FOUND MONEY (OR BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO MOURN)

You know that feeling when you find a $20 bill in the pocket of your jeans unexpectedly?

Even though it was your money all along and it was stored safely away,

it always feels like a gift from the universe when you trip across it-right?

Like sneaky proof that you are lucky or beloved or smart.

What if that $20 was stuffed in that pocket while you were 

trying to eat pancakes with a toddler?

When you pull it out, it's stuck together with dried syrup

that has preserved the paper into a shellacked rectangle.

What would that feel like?

Knowing that you have to hand wash that twenty dollars-

really get in the creases-

before you can use it or give it to someone else?

Knowing the process of making the money usable 

requires you to get the dried syrup all over you,

all in your fingernails and maybe on your clothes-

is it still worth it?

Or is it ruined?

I'm using a light-hearted example to illustrate something a little more complicated.

What if the twenty was actually love

and the syrup was grief?

And what if every twenty you ever had was

always covered in something sticky that you really didn't want to touch?
Would you ever use real money again?

Erm....maybe let's leave this metaphor now before I get too weird.

This is how I've come to understand the way grief and love show up together.

Every amount of love I've ever experienced has been a joy, a gift, a surprise.

Aaaand, it always comes with a commensurate amount of grief.

Big love=big grief.

I used to think that the grief came at the end,

that it was a rich dessert I could decline because I was on a diet.

I used to think that one of the ways you won 
extra points at love was by avoiding grief.

That I could jump from love to love to love

like I jumped from the couch to the chair to avoid the lava of grief on the floor.

I didn't realize how watered down my understanding

of love was until I got more comfortable with my grief.

What I understand more and more is that I walk around with 

grief wrapped around me,

spilling out of my pockets,

embedded in my tattoos,

watching through my eyes.

I breathe it in and out in equal measure with love.

I can't have one without the other.

For instance, when my children were born,

everyone focused on how great it was going to be to be a mom,

to have them here, to experience all of their 'firsts'.

No one told me about the 'lasts' or how quickly they started coming.

In the beginning, I was my kids' super-hero with all the answers.

Now our relationships are something else-bigger, deeper and alive.

Childhood is a road that has an end and you're supposed

to feel sad or have a mid-life crisis once they're up and out.

But I naively thought that meant later, after the child stage.

Not right alongside it, while you're in the thick of things.

I didn't know I would hold fistfuls of love and grief simultaneously.

I didn't know that I was also granting grief an all access pass 

to this area of my life, for the rest of my life.

I was unaware that I would need to care and tend 

for my grief with intention

so that I didn't risk diminishing the love I share with them.
I mean, not from day one.
But grief was born on the same day as love.
A separate grief for each of them too. 
Not just one grief around my years of parenting but two 
with completely different timelines.

Each time my love grows for them,
each time they reach a new milestone,
our relationship has already shifted-
out from underneath me.
I miss what was as much as I love what is now.
I long for their future as much as I want to covet what happened yesterday.
The changing nature of our bonds, of our love,

is one of the things that has forced me to come to grips with the grief.

I'm learning (with lots of help) that I can choose how I work with this combo.

There's a few choices available when working with grief 
but most of them boil down to these three.

Option 1-Avoid It

I can stuff my grief away, avoid thinking about it too specifically

and hope it sorts itself out with time or distance or ignorance.
Of course, ignoring my grief means I'm also
avoiding a core aspect of our love, diminishing it's worth
by ignoring the cost it requires.

Still, avoidance can sometimes keep the tide of grief

 and love from pulling me under.

This is a fine temporary strategy, a survivalist move that can let me postpone

until I'm in a position to fully embrace both halves of this whole.

It's not a life strategy-it's a holding plan.
I've put love and grief in boxes for so long that monsters 

have grown in their place while I waited for the time to be right.
I work hard to keep my grief where I can see it instead of hiding it.

Option 2-Preserve It

I can choose to leave the love wrapped in grief-

stuck in time like a bug in amber.
I can resist looking at what's now 
by focusing on images of the past or 
keeping static systems in place that no longer work.

In this specific example, preserving it would look like me interacting

with my teen and tween children as if they are still incapable of basic responsibility.

It would mean continuing to supervise or dictate to them choices

instead of letting them direct my attention or their own path.

It would mean pretending that we're all going to live together,

in exactly this family structure 
(without girlfriends or husbands or grandchildren)

forever.

It would mean suffocating what comes next in favor of looking at what was.
This always ends in disaster. 
Everyone picks it along the way for a few seasons-
marriage, parents, best friend, church, or even kids...
these loves are so amazing and precious
that it can be hard to resist the urge to keep them stuck.
Love is alive, it must move or die.
This is a poor choice.
If it's your go to, you might need help to pick another.

Option 3-Welcome It
Not surprisingly, this is the one choice that helps most.

I can do the hard dirty work of facing the grief so I can reclaim the love.

I can examine it, experience it, let it work on me so it can teach me.
Every time I've admitted I'm heartbroken-
my heart responds with expansion.
I miss those little hands that held mine.
I adored those little people who thought I had all the answers.
I will never get that exact moment or feeling back.
And.
I adore the young people who have grown so beautifully from those seeds.
I am a more compassionate and loving person than the mother of those littles.
I have so much to look forward to within the right now.
Which is only possible because of the way love transformed all of us
into who we are now.
Bittersweet is the taste of love and grief
and I have learned to tolerate the taste.
It's possible one day I'll learn to like it
but for now I take it like medicine.


Finally, I want to say that I don't think grief welcoming is a solo exercise.
I think it is done best in community.
For my kids, processing and accepting my grief has 
been made infinitely easier by my friends who've been here before.
It looks like forgiving myself for things I didn't know how to 

do better in the moment and making amends to those I unintentionally harmed.
It also looks like celebrating the times where I was exactly
 the kind of mother I want to be.

It looks like being present for the ceremonies-

the firsts and the lasts-

so that I can remember how far we've come.
It means sitting down to mourn
so that I can be comforted (Matthew 5:4).
It looks like talking to the parents of littles (and mediums) 
and all the ages that I've walked through before so that they know they're not alone
and so I can remember when mine were that age.

So, when you find yourself surprised by grief, 
remember that it was there all along and will always be there.
It's best eaten as you go along,
not saved up for the end.
And that it's a communal meal-
there's more than enough to share.