Walking With You 2013: Mirror, Mirror ~ The Comparison Trap

The Walking With You topic for week 5 is "Mirror, Mirror ~ The Comparison Trap."
"Mothers often fall into the trap of comparing ourselves to one another. This is a trap many women fall into. We compare our families, mothering styles, fashion sense, careers or lack thereof, bodies, etc. Even mothers with babies in heaven compare the way we grieve our children. I know…sad…but we do it, if we’re honest enough to admit it. So, how can we find freedom from this? Sharing is a start…telling the truth…admitting the struggle. I think, then, we will see that we all love our children, regardless of how we choose to remember and honor their lives…whether publicly or quietly…with big parties or simple moments of remembrance. Be real on this week’s post, and let’s free ourselves from the trap of comparing!"

Kelly has encouraged us to "be real," so I am going to try to be open, transparent, to share how I felt and how I feel, even when it is difficult for me to admit it to myself.  We have the expectations of how people are "supposed" to act in the face of loss, especially a loss so great.  We look at what other bereaved families have done; we listen to what others, even those who have not lost a child, say about grieving.  Many times we have heard people say that they "couldn't survive" the loss of a child, that we must be incredibly strong because they couldn't have done it.  I have found myself feeling guilty for even surviving, for being able to continue breathing after Elena died.  As if I am the One with power over life and death.

I have often wondered if I grieved the "right way," if I made the "right" choices.  I remember feeling so guilty about eating the first few days after Elena died.  EATING.  Really???  I felt guilty for being aware of feeling hungry.  Aren't people who are in the depths of sorrow supposed to stop eating?  How could I think about food when Elena was gone?  But I did feel hunger, and I ate, and I felt guilty.  What would people think if they knew I wanted to eat and that someone wasn't having to force me to eat, to force me to take care of myself?  A friend came to check on me later that week and said she was happy to see I had showered, that she wasn't sure what to expect when she arrived and had been prepared to make me take a shower if I hadn't bathed in days.  I know she didn't mean any harm by it, but then I started feeling bad about bathing.  Why was I able to hold it together enough to take care of the basic things?  How could I even get out of bed and shower when my baby was dead?  Didn't I care enough about Elena to be so devastated as to not be able to function after she died?  Looking back on it, it would almost be comical if it were not so incredibly sad.  The pressure we sometimes put on ourselves is so intense and so unnecessary.

I compared our final decisions for Elena with other bereaved families.  Did they bury their child or choose cremation?  What did that mean about them, and more importantly, about me and my decision to cremate?  I still question my decision when I am around moms who chose burial.  Did I make the right choice or did they?  As if either choice is "right."  There are no "right" decisions when our babies die, only hard ones.  None of the choices are ones we want to make. 

And it didn't stop with burial vs. cremation.  Of the families who chose cremation, what did they do with the ashes?  Are they scattered or displayed proudly in an urn or tucked away somewhere, treasured but unseen?  How do other families remember significant dates around their children's lives - birth dates, death dates, due dates?  Did they have birthday parties?  Did I love Elena as much as those who baked cakes and invited extended family and friends?  Was it enough to just release balloons with her dad and brother?  Did I talk about her, share her story with others as much as the other moms in my support group?  Was it wrong to not immediately start a blog like so many of the moms in my support group, like all the moms I found online sharing their baby?  Maybe I was not doing enough to keep her memory alive.  I did not post about Elena on Facebook as much as lots of my baby loss friends did, but on the other hand, I posted about her more than some of the others did.  Always looking to others to see what they did.  As if any of it matters, as if how we grieve somehow is a measure of our love for our children.  I wrote last post about not putting any blame on other bereaved families, but still blaming myself.  Similarly, I didn't think that any bereaved parents loved their children any less by how they celebrated holidays or how publicly they remembered their babies, but somehow I thought that the way I grieved would (should?) be a reflection of my love for Elena.  I know with my intellect that it is simply not true.  Again, getting it to my heart has proven more difficult.

In writing this post, I realize that not only did I (and sometimes still do) compare my grief to the grief of other bereaved mothers but also to some imaginary "ideal" of what grief "should" be.  This also causes me to worry about other people judging the way I grieve and the way I remember and that somehow they will interpret my grief as a gauge by which to measure my love for my daughter.  I believe that those comparisons and those concerns of judgment are significant sources of guilt (which may explain why this post seemed so similar to me to the last one).  I think I need to pray more for release from comparing myself to others and from worrying about what others think.

Despite our differences, we (bereaved parents) all have the most important things in common:  we love our children beyond words, we love our children beyond death, we love our children forever, and we always miss them.  How we grieve them, how we remember them, how we celebrate them are not measuring sticks of our pain, our missing, our love.  They are only indications that we are different people from different backgrounds with different needs and abilities and different ways of expressing ourselves.  But the love is the same.