This post is part of the "Weight and See" series and will be archived with those posts. Part of any effort to make the much needed lifesaving lifestyle changes is addressing the emotional issues that impact not only mental health, but physical health as well. Part of my way of dealing with these issues is to write about them and then focus on changing how I react to the emotional stress and trauma that has led me to emotionally eat myself to near-fatal morbid obesity.
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Yesterday I wrote about a huge milestone Gaby has coming up...loosing her first tooth. I mentioned that this was the first time in my twenty plus years as a parent to five children, that I've been there for this particular "first."
I'll give you a moment to let that sink in. I've written briefly about my nervous breakdown in 1995, in the midst of this post, but have never really delved into the nitty-gritty of what happened that led me to not be the primary parent in my older children's lives from November of 1995 to May of 2003.
My first child, Joshua, was only two when he died in 1990. Too young to have lost any teeth. Then in 1995 Joshua's father and I divorced after not quite ten years together, nearly eight of them married. Our surviving children, Matt and Meg, our twins - were five at the time, and Zach was two. It's what led to the divorce that is the crucial part of all this. Whilst Joshua's death played a huge part in steamrolling our marriage into divorce, it would be dishonest if I said that our marriage probably wasn't doomed to fail from the start.
"M" and I first met almost as soon as I graduated from high school. Our relationship wasn't aided by the fact that at 17 I'd left home without so much as a "goodbye" to my parents, a mere two short weeks after meeting and starting to date "M". There are probably some things in that particular situation that need to be addressed but this post isn't where I'm going to do that. What I will do though is apologize to my younger siblings, Diana, Amanda, and Jacob for the way I left home and for the ugliness that ensued between my mom, step-dad and myself afterward. As we've all grown up and forged our own lives I think you understand why I did things the way I did, but I'm genuinely sorry for any pain it caused you.
When I left home at 17 I moved in with my Aunt Meta. By that point, M and I were already engaged. Before you know it, we're a few months into the engagement and I find out I'm pregnant.
I didn't have that baby. I made the choice to end that pregnancy. Sadly, I didn't get much smarter from there on out. My relationship with M was a volatile one. We'd break up and get back together. Shampoo, rinse, repeat. I didn't do much about it though despite my Aunt Meta's offers to pay for part of my college education if I ended my relationship with M. I was too young and petulant to listen to someone tell me that I was too young to be so emotionally and physically involved with someone I wasn't a good fit for.
Several months later surprise surprise, I'm pregnant again. I was still carrying so much emotional baggage, pain, and anguish from ending the earlier pregnancy that I knew there was no way I could do that again.
The news that I was pregnant did not go over well with M's staunchly conservative, Christian, family and I had not even begun speaking to my own family again. My mom's childhood best friend was the one who told my mom I was pregnant. I simply couldn't do it. M's family didn't like the scandal of having a baby born out of wedlock and on Thanksgiving night of 1987 they sat M and I down and told us that not quite three weeks from that date we would be getting married and to send out invitations to those we wanted to have there. It wasn't until early December of 1987 that I spoke a word to my mom. We had to go over to her house to get my birth certificate so that we could get our marriage license.
I walked in the front door of my mom's house, 18 weeks along, she handed me the birth certificate, and I embraced my sisters and brother and had the hardest time letting them go. It had been almost a year and half since I had seen or talked to them. To say that my mom wasn't thrilled with my decision to marry someone she felt wasn't prepared to take on the role of fatherhood and primary contributor to a household was an understatement.
Two days before M and I were married I felt Joshua move for the first time. Deep inside I knew that marrying M was not the right thing to do but I had this wee babe depending on me. I'd seen a few young mothers who were on welfare and lived in roach-infested hovels. I saw the struggle on their own faces and the deep, sunken look of hopelessness in their eyes. I didn't want that for myself or my child.
M and I were married in mid-December of 1987. Joshua was born in April of 1988. After living with both sets of parents, and briefly separating when Joshua with 8 months old, M and I moved to the small ski-village of Wrightwood in the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California.
Life was idyllic and then at times, it wasn't. Despite our really bleak financial outlook at the time, there was absolutely nothing in the world that made me happier than my three little kids. I could deal with the stress of being married to someone that I probably never should have married in the first place as long as I had my children surrounding me.
Joshua was almost two when the twins were born in February of 1990. As far as he was concerned, they were his babies. He thought having two babies come home from the hospital with mommy was the coolest thing ever. I completely agreed. Oh sure, I was sort of at my wits end trying to manage three kids under two, but we made it work.
When the twins were very small and sometimes fussy, I'd take them out of their crib and place them in their car seats next to my side of the bed. I'd lay there early in the morning as the sun rose over the eastern horizon and cast it's beams through our bedroom window and onto the faces of what I felt were the most perfect babies in the entire world. Matt and Meg were literally bathed in golden sunlight. Meg would look up at me and smile and it took my breath away. Here was this itty bitty baby girl, swaddled in pink from head to toe, whilst her twin brother next to her was swaddled the same, except in blue. Meg would smile at me and it felt like that beautiful smile mixed with the warm sunlight went straight through my heart and deep into my soul. I remember thinking that those moments held tiny bits of magic. Surely this kind of pure happiness was the stuff of faerie tales? Then Joshua would tumble out of bed and drag his much-adored and never left behind Mickey Mouse with him into our room and would plop down on the floor next to the twins and say, "My beebies. MY BEEBIES. Beebies see Mic Mouse! MY MIC MOUSE!"
Joshua would proceed to point out the different colors on Mickey Mouse to the twins and they'd coo and smile at him. I lived for those moments, the first moments of the day which I coveted because M would still be asleep and oblivious to all those smiles and love that were bathed in pure happiness and sunshine.
Those mornings spent with my three babies took some of the sting out of trying to do so much for so many small people and sometimes failing. I'd promise Joshua we'd make cookies and because the twins would need my attention, I'd get to the point of having the batter made and that was it. So we sat on the floor and indulged in ooey gooey cookie dough goodness. Sometimes the twins would fuss a minute or two longer than I thought was wise, but Joshua needed an extra hug, one more story, or another cuddle. Cookie dough, hugs and love were sometimes the glue that held mother and babies together!
In the blink of an eye, that golden sunlight was blotted out by an excruciating darkness that drained all of the light and color from my life. Joshua died after being struck by a small pickup truck in August of 1990. I've written about that night in horrific detail, here.
I used to think that I lacked the words or the talent to adequately describe the sort of pain a mother goes through when she loses a child. After writing openly about his death and speaking to several other mothers who have also lost a child, I now believe that there are no words in the human vocabulary to accurately portray the bone-crushing, heart-breaking and soul-splitting pain that a mother goes through when her child dies.
Some parents learn to "handle" the loss of the child by grieving and just getting by, day-to-day. The pain never really goes away and you never "get over it." I've read a lot about the stages of grief, but I never read anything about how to grieve when you can't. There's nothing written for the mother who has gone numb from the scalp down and has shut off every maternal instinct that used to lay claim to every cell within her body. There are no books or pills you can take to stop the psychic bleeding that happens when your child is ripped from your arms in the middle of the blackest night by the gruesome figure of Death.
So, I shut down. Emotionally, mentally, physically. I just stopped being the person I used to be. If I shut myself down then I lessened the pain that was surely going to happen again, at some point because it was my fault Joshua died. I'd had an abortion and then, against M's will, I went back to the Mormon church. I believed that God was punishing me for the abortion. He took an eye for an eye so to speak. And M blamed me because if I hadn't gone back to the Mormon church, then he wouldn't have sought the council and prayer from a minister we didn't know, who would ask us to leave Joshua with his daughter and then take us to the home of someone else we didn't know, and while there, Joshua would die.
I truly felt like God was punishing me for all of my transgressions.
When you live under the burdensome weight of guilt, profound sadness, and the unbearable pain of losing a child, and you don't find an outlet for that grief, or help in dealing with it, it will deal with you and it will bear it's weight down upon you until functioning on a day-to-day basis is nearly impossible.
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Tomorrow in "Emotional Fat Part II" I'll go into further detail about how the guilt and sadness, which lead to emotional numbness propelled me into making some agonizingly poor choices.
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