I’m handing out candy to trick-or-treaters at the time of writing this. My neighbourhood is a mix of all different kinds of people. Some kids travel in packs, in their costumes, with a gaggle of parents — also often in costume — waiting for them on the sidewalk. Others come alone, sometimes with no costume. Or a parent comes with a baby, again with no costumes, and my brain starts to do that thing where I add up those seemingly innocuous bits of information and begin to concoct stories about each visitor. Food insecurity is highly visible in my neighbourhood, and I wonder if anyone else thinks about the not-so-obvious reasons that people might come to your door on a night when free food is being given out.
The world is a harsh place, and tonight, I’m wallowing in it. I’m consumed by loneliness and melancholy. There’s the news, of course, and despite deleting Facebook and Instagram from my phone again, I keep going to Apple News or TikTok or — the worst — sneaking a glance at Twitter from my browser. Heck, even LinkedIn offers no respite from the world created by greedy, violent men. Like a kid watching a horror movie, eyes covered by their hands, my weak-ass social media detox is akin to peaking at Freddy Kruger from the spaces between my fingertips.
Do you feel it, too? Like you need to look away to save a bit of yourself, but you’re also overwhelmed by that privilege of shutting it off, knowing it’s still happening? There’s so much shouting at each other about good vs. evil online, and yet there’s so much grey we’re not able to acknowledge due to pain, history, and fear.
It’s my first Halloween, completely alone. I knew this day would come, that the kids would grow and be out with friends. That they’d learn to navigate two households. And I had planned for it. In the Before Times, there was always someplace to be, someone to hang out with. I was a vibrant, active person who walked or biked everywhere and drew her energy from being out with people in the world. I figured that when my kids started doing stuff without me, I would find my way like I always have.
But lately, I feel like a shut-in who barely recognizes herself. I just checked my Fitbit. I got a humiliating 1500 steps today. (1476, if I’m completely honest.) That’s like 15 minutes of walking. Total. For an entire day. How did I never realize that choosing writing as a career meant I’d have to be very disciplined about moving, eating, and talking to other humans? How did I not realize that having ADHD hyperfocus when it comes to getting words down would come to be harmful to my health?
My perimenopausal body sweats at night. My pants go up another size just looking at food. Complaining about it feels pointless and antithetical to who I am, someone who is always bubbly and optimistic. Someone who knows that walking and eating are privileges, and so is being able to work from home without bombs going off. The person who has all the tools to create new habits with intention has chosen to wallow in her woe-is-me stories.
Something is off. It’s like we’ve all forgotten big swaths of what it meant to be a community. Is it me, or after so many years of hiding away, does getting outside seem like more work than you have the bandwidth for? Maybe it’s just time passing, and I’m struggling to accept what is. But I know I just feel off.
Lately, I’ve tried to mandate going to the office to reclaim parts of myself, but I wonder if I ever even knew her. Was she just always busy so that she didn’t have to be with herself? Was listening to other people’s stories just a way to drown out her own?
Most days, I count my blessings and try not to take them for granted. I like my current job, even if I miss having a career that involves more moving around. I’m very giggly in love with Rasheed, and while he will tease me for typing that, I look forward to laughing with him and tucking my head into the crook of his arm. My kids are doing well, and we’ve survived a lot of really hard things together, so I’m proud of how far we’ve come and where we’re going. My parents are aging and mostly well, and our relationship has healed. I often feel a paycheck away from moving in with them, but —touch wood — I’ve kept a roof over me and the kids, all by myself, for almost 7 years now. And I’m grateful and proud of a lot of that.
But how to lean into the joy of this window of time with the world as it is right now? And also, what IS “right now?” Aren’t all the other times we feel okay about stuff simply an illusion of peace and harmony? How do we continue now that we can see so clearly how awful we are as a species?
Maybe tonight, it’s simply all louder because I’m alone on a holiday, and that often gets me down. We were a family with a story, and stories on repeat… well, we tend to believe they’ll always be, don’t we? And while I really don’t see my ex-husband in that way anymore, I wrote myself out of a script. Doing the big fancy holidays on your own is a lot of work and expense, and I was already treading water with two adults and two incomes in the house. But I deeply miss some parts of it: Decorating and making costumes, their innocence as they did inventory on their candies, their laughter as I took the Coffee Crisps as my “mom tax” — even my in-laws coming over and handing out candy while I took the kids door-to-door. And the longing for those times, which were ALWAYS going to end, amplifies my blah mood.
Everything ends. Only spirit endures. And with every ending, we grieve. I watched an episode of Sex Education tonight while waiting for candy seekers to knock. They revealed (this is not a spoiler) a scene of grief and depression that Dr. Jean Milburn (Gillian Anderson), mother of the main character, Otis, experienced when her marriage dissolved. This had never been discussed on the show before, and I found the sight of a young mum sobbing in the fetal position while her child checked on her shockingly painful to witness. Why does allowing our children to see our pain feel so shameful? Perhaps because many of us have seen our mums in the same way, and it scared us. I know I’m definitely embarrassed about letting my kids see my pain.
In my opinion, divorced women are rarely accurately depicted in media. The divorcee is either scorned and bitter, perhaps vengeful, or maybe an addict or alcoholic. Or she is empowered and brave. She’s worked through it and moved on and is KILLING it in life. And that’s what we want to see, don’t we? We want to see her triumph and beat the odds because that gives us comfort. We don’t want to see her grieve. Grief makes us uncomfortable. And if we do, we want it to happen only on the way to her success and redemption.
But the truth about grief is that it’s not pretty. And it’s not clean or neat. You can’t simply put it in a box and tuck it away. What I’ve learned is that grief never goes away; we just learn to carry it over time. Sure, it gets quieter, maybe, but then, some days, it surprises me with its loudness. “Oh,” I gasp, “I thought I was done with you.” But nope, I simply couldn’t feel ALL of it at the time. Feeling the full weight of it would have killed me. It would have made it impossible to get out of bed and be a rock for the kids while they learned to move forward with the new way of being a family. Grieving fully might have meant things would slip, and I couldn’t allow myself that. I worried I’d forget to make their lunch or be sure the forms were signed or let the passports expire.
So, instead, I grieved a little at a time. And carrying the weight of what was left with me meant that sometimes I did forget to make lunches or sign the forms or renew the passports. I drowned the noise in my head and filled my time with activities and people so that I would not crumble. I lived with a parent who fully crumbled in heartache, and it forced me to grow up fast, which meant I matured at a speed that made me a lopsided adult.
Eventually, scary things landed at my door: My son was born half-dead. My daughter was diagnosed with a rare cerebrovascular disease and needed bilateral brain surgery. And then the person I experienced all that with told me he was not in love with me anymore. So I had to do the work on myself, and if you’ve ever done therapy or coaching to unpack complex trauma, you’ll agree with me that it’s not fun for a good long time. And then there comes a time where you think, wait, I may be OK now. I may have the tools to proceed here and try adulting properly, whatever that means. I may even be happy!
But despite all the work to better realize oneself, I realize on nights like tonight that Sad, Lonely, Hurting Nadine is still here. I haven’t tended to her fully yet. Maybe she’ll always be here with the grief, and I need to accept that and learn how to live with her. She’s still grieving the possibilities she closed the door on. She’s grieving all the love she hasn’t gotten to express yet. She’s still longing for something, but she hasn’t quite made the time to figure out what it is.
Right now, the feelings people, my fellow empaths, are grieving. They are still carrying the grief they acquired in lockdowns. They may still be grieving people they’ve lost along the way, be it to death or disagreement. Maybe they are grieving the pain of their ancestors, watching that pain being inflicted again and again in real-time. And now, we are also grieving the mass abductions and deaths of babies, children, and families across the globe. And maybe, like me, you feel tired of grieving, too.
So, after a solid-ish night’s sleep, I gratefully woke up, eager to pick up this writing again. And I want to share my morning awareness that it’s OK to set down the grief for a bit. But first, we must acknowledge that we are carrying it. We have to observe the box or suitcase we didn’t notice was attached to us with a cool, non-judgemental witnessing. We must say tenderly, “Huh, you’re still here. You must need something of me. Let me set you down a moment while I go do some capitalism for my survival or attend to the other living creatures in my care. I promise to come back to you later and listen to your needs.”
What grief communicates is the longing. And while we feel discomfort from wanting and being unable to articulate what that want is, the longing is our way out. The longing, if we ask what it wants and are brave enough to listen, will show us the way. It will open the door to imagination, possibility, and creative solutions. Sure, the Buddhists say that not wanting — meaning getting to a state of full acceptance of what is and no desire beyond survival need — is THE path to freedom. There would certainly be less chance of climate catastrophe and fewer oil wars that are proxy wars disguised as means to keep citizens safe if we didn’t want all the meaningless things we desire.
But our hunger to endure, the very same energy that brings under-resourced humans to my door for free candy… THAT has always kept us going, kept us working together to figure out the path forward. We might lean into that now as people famished for freedom, peace, love, community, and acts of kindness. We are tired of grieving. I would like to remember myself again, to meet her where she’s at now. I’m ready to listen to her terms and negotiate this next leg of life. And I want to do that in a way that honours who I want to be, how I want to live, and what kind of world I want to live in.
Here’s a poem from this morning’s writing class to wrap up this moody-broody post. Have you tried poetry when feeling blue? I’ve found it often does the trick. Go forth and be loving, fellow tender-hearts.
Wow this is so beautiful and moving, Nadine. I'm with you ... celebrating holidays alone after a lifetime of parenting and then single-parenting is painful. Thank you for sharing this though...was a beautiful piece of writing to wake up to...grateful.
Oh honey - I feel this, so much. Sometimes I get hit with such grief that it takes my breath away. I get upset with myself, I should be grateful. This helped me remember the years and years of trauma that I pushed down to survive. I need to be kind to myself (and find a good therapist.)