not this year yet, but eventually.  That's a good step forward for me, as before I wasn't sure if I ever would want to even acknowledge the day.  For this year, thank you to everyone who has read what I've had to say this year, and supported me.  And thank you for letting me pass along this advice.  I hope someone out there takes it.  I'm done now.  Consider my soapbox stowed away, back in its proper location.

*Though I lost the person I care about the most in the world, I will strive to follow my own advice with my new most important person.  Sophie, everything I do is for you.

Work

In the past year, I've lived three separate and distinct lives.  Until February 19th, I lived the happy life of a young wife, working full time, ready to start a family, and living independently in a house with her husband.  From February 19th to October 6th, I lived the life of a pregnant widow, living back at home with her parents, still working full time, trying everything to have a healthy pregnancy while also dealing with the extreme grief and emotional stress of losing a spouse.  Since October 6th, I've been living the life of a new single mother, very much dependent on her family, still living at home with her parents, learning to be the provider and caretaker for her daughter all hours of the day while on maternity leave.  At the end of this month, yet another new life will start for me- one in which I return to work.  I have been dreading this day for many months now, but the closer the day gets the more I begin to panic.

I think most new mothers struggle with this time - after weeks of being at home with a beautiful new baby, the thought of being away from that child for forty plus hours a week is tough.  Most women who plan to be mothers venture into motherhood with a plan - either they choose to become working mothers or stay at home mothers, and there are passionate feelings connected with that decision.  I always expected that I would be a working mom, for many reasons.  As a young woman, the idea of staying at home with kids all week never appealed to me.  I always expected I would be too career-minded to be a full time mother, and that I'd have a job that I loved and wouldn't want to leave behind.  By the time having children became a reality for me though, my opinion had changed a bit.  I like my job, but I can't say I love it enough to be desperate to go back.  When Ryan and I started planning to have children, I started to see the drawbacks of working in my current situation.  I work 8:30-5:00 every day, some Saturdays, some evenings, depending on workload.  Ryan definitely would have been home with the kids more than me, and I worried about him having the chance to get closer to them than I would.  I've often wished that my job had more flexibility, or the opportunity to work from home, but it just doesn't work like that.

With all of that in mind, Ryan and I discussed our options frequently.  My own mother was a working mom, so that was my model.  Ryan's, however, was a stay at home mom, and he thought that was the best thing for a family.  His preference was that we not put our kids in day care, that I stay home, and that he provide for us.  But, he recognized that financially that might not have been possible.  For my part, the more I thought about it, the more staying home sounded like a good idea - I could use the time to reassess my own career and future, and maybe take some online classes.  We never really made a firm decision about what we were going to do.  I remember us having a conversation about it around a year ago, before I was pregnant, and Ryan said that once I got pregnant we'd have nine months to figure it out.  Not having a more specific plan gave me all kinds of anxiety.  When I did get pregnant, in the little bit of time we had to talk about it, we thought that I would take all of the time off I was allowed, and then see how I felt about returning.  I could have even gone back to work for a month, then decided it wasn't for me and changed course.  It was all very fluid, and I felt that I had options and support in my decisions.  Ryan told me over and over again how he would support whatever choice I made, and that whatever I did, we would make it work.

Now though, I feel as though I have no choices, no options, and I feel trapped by my circumstances.  I felt this for months before Sophie came, as the reality of my situation sank in.  Any option that I had to be a stay at home mom has evaporated.  If I want to regain my independence, and for Sophie and I to one day have a place of our own, I absolutely need to work full time.  Even if I wanted to stay living with my parents, I probably would still need to work full time for healthcare alone.  In one way, I know am very lucky- many single mothers would need to be concerned about the cost of childcare, and the difficulty of leaving their child with a stranger.  I have the best childcare that money can't buy- two loving grandmothers who probably wouldn't allow me to use daycare even if money wasn't a concern.  I have the fortune to be able to leave Sophie with people who know her, love her, and will give her what is probably better care than I could provide if I were at home, since they both have many years of experience.  But, I do have to leave her.  I have to commute many miles, work all day five days a week, lose valuable bonding time, and miss milestones.  Though I very likely would have done this even if Ryan were here,  the difference is that I would have been making a conscious decision to do so.  Now I am doing so out of necessity.  My lack of options is disheartening, and it's very difficult for me to see a bright spot on the horizon.  All I can see right now is how bright the horizon would have been in my old life.

How on earth am I going to manage being a single working mother?  When Sophie keeps me up late at night, I pace the floor and struggle to imagine how I would manage if I had to be at work the next day.  In the first few weeks of Sophie's life, the "how am I going to do this" was only a distant worry; I had twelve weeks to work it out.  Now though, I'm down to three weeks.  I don't know how I'll be able to work an eight hour day, with a twenty mile commute each way, on three hours of sleep.  I already can see how stressed out I'll get in the middle of the night when she's not sleeping, and I know my chance to sleep is ticking away.  I'll do this middle of the night stuff alone.  I don't have a husband to hand her off to so that I can sleep a couple of hours.  I do have my mother, who has been my savior, but I can't help feeling bad waking her.  I also don't have Ryan to offer support when I'm losing my mind that I'm feeding Sophie for the third time in two hours, or to commiserate with when we are both dead tired in the morning and both have to face a day of work.  It's not that I have no support; it's that I don't have the support I need.

I'm worried about plenty of other things too.  When I leave her, will she start to become closer to her grandparents than she is to me?  Everyone tells me no, but I can't help thinking about it.  Will I miss the first time she rolls over, or crawls, or walks?  I'm bound to miss something, but then, I suppose most mothers do, even  stay at home moms.  How will I manage everything I have to do in the few hours I'll have to do it?  I already have a tough time getting things done in a day, things like laundry, paying my bills, running errands, everything seems to take forever to get done right now.  On top of that, I'm trying to clean out my house, sell it, and find a home for Ryan's possessions.  I have a hard time imagining, once I add in a forty hour work week, how I will get done everything I have to do, plus spend quality time with Sophie.  That's all not to mention finding time for other pleasures: hobbies, a social life, exercise, relaxation.  It's daunting on my best days, insurmountable on my worst.

I'm admittedly a worrier, and I always have been.  Hopefully things won't be as bad as I'm afraid they will be.  It's undeniable though that I face a lot of challenges, challenges that I wouldn't face or that would be easier to face if I had a partner.  And knowing that, what I've lost, what I'm missing, sometimes it's so oppressive that I feel like I can't even lift my head up, I just want to lie in bed and cry.  That, of course, is not an option (not a viable one at least), so I have to talk myself into believing that there is a light, if not on the horizon, then over it somewhere, that will eventually come into view.

Things I Wish I Was Thankful For

When I woke up this morning around 5 a.m. to feed Sophie, the news was covering the preparations for the Thanksgiving Day parade.  Sitting in my bed at my parents' house, alone with Sophie, I was abruptly reminded that today is my first Thanksgiving without Ryan.  Anyone grieving will tell you that holidays are hard.  This is such a common statement, that "holiday grief" might as well be added as one of the stages of grief.  It's only because it's the holiday I'm dealing with now, but Thanksgiving seems to me like a particularly tough one, because there's so much tradition attached to it.  Ryan and I did something a little different for Christmas every year, but Thanksgiving was always the same.

I have a job that gets very demanding in November and December, and I've always had to work all of Thanksgiving week, often extra hours, with the exception of the day itself.  Ryan's schedule teaching was always much freer.  Thanksgiving week was an exciting week for me, knowing that I'd have a whole day off that Thursday.  And also, I love Thanksgiving - I always have.  It's the perfect holiday, a celebration of food.  This is exactly why Ryan was not thrilled with the day - he was the world's pickiest eater, and Thanksgiving dinner was not on his approved list of foods.  If there could have been a holiday where everyone ate sausages and potato chips with onion dip, that's one he could have gotten on board with.

What he did love about Thanksgiving was visiting with family, which, with his family, started the day before.  Every year his aunt, uncle, and young cousins would come into town, often his grandmothers, and sometimes other famly members too.  Halfway through the day I'd always get a phone call at work telling me to come over to his family's house right after work and have dinner and hang out with the whole family.  He was always in such a great mood when I got there, very festive and relaxed, and attentive to me, knowing how tired I would be after work.  I remember last year I had had a particularly rough day and was on my feet a lot, running around, and I did something to my toe.  When I finally got to Ryan's parents' house, I told him that I thought I had broken my toe.  He was so concerned, he wanted his sister, who is a doctor, to look at it and wouldn't let me stand anymore.  It was ridiculous, it was just a toe, but his concern made me feel so cared for, so loved.

On Thanksgiving morning, I always slept in.  For the record, I love sleeping in, it's the greatest.  My job requires me to wake up extra early on Black Friday morning, so I would always take advantage of not having to be anywhere right away on Thanksgiving itself.  Ryan and I would sit in bed and watch the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day parade.  I grew up watching it, so it's always been tradition for me, but Ryan thought it was pretty ridiculous.  He watched parts of it with me anyway though, just to spend time with me.  This morning when the parade started, I ached to be at my house in my bed with Ryan watching the parade and drinking our morning coffee.

After our long morning in, we'd go over to Ryan's parents' house and eat ourselves silly.  Correction:  I would eat myself silly.  Ryan would eat a lot of cheese and crackers, but then come to the dinner table with a plate of green beans and bread.  No turkey, no cranberries, no stuffing.  It was Thanksgiving blasphemy, but that was Ryan.  The day's saving grace for him was the football, which he could sit and watch with his family for hours on end, regardless of who was playing.  

After the long day of eating and football, Ryan was usually anxious to get home.  I always managed to persuade him though to make a stop at my parents' house to see my family, and maybe play a few games.  We were very lucky to have both of our families nearby, and we could spend time with both of them every holiday.  It was the perfect situation for when we had a family of our own - we knew we'd never have to disappoint either side.  When we finished at my parents' house, we'd go home before too late so I could get to bed - I had to be ready to wake up early for a Black Friday work marathon, a day when I have to work twelve hours or more.  

The great thing about this year is that I'm on maternity leave, so for the first time ever, I don't have to work on Black Friday, nor did I have the crazy hours leading up to Thanksgiving.  I've been able to spend the week at home, relaxing with Sophie, and spending time with Ryan's family and my own.  The bad news is, of course, that Ryan isn't able to enjoy it with me.  When we found out about my pregnancy, and when I would be due, Ryan was incredibly excited that I would be able to be home for the holidays, and not have to work.  In the ten days that we had before Ryan died in which we knew I was pregnant, we fantasized about Thanksgiving week in particular, knowing that I would be able to enjoy the whole holiday without thinking about work.  Like so many other things, it's a fantasy that is left in my mind, never actualized.

Today, I know that I'll feel what I've felt so many times this year - extreme loneliness.  Being around people makes the loneliness somehow both better and worse.  Ryan's absence is felt every minute of every day, but it's often worse when I look around and see the rest of my family with their partners, and I no longer have mine.  I'll spend my day today with my parents, my sister and her husband, and my nephew and his fiancee.  They'll put their arms around each, hold hands, have little couples' spats, smile at each other, and at the end of the day go to bed next to each other.  I won't be able to stop thinking about how much I want to be able to do the same with Ryan.  I'll be missing him being glued to the couch watching football, I'll be missing his pathetic Thanksgiving plate, I'll be missing his arm on the back of my chair at dinner.  

Our family has never been much for the tradition of taking turns saying what we're thankful for, but I know many people feel that's what the day is for- being thankful.  While I'm of course thankful for my beautiful and healthy daughter, I'm having a difficult time being thankful for much else.  I'm still awfully angry, still feeling very much like my chance at happiness was stolen from me.  I feel it worse when the loneliness comes on strong.  I know I'll be feeling it a lot in the next month, and there's not much I can do to stop it.  I don't feel that I should avoid the holidays, because I want Sophie to enjoy them and start to have holiday traditions of her own.  Over the years it will become less difficult, but this year I'm just stuck with a lot of things I wish I still had to be thankful for.