Are you my mother? Re-Calibrating After Loss

The people we love become part of us, and losing them means losing part of your identity.  Trying to adjust to life after loss means we often feel unsteady almost like a chair without a leg…we know we’re missing something and it’s hard to function correctly.  It’s normal to feel this way, and important to recognize what role the person played in our lives. Often loss makes that poignantly clear.  Grieving is essential.   However, learning how to function and re-calibrate after grieving is crucial to finding hope and healing after loss.  This is part of my story of re-calibrating after losing my mother.

Losing My Mother

I was living in Beijing, China when I received a phone call on a Saturday morning from my sister.  “Mom isn’t doing well—the hospice nurse thinks she only has a few days left.”  I hung up the phone.  My mother had been battling cancer for 4 years.  I knew she wasn’t doing well, but I hadn’t realized the end would come so quickly.  I was panicked I wouldn’t make it back before she slipped away.  I boarded a plane that morning and sobbed all 24 hours to Denver.  Bless my sweet seat companions.  Every time I had a layover, I called.  She’s still here.  I didn’t relax until I had her cheek to mine and I was squeezing her hand.

It was a bit of a shock to see her so gaunt and wasted and in a hospice bed in the middle of the living room.  The last time I had seen her, she and I had gone for a walk around the trails in our neighborhood.  Now just breathing was laborious for her.  Each night for the next 6 days I wondered if it would be her last.  I was lucky enough to get to minister to her—to rub her feet, to read her biblical text, to lay next to her, to laugh with her.  I tried to soak in every minute and detail of her presence up until the moment she took her last breath.   For more on losing my mom see  God Loves Broken Things:  Accepting our Brokenness.

I did not anticipate the emptiness and longing I would feel as I watched my mother lie lifeless on the bed or be wheeled out of our home.  The day of the funeral, I was numb.  People were so wonderful and so supportive, but it all seemed like a bit of a blur.  It seemed surreal that I was at my own mother’s funeral, shaking hands of people we loved, laying a flower on her casket. And then it was time to leave.  Her earthly remains disappeared.

Looking for My Mother

I knew she was gone, but I still needed her.  By default, I still kept going to the space she occupied for me emotionally and would find her gone.  I felt adrift and off-balance.  Some days I’d pick up the phone to call my mom…..and remember she wasn’t there.    I had always written little ideas or funny things I wanted to share with mom on post-it notes around the house to tell her next time I talked to her.  I found myself still writing them for a while.  But then I stopped.

My mother was my emotional calibrator.  When I needed encouragement or to laugh about something humiliating, I could almost hear her voice as she’d quote Anne of Green Gable, “Girl you do beat all.”   When I went home, I would re-charge my emotional and personal history battery. It helped me remember who I was and how I wanted to be.  But now I just slowly lost battery and wasn’t sure where to recharge.

Where should I look to find a model of the woman I wanted to be?  The mother I hoped to become?  She was gone.  I watched other women her age, but not having access to their thoughts and personal doings, I felt at a loss.

Are You My Mother?

I knew I still needed anchoring and mothering.  But I didn’t know where to find it.  I felt like the little bird in the PD Eastman children’s book, “Are you my mother?” At times I looked for her in others.   I sometimes tried to find her in my husband, my sisters, my dad, my friends.  They were all amazing, and sometimes they did fill her space in my soul for a moment. I read her journals, I read books I knew she had read and loved.  I made her recipes.  Other times I looked for her in my memories or in her legacy.  What would she do if she were here. Sometimes looking for her helped, but other times it made the empty space she had occupied feel larger and hollower.

Losing Me

I felt my new identity was wrapped up in her passing.  I felt disconnected from people who didn’t know about it.  Little things un-related to my mom felt heavier and harder.  I was irritated more easily with my family and others.  They were not my mother.  And I felt resentful they weren’t.  Of course it wasn’t their fault, or even mine—it was part of the grieving process.
It was a dark time.  I cried myself to sleep many nights.  The emotions would well up at strange times—like a song on the radio, or her handwriting sprawled on top of a recipe I was making that said “delicious.”

I remember sometimes the feelings were so raw it was difficult to own them.  I was a busy mom with a new baby, two older children with their own needs, I was preparing for an international move and trying to carry on with normal life responsibilities.  Life kept going, but the construct of life I had always depended on wasn’t there.  I had to keep going but with more heaviness.  Sometimes I would shove the difficult feelings down when I couldn’t process them. I wanted to process my grief.  I wanted to own it.  But part of me didn’t know how.

Significant days like Mother’s Day, the day of her passing, and her birthday were the hardest.  I remember sometimes being sick of the pain and wanting it to stop.  And, then other times not ever wanting to feel “over it,” as it seemed like that would diminish the significance of the loss.  I wanted to find my mother, but I didn’t know how.  For more on grief see  Hope Is the Thing: Getting Through Grief.

Finding New Mothers

I Found My Mother in Me
In this longing and looking for my mother, and often not finding her, I discovered something.  She was not the only source of love and strength and peace.  I realized I am stronger and braver than I thought.  But I had to walk farther than I’d ever walked before to know it.  In the midst of an international move to Mexico I found my mother—in me.  I remembered the grit she showed as she re-landscaped our front yard one summer, or walked herself into another chemo treatment.  But I had to summon the courage to try.  I found the courage and strength to walk by children to school past drug deals and guards with machine guns.  I found the courage to take my children to doctors in a foreign language and how to do white-knuckled Mexico City driving.

I Found My Mother in God.
I found that He is closer and more merciful than I knew.  But I had to reach out and remove the obstructions of pride and laziness preventing me from feeling his love.  I had my 3rd daughter just a few months after my mother’s passing.  I needed my mother.  I wanted her there.   The spirit helped replace the longing and acute pain with peace.   When I needed a confidant I began falling to my knees to pray to my father who loves me perfectly.  Isn’t that really our journey here anyway—to learn to fall to our knees?

I Found My Mother in Others.
I found that they are more loving and vulnerable than I expected.  But I have to let them come close to my heart and I have to change my expectations.  No one will ever fill that entire role.  But people can fill tiny bits of her.  When we arrived to Mexico City, we had no furniture.  My husband and I were ordering furniture for our home for the first time since we were married.  I scoured design websites and looked for deals.  I was so excited when it finally came—I wanted someone to be excited with me.  I called my neighbor downstairs and she came up to celebrate with me.  It was just a little space she held, but it was enough.

The absence of my mother, left a hollow part of me.  I still miss her fiercely.  I will never fully replace her, but in trying to fill that space, I have found so many mothers… a closer relationship to God, deeper friendships, courage, and so much personal growth.

Re-Calibrating After Loss

Mourning is something each of us do many times in our lives—not just when we lose someone we love, but when we lose a job, lose part of our health, move or a friendship changes etc.   It’s important to grieve and recognize the absence.  Often it is that noticing that gives us a deeper appreciation for what we’ve lost.  After those feelings have become less acute, it can be so healing to begin noticing the amazing compensatory blessings God places in our paths to help fill those spaces.  He does fill them.

Fill the Gaps

What loss have you experienced?

1.  Consider writing down how life has changed because of that loss, what is missing with that person or that thing gone?  It can be so healing to recognize what a significant contribution that person had.  Often it’s hard to fully realize without losing something.

2.  Can you see any way it has been filled in different ways?  If you aren’t sure, become curious and begin looking.  You may find some compensatory blessings.

Make Friends With Stress: How Our Beliefs About Stress Affect Us

Most people belief stress is a villain.  After all, it can increase your risk of a heart attack, it can decrease your effectiveness in a meeting or difficult conversation, and it can reduce our enjoyment of things.  However, new research suggests that it is not stress it’s self that is the villain, but how we think about stress that causes the problem.  In fact, in many cases stress could actually be beneficial.

Our Biological Stress Response

A few weeks ago, I had to teach a group of about 50 women.  Normally I really enjoy teaching, but it had been a busy week, and I had struggled with how to present the material.   As the time got closer, my heart began to pound, sweat collected on my palms and forehead, and my mind started racing. If felt stressed!

Biologically a lot happens to the body when we feel stress.  The brain (the hypothalamus) sounds the alarm system! It says, “Help, there’s emotional danger—gather the troops!” The body releases the hormones of cortisol, adrenaline and oxytocin.  When cortisol increases the blood glucose levels it stops non-essential emergency processes like digestion, growth, and the immune response. Adrenaline is also released; it increases the heart rate, blood pressure and energy.  Our bodies are incredible the way they are able to instantly gear up to meet a threat.

These responses won’t hurt us if they only occur occasionally, but if they are felt ongoing they create a host of problems.  This is why for years health professionals have told us that stress is bad for us. However, recent research has put that theory into question.

Is Stress Really Bad For Us?

Kelly McGonigal, a Stanford Professor and Health Psychologist, reveals some fascinating new research about stress in recent study that tracked over 30,000 Americans for 8 years.  The study tracked the amount of stress they had, their belief about stress and how many of them died. For people who had a lot of stress, the study showed that there was a 43% increased risk of dying. Think about it…if you’re stressed, your risk goes up by almost half!  BUT that was only true for people who believed that stress was bad for their health. Those who didn’t believe stress was harmful for their health had no higher risk of dying!

What You Believe About Stress Matters

So, put simply you decrease your risk of death from stress by 43% just by changing your thought about stress.  Did you catch that? That is powerful. You can reduce your body’s risk of dying from stress by changing a sentence in your brain! Wow.

In her book “The Upside of Stress,” Kelly McGonigal explains why this change in our perception about stress can be so powerful.  One of the hormones released during stress is called Oxytocin. This hormone has several stress reducing properties. First it reduces cortisol–which we mentioned earlier stops digestion, immune response and growth.  Oxytocin also relaxes your blood vessels which lowers your blood pressure and it can decrease physical pain due to it’s anti-inflammatory properties.

Isn’t it incredible how the body compensates for its own self-causing damage?  When people believe that stress is NOT harmful, more oxytocin is released. 

Benefits of Stress

In a study done at Harvard, study participants were taught several benefits of stress.  Then, the patients were purposely stressed while under observation. When patients thought about their stress positively, their heart still beat fast, but their blood vessels stayed open.   Kelly McGonigal explains that this biological profile looks like what our bodies do when they feel joy or courage. She says, “When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage.”

When we stress out about stress, it IS bad for our health.  However, when we choose to make friends with stress, it actually doesn’t harm us.  The best way to make friends with stress, is just by changing our thoughts about it.   

Stress Hard Wires Us For Connection

If you need more convincing, here’s one way McGonigal says stress can actually HELP us.   Again we can thank the hormone oxytocin. In addition to the other physical responses it creates, it also has emotional benefits.  Oxytocin increases your trust, empathy and your desire to connect with others. McGonigal states, “When you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience.”   Connection is one of the most significant determinants of happiness. Stress actually gives us a biological nudge to connect.

Another study that tracked 1000 adults in the US, showed an increased 30% risk of death for each stressful event that occurred.  BUT it also showed that those who spent time serving friends, neighbors and people in their community had 0% increased chance of death from their stressful events.   Our biology is literally changed when we reach out under pressure.

Connecting During Stress

This week as I stood in front the group of women, I confessed that I was feeling really nervous.  Immediately I received kind looks of affirmation and smiles. Their smiles gave me the courage to calm my nerves enough to present the way I had hoped.

Stress is only harmful if we believe it is.  I love Kelly Gonigal’s summation of stress, “Stress gives us access to our hearts.  The compassionate heart finds joy and meaning in connecting with others.”

Make Friends With Stress

What are you stressed about right now?

  1. Remind yourself that stress is good.  It is your body’s way of gearing up to deal with something challenging.  Just by believing this, you will create biological courage to handle the situation with more grace and wisdom.  
  2. Use that courage to reach out and make a connection. Ask your neighbor how they’re doing. Give your husband a hug.  Smile at someone. You’ll do yourself and them a favor by creating more oxytocin.

Here’s a TED talk by Kelly McGonigal discussing this idea more in depth.  How to Make Stress Your Friend.

 

Mental Gardening: How to Grow Happiness Anywhere

They way we feel is the product of what we think.  Just as with physical gardening, we plant seeds in our minds constantly.  Sometimes we choose them, other times we don’t.  However, whether a seed flourishes depends entirely on how we care for it.  In other words the way we think about something that happens will affect how much it grows and impacts us much more than the fact that it happened.  A productive yield of happiness requires both planting and nourishing gratitude and abundance as well as weeding and pruning  dissatisfaction and lack.   As we do we’ll find we can grow happiness anywhere.

The Law of the Harvest

My Dad loved to garden, and he put all of his daughters to work planting, weeding and watering each summer.  Frankly, I thought it was hot and boring a lot of the time; I tried to avoid it whenever I could. One of the pay-offs of our hard work was the tender, rich acidic flavor of red home-grown tomatoes that we picked on summer nights and ate for dinner.

A garden’s yield is directly correlated to the effort put into it.  I remember one summer when we were fairy lazy about watering. Then, we went on a family vacation and returned to find the garden sparse and mostly dried up.  I remember my sister running into the house sobbing because it meant there would be no home-grown tomatoes that year.

The law of the harvest states that we will reap what we sow.  If we want the home-grown tomatoes, we have to plant them, water them, and weed them.

The Law of the Harvest in our Minds

Because I grew up spending Saturday mornings with my fingernails buried in the dirt weeding and watering our backyard garden plot, I find particular poignancy in this quote by Sarah Ban Breathnach about the gardens in our minds.

“Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend… when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present— love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure— the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth.”

This quote hung on my refrigerator for a couple of years to remind me that the law of the harvest applies to my mind.  The thoughts I think are like seeds that germinate and grow into plants of feelings and actions and eventually yield the fruit of my overall happiness and relationships and contribution in the world.  I determine my yield by the thoughts I choose, and the paradigms I tend and cultivate.

I love the concept that at any time, there are two mental gardens existing at the same time.  In any situation, relationship or even with our own self-image, there is always abundance and there are always things lacking.  It’s easy to feel that our external situation is the cause of our lack. However, ANY situation has abundance and lack simultaneously.  The abundance we feel is directly correlated to how diligent we are in tending the abundant thoughts and allowing the gardens of lack to shrivel up and die.

 

Mental Gardening Around the World

My husband is a diplomat, which means our family gets to move frequently to various places around the world.  When we embarked on this lifestyle I was optimistic about the many ways we could serve and the blessings it would have for our family.  I love to travel, explore new places, try new foods, and experience how different cultures do things. I hoped to broaden my children’s minds.

Tending My Garden of Lack

The reality of life abroad however, brought many challenges.   I discovered that even the smallest daily tasks were harder than I had experienced in the United States.  The water wasn’t safe, so we had to use purified water to brush our teeth and get a drink. We had to bleach all of our veggies and fruits to kill bugs and bacteria.  Finding simple items was an epic challenge; there was no Target or Office Depot like I was used to. One day I remember spending over 7 hours driving around the city looking for paper clips and came home empty handed.   The difference in time zones made it difficult to call home, and our internet was slow and cut out frequently. I can remember sometimes having to call 6 or 7 times just to make it through a short conversation with a sister.   

Driving was challenging.  Many of the streets were not marked, and not knowing the language made it difficult to ask for directions. There were times I spent hours lost and driving around with a crying baby in the car.  Traffic was oppressive–one time it took me over 3 hours of white knuckled driving to get my children to school.  They struggled with bilingual schools; they felt overwhelmed in an environment where they understood nothing.  There were no libraries, and the pollution was so bad it often prohibited going to the few rusty parks nearby. Medical care was not always optimal, and sometimes it was in a foreign language.

On difficult days, I would compare my experience there with the idealized life in America I imagined…the mini-van, the cul-de-sac, walking to elementary school, clean water, and the list goes on.  When I compared my life abroad to this, things seemed difficult and unfair. Without even realizing it, I began to tend my mental garden of scarcity. The more I noticed how much harder life was, the more I collected evidence of the challenges in my life and my resentment about our lifestyle grew.  My garden of scarcity grew and began to take over some of the real estate in my garden of abundance.

My husband and I accepted a posting in Hawaii–I did finally get a little home with a yard on a cul-de-sac.  We could brush our teeth in clean water, shop at Target and my kids could speak English in school. I could communicate easier with my extended family.  I had all the things I had dreamed about in an American life. My ideal of life on a cul-de-sac—while wonderful had just as many challenges as my life abroad.  They were just different. We lived in a small home, abundant with bugs! We had no A/C and it was oppressively hot. The schools were not as stimulating as our previous experience and everything was SO expensive.  My children still struggled, but with different things. I still felt discouraged and frustrated. And, I found I missed many of the wonderful things about our ex-pat life.

Tending Abundance

I realized it didn’t matter where I was–there would always be lack as well as abundance.  I was focusing on where I was, trying to get to the right place–thinking that the abundant garden was an actual physical place or situation–I realized it wasn’t.  The abundant garden is in our minds. We get the abundant garden by the positive thoughts we plant and nourish by intentionally focusing on. Lack will always be present as well.  But we dry out that garden as we give it less attention.  

With this shift in my understanding of abundance, I began to see my life in a new way.  The challenges didn’t evaporate, they stayed the same, but I began to notice the abundance in my life and focus on that.  I could walk to the beach! My children could go slip-and-sliding in the backyard and we could be outside year round! There were breathtaking hikes just minutes away.  We made some wonderful friends and we had lots of family come and visit. Hawaii became my garden of Eden…not because of where or what it was, but how I thought about it.

Similarly as we’ve moved abroad again, I have found a life full of abundance in our ex-pat life as well.  The difficult things of living outside of the US are still part of our life. There is still traffic, food and sanitation issues, and language barriers.  None of that has changed. At times I get frustrated by them, but I’m learning to prune those thoughts and not allow them to overtake my garden of all the abundant things I do love about our life.  When those thought arise, I just allow them to pass through, but don’t let them take root. I try to think of the inconveniences as part of the package deal that comes with so many benefits for our family.

I spend a lot more time noticing the amazing education my children are getting, nurturing relationships with other ex-pat women who have lived all over the world, and relishing our family outings on Saturdays to ruins, natural wonders and historical treasures.  I try to stop and notice things; the other day I saw a man riding a bicycle stacked high with cardboard boxes several times taller than himself riding through a developed intersection full of cars. I thought about how fascinating this life is–and how amazing it is to have a car to drive.

This mental gardening has helped my emotional garden of abundance to grow and has helped to prune back my garden of lack. It has indeed caused “the wasteland of illusion to fall away, and allow me to experience Heaven on Earth.” (Or at least moments of it. 😉

Tend Your Garden of Abundance

What area of your life do you want to improve?  

When you think about that area, what is in your emotional garden of lack?  What about your garden of abundance?  Tend the garden you want to grow.  Nourish the thoughts of abundance by thinking of them often, talking about them, writing them down.  Acknowledging the lack is fine, but dwelling on it will diminish the sense of abundance.