As we rounded the corner into ‘officially fall’ I got a little flutter in my chest. You see, I’ve always loved the fall: the chill in the air, warm beverages, bonfires, and football. {I could take or leave pumpkin spice – feel free to judge me.}

I’m a late October baby so I always thought of Halloween as an extra birthday present – dressing up as anything I wanted and having complete strangers give me candy? Yes please! I even thought it was serendipitous when I found out I was pregnant on October 31st - and told my husband he was going to have a ‘dress up’ as a daddy…for the rest of his life. {I had the whole ‘costume’ picked out too: decades old Birkenstocks with black tube socks, ill-fitting khaki cargo shorts with a fanny pack that’s big enough to be a backpack, a farmer’s tan, and baseball cap that should have never been allowed to see the light of day…}

October is ‘special’ for another reason too – It is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month; with October 15th being the International Wave of Light. My birthday month has become a little more bittersweet – and a lot more ‘activist-y’ – in the last decade and a half.

For some reason, I’ve been having some ‘extra emotions’ about ‘my month’ this year. When I ‘just have that feeling’ and don’t really know what it means I like to look through to my Remembering a Life Journey Cards to see if any of the topics particularly resonate with me – then I use the prompt as a starting point for a thought exercise… and one really stuck out:

Write about memories of time spent together or about experiences you are having now you wish you could share with your loved one.

Especially in the life of a Loss Mama – there are so few of the first and so many of the second. And, it’s not always the ‘big things’ what we ‘should be’ experiencing that get to us either.

School starts about this time every year – and I’m bombarded with first day of school pictures on social media. I understand that some years are more of a ‘rite of passage’ than others (…kindergarten…high school…) but every single year I’m like a moth to a flame with those pictures – thinking maybe {just maybe} my daughter will magically appear in one of them.

And, just the other day I went to my nephew’s pee wee football game {have you ever watched 6-year-olds try to run with a football – it’s almost as big as they are!}. There had to have been at least three dozen other games happening at the same time and ‘our’ game was literally in the middle of a field marketed off with little orange playground cones. Plus, there were as many siblings running around off the field as there were players on [you couldn’t really tell which areas were organization sanctioned and which were pick-up games except for the colored tee shirts]. And I’m pretty sure there weren’t any official winners - but every child there was playing for the coveted ‘participant’ ribbon…

This was just a run of the mill ‘busy Saturday afternoon’ for most young families around the country. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t an EVENT. Just an ordinary weekend that transcends time:

  • Children melting down because…they had to be on the field at 7am – and also missed their naptime, or can’t have the $12 sugar rush from the concession stand, or No, they canNOT beat their brother with the whiffleball bat even though ‘he said I coooooooooooould!’
  • Adults yelling because…players are more interested in picking at their fingernails than playing the game, or siblings are running through the field because they want to be part of the action too, or a parent thinks a coach is not giving their kid enough playing time, or even a coach thinks umpire made a bogus call [even though everyone (and also no one) will ‘win’ at the end of the day, remember?]

Looking at it from an outsider’s perspective, who in their right mind would willingly sign up and pay good money to live through this debacle this every weekend, for at least 30 weeks a year, for the next 12+ years…!?!??! But, given the opportunity, I wouldn’t bat an eye at the time or cost spent with my own children…

And I still couldn’t keep my mind from wandering and wondering what my life ‘could’ have been like: would I be spending my weekends on the soccer and softball fields or in the dance and art studios? Would I need to be cutting up orange slices or cutting out pattern pieces? Or, would my (now theoretical) 14-year-old even ‘allow me to be in her presence’?

After we lose ‘our person’ [no matter their age, relationship to us, or any other characteristic] both us, as the griever, and our friends and family think about the BIG things: holidays, special events, birthdays and anniversaries…and yes, those events truly hurt our heart. And also, it can be the ‘sneaky grief’ that can get to us too. The mundane and tedious things that we’re not expecting to hit us so hard.

Things like:

  • Shopping for groceries and spotting your person’s favorite can of soup
  • Taking a walk and getting the faint scent of the same bushes they had in their yard
  • Seeing their doppelganger for a split second across the busy parking lot
  • Taking that first bite of a meal you didn’t expect to taste ‘just like they used to make’
  • Hearing their rarely played favorite song (or just a song that reminds you of them)
  • Getting a great hug from someone that just ‘feels’ like them

It makes us pine to do those things with our person ‘just one more time’… it also reminds us that we are human, and our person was truly loved.

I wish I had a ‘fix’ to keep you from having to experience these ‘gut punches to the heart’…or at least prepare you so they don’t catch you so off guard. I just don’t have the answer. But my best advice? Please don’t bury those emotions forever. Allow yourself to ‘feel your feels’ – at your earliest convenience that is, maybe calling attention to yourself in the middle of the Kroger soup aisle isn’t your thing. But if it is, go for it! Who really cares if that stranger shopping for chicken and stars looks at you a little funny during your mental breakdown? What grown adult still eats chicken and stars anyway?!?!

End note: No shade to anyone that enjoys a hot bowl of chicken and stars soup. I believe, deep down in my soul, that the blue box shaped noodles is the only mac and cheese worth eating (that isn’t homemade).