When the Bough Breaks

Written Friday April 14, 2017 Facebook Notes...

I’m reading a book called When The Bough Breaks. I always thought that was an odd saying to begin with. When the bough breaks the cradle will fall? Who the hell has their baby way up in a cradle in the tree tops to begin with? A gorilla? Of course the cradle will fall you moron! Okay now that THAT is off my chest! There are experiences in here from all sorts of parents who have lost their children in every conceivable way. It’s left me grateful. That she died peacefully and not violently. That I know what happened to her and I’m not left to a life where there are so many unanswered questions. That my entire family was around me to support me through this. That I didn’t have a relationship in my life that complicated everything and fell to pieces because of what happened to my daughter. So many things to be grateful for in the face of this terrible feeling of loss. Even in this there is a bright side.

I found the self cleaning function on my oven yesterday. I did the cycle last night and woke up this morning to it looking brand new inside. I just stood there looking at it wondering where all the burned on crud went? I looked all around in there just amazed that this heat this intense heat cleaned the whole thing. Well my life is in a self cleaning mode. I’m in the intense heat cycle. When it’s done I’ll be able to feel happy and look inside at something that is very different and maybe even amazing. We can’t always make sense of what we go through or why. I don’t want to reduce this to what I needed to learn or how I needed to change or grow. But what other choice do we have? We either make lemon meringue pie from the lemons or sit with the bag of them and burst into tears in our kitchens. Well I choose the pie. I always have. There are so many things you can use lemons for and honestly I’m dealing with a grove of them.

It says in my book that when a child dies you begin a new life. One you never chose but have no other option but to live. Everything is different. I want to extend that to when you experience a “loss”, because I felt this when I got divorced, when I lost a job I loved, when my dad died, when I moved to Colorado from California, so many big changes that start a new chapter in our lives. Some changes we have control over and others we don’t. Like this one. But it’s our choice how we deal with it. If you let lemons just sit there they become hard as rocks. No good to anyone or anything. I don’t want to become hard or useless. So this new life of mine is unfolding every day, more and more. The distortion of time is either 10 weeks or 10 years ago all this happened. It feels the same.

Rock a by baby in the tree tops? Never in my world, or the new one either.