young widowhood

Just Guessing – Is the Widda Board Down?


The server for the YWBB is in the Northeast somewhere. New York State, if I remember correctly. It has to be in some weather vulnerable area because if memory serves, every time the area got whacked by winter – as is the case today – the board took a powder. As it’s a volunteer thing for the most part, it sometimes took a while for the tender that is to notice and, depending on whether or not it was a power issue, get the board back up on line.

When the widda board goes dark, my site lights up. I get search hits and loads of page-views from widowed in varying degrees of withdrawal. Last night, my stats doubled thanks to a couple of widowed folk in Texas*.

I had a comment yesterday from a board member on a more recent post about grief not being a process. She personally found the board an immense help and that the nastier souls that roam there were few in number and more to be pitied than worried about. She isn’t wrong in her asessment. If a person sticks to the newly widowed forum and even the 6 to 12 month forum, most of the time all is well. It also helps to have a co-hort, people who arrived at the same time you did who were roughly within your widowhood time frame.

I was a late comer to the board. I didn’t have a clique. The existing ones in my time frame weren’t welcoming, and I had the added burden of having spent well over a year physically/emotionally on my own prior to Will’s death. I just came in with a whole different mindset and needs.

I made some friends. I met my husband Rob there. I won’t tell anyone not to go there, but I will caution people to keep their true feelings close to the vest lest someone (usually someone who is older in widow age and heavily invested in the community) take offense and decide to “school” you.

Being schooled makes me cranky. Being told my own feelings and experiences aren’t what I know they are … gets my back up. I wasn’t so “yoga” back in my board days. I let my fingers fly and I got myself in trouble. End of story.

But back to the point, yes the board is down. It will be back up because you know what they say about bad pennies? It applies to the board too.

So breathe. Follow this link if you like. It will take you to a widow blog whose blog list is all widowed. The blog community can be just, if not more, helpful.

Namaste.

*Yes, I can see you via StatCounter. State, city, ISP addy and what you are reading. I’ve had problems with board members linking me back in posts there for the purpose of having a little flaming fun at my expense. That kind of thing doesn’t amuse me. I get that I am a heretic, but I am allowed to be so on my own blog – which no one has to read if they feel threatened or offended by my pov on grief and moving on.

UPDATE: I learned via widda friend status update on Facebook today (Sunday) that the board will be down until Wednesday due to a winterstorm related power outage. Just thought I’d pass that along.

It’s Probably Just Me


I don’t like being a “dance mom”. Two nights a week I haul the girl into town and pass time sitting on a cement floor while people I pay pretend to teach her to dance. Dance is just another version of those horrifying child beauty pageants. It’s all about outfits, costumes, hair and make up. Dance is incidental.

The ancillary stuff dominates. At the beginning of the year, the moms anguished over the ballet uniform: hair up in bun, black leotard, pink ballet shoes and ballet pink tights (yeah, it’s its own colour). Some of the girls weren’t dressed out properly and moms who’d been lectured on their own daughter’s dress code violations were stewing none too silently over what they saw as preferential treatment.

I’ll cop to being one of the privileged moms. Dee’s dance instructor doesn’t approach me with complaints on the odd day that I don’t get Dee’s hair into a bun, but that has more to do with my “who fucking cares” demeanor and the fact that I am 46 and  the teacher is just 18 than anything else.

“Why do you care what a teenager thinks about whether or not your child arrives properly dressed every time?” I asked. “Sometimes life gets in the way. The laundry didn’t get done or we didn’t have time to put hair up. It happens. No high schooler is going to lecture me on parenting.”

Unsurprisingly, none of the other moms had a response to that.

The current crisis concerns the costumes for the girls’ ballet festival performance. Festivals are weekend time sucks where dance schools gather and compete for bragging rights. I will miss both festivals this spring due to conflicts – yoga training weekends – thus saddling Rob with “dance mom” duty. He has been quite Dalai Lama about it.

Harry Potter inspired the choreography and it’s cute really. After 4 years of ballet, it finally appears as though Dee is actually dancing, but the costume is a mish-mash and two of the mothers aren’t pleased with the full effect. Every dance night there is a discussion about what can be done about the unacceptable costume. The poor little dance teacher keeps to the fringes because she’s afraid of simply scrapping and starting over – money has been spent and clothing purchased so far is non-returnable. She’s only 18, as I mentioned earlier, so I understand her reticence, but I am tired of the angst.

Who the fuck cares? It’s a stupid costume in a dumb festival that even a year from now, let along a hundred, won’t matter one bit.

But okay, I am not a girly, dancey, overly invested in my daughter’s hobbies kind of parent. It’s fine if you are, we all find our parenting level and rise or sink. I’ve, obviously, chosen the lower levels to dwell in, but I don’t aspire to motherhood as some kind of personal nirvana.

Against my will, I volunteered a few suggestions last evening when the discussion began to veer off into territory that might involve more personal involvement on my part. Interestingly, they were not dismissed out of hand.

More interesting, to me, was the jealous twinge I had a bit later as I sat and listened to one of the moms discussing the purchase of their new home.

In the newer suburban tract of The Fort, there is an attempt at upscale, executive type, homes. They bottom at about $500,000-ish, but keep in mind that housing prices in this neck of Alberta are stupid. Case in point, my home in Iowa – 1400 sq ft with sizable yard on a cul-de-sac sold for $163,900 at the beginning of the housing bubble burst. That same house here? Probably $350,000. People here pay, without a second thought, for slapped together shite on postage stamp lots in neighbors so choked with trucks, SUV’s and holiday trailers that parking is a nightmare in the residential areas. I will give Canadians this one kudo – they are fanatics about green spaces, bike/walking paths and parks, but neighborhoods might as well be tenements given the lack of space between houses.

The new home owner’s daughters are friends with Dee and the mom waxed on about the new home’s spaciousness – the exec housing is on three-quarter acre lots and have stupid amounts of square footage in addition to all the other superficial things like the upgraded flooring, counters, bath accessories and three/four car garages.

I don’t have counter top envy. Granite? Whatever. I do have space envy.

I’ve mentioned previously, and on numerous occasions, that in my last house I had very little furniture. I fought against the accumulation of it. My mother and MIL couldn’t grasp not wanting a living room set. But I have always preferred sitting on the floor and in fact, sitting on the floor is anatomically better for a person in the long run. There was so much space. Sometimes I would sit on the top of the landing and just bask in the openness.

As she talked about space and de-cluttering, as she is in the midst of packing, I felt jealous.

My practical side, for which I can thank my Depression-era born father and my brush with bankruptcy during Will’s illness, can’t fathom buying a home in Fort Saskatchewan of all places for $630,000 when the house I live in is paid for. Especially at my age in these economically dangerous times and with my level of paranoia about “what ifs”.

Still – space – the temptation.

Must think more yogically – detach!

UB mentioned the Buddhist (and its yoga premise too) idea that attachment is at the root of what we term “unhappiness”. Our inability to accept the impermanence that is all things in life holds us fast. Attachment roots and not in a good way. I have struggled with the idea but not the practice ironically.

Occasionally I comment on widow blogs. It’s not smart because I am far removed from common grief-think. Someone wrote about how being in a new relationship does not make things better and I disagreed. Falling in love with Rob and marrying again did make things better. I shouldn’t have said so out-loud because it’s heresy wide-open for misinterpretation, but I weary of the doom and gloom about the future after loss. I was “attached”, if you want to put it that way, to Will but I never believed that our marriage was anything other than time and place. We were destined to have a time and a place together that at some point one of us would leave. Everyone dies eventually. The idea that we have more than just brief moments together here and there over the course of existence is not something I question.

Sadness can balance happiness over the course of a mortal existence or one can swamp the other. I think we know going in what the general outline will be and it’s when we stomp our feet against it that life is harder than it would have been if we’d merely viewed it as transitory.

Marrying again didn’t make the fact that Will died better, it made me better. It re-grounded me, gave me an outlet for love again and bolstered my faith (I won’t say “rewarded it” because I don’t really believe in the whole reward/punishment model of existence). I think if one denies the benefits of moving on – however it manifests – it ‘s just resistance to the reality that life is impermanent and that should be re-examined for one’s own sake.

But, it’s probably just me.

Narratives are Us


I’ll break down the actual Michael Stone* workshop later in the week in terms of nuts and bolts, but today I am going to talk about narratives.

Stone talked about how our stories distract us and keep us stuck in patterns that no longer serve us or actually inhibit our lives in some way. These internal narratives run on a continual loop that we may be aware of but are just as likely not to notice. In terms of meditation, which was one of the themes of the workshop, our inability to silence/redirect or otherwise reprogram these stories we tell ourselves interferes with our ability to focus on our breathing. On a larger stage, our stories enable us to avoid reality.

An example, my youngest sister, BabySis, exists for the most part in a life that must seem like some waking nightmare to her because I am certain that even she would not have wished for it back when she was sixteen and planning to trap her very first boyfriend by getting pregnant. She saw hearts and flowers and an infant cross between the baby Jesus and a child model in a Pampers commercial. She did not see an alcoholic not too unlike the dad she wanted to escape or living in a double wide on the farm where he would be employed as a diary hand. She didn’t foresee him physically abusing her or her body run down and broken by  a combination of vertebrae scrunching laboring in a nursing home laundry and twenty years of junk food, cigarettes and too many babies.

Her narrative to explain her reality boils down to this …

“Mom and Dad made me give my baby up.”

And with that, she neatly side-steps the truth – which was that our parents told her she needed to live in a home for unwed teen mothers to learn how to be a parent on her own – and she has had a handy emotional bludgeon for purposes of guilting her family into putting up with her behavior for the last couple of decades.

A lot of people carry around the “parents” narrative to explain away their missteps. I taught rooms full of children who are probably still playing the parent card.

Interestingly, the first time I ever looked another person in the eye and told her I was not going to accept her story as the basis for my relationship with someone we both knew, a parent story was playing**.

I skimmed blogs on Valentine’s Day and wasn’t surprised to see the “Valentine’s is bad. Stupid Hallmark holiday.” theme weaving in and out. Anyone unattached by choice or happenstance snarks pretty much the same tired, trite reasons that Valentine’s is trivial and shouldn’t be allowed.

But Valentine’s is just a day on the calendar that carries some historic significance and, at it’s root, is harmless. So what if people wear pink, buy flowers and send cards? Perhaps it is something we should do for no reason as well – acknowledge the people we love in a tangible way, but that shouldn’t invalidate reserving a day for it. Trashing it because one is feeling unfairly left out ? Story. No one is left out who has someone to give to and we can all give.

The first Valentine’s after Will died came two days after I buried him. It was a cold afternoon. Just the sexton, me and Dee and a hole in the ground. I went to school that Valentine’s with treats to give my students, and this was after I’d left a box of baked goodies at Dee’s daycare for the caregivers, who were beyond wonderful to her and I.

All day during the passing periods I saw girls and boys linked together. Flowers. Cards. Candies. And it felt … hopeful. It warmed me up a bit knowing that love existed and was being shared.

I suppose I could have woven a story for myself full of pity and bile, but where the point would have been in it I didn’t know, so I chose to give to those I could and trust that someday I would receive again.

The next Valentine’s I found a box of roses on my doorstop from Rob, as he and I had just begun our romance.

Narratives push us away from paths that can be good, or down alleys that are bad, for us depending on the quality of the story and how much we chose to believe in it.

I wouldn’t say that I am story free or that I can completely resist the temptation to try to enlighten others about their own narratives – though I hope I am getting better with the latter. I do know I am experiencing a period of rewrite.

Rough drafts are being polished or trashed depending and I am scaling back from epics to novellas. I’ll update as necessary.

*Stone’s website offers free downloads of his lectures. Click here.

**It was my sister-in-law. She blames her current mixed up life on her mother. The first time I met this SIL, she rambled on for a good 45 minutes about the evils of her mother. Finally I said, “I like your mother. Your history with her is yours to take up with her, but it doesn’t have anything to do with she and I.”