Learning How to Grieve the Life I Lost
Several months ago I was sitting in a small, square room talking to my counselor about the sheer weight of all the roles I have. Life is so fast paced with two high-energy toddlers. Motherhood comes with stress, imense responsibility, and endless feelings of needing to do more. The weight of motherhood is heavy.
As I sat there and professed the lack of peace I felt, he picked up on something that I had never noticed. I am a 27-year-old suburb living wife and mother of two. I got married right out of college and had babies shortly thereafter. I’ve lost touch with friends I truly care about because our lives are just so different right now. Over the last handful of years since we graduated from college, they’ve been out living the typical twenty-something lifestyle, while I’ve been portraying my best rendition of “The Real Housewives of Middle Tennessee.”
Now let me follow up that biography with some very important truths:
I am so incredibly happy with my life.
I feel abundently blessed and proud of the family I have built.
I would never trade my life for theirs or anyone elses.
Simultaneously, there is one aspect of their lives that I can become insanely envious of:
FREEDOM.
Oh how I long to feel free again. My goodness, can you imagine? Gosh, they have such a privilege to be selfish - living on their own terms with no one else to answer to. Let’s daydream…
You’ve had a long, hard day. You get to go home and lay down. Binge watch a show. Forget about the chores if you want to. And all without feeling like you’re missing a rare opportunity to spend quality time with your spouse.
You are making dinner and realize you don’t have an ingredient. You need to go to the store to grab it. And you just… go. And then come home all within like fifteen minutes because you’re not loading bodies in and out of carseats and mitigating shopping cart metldowns.
It’s 9:00pm. You need something from Target and won’t have much time to get it tomorrow. You decide to just go tonight. Afterall, there are no babies asleep in the next room, putting you on home arrest until another supervising adult can take over.
It’s the weekend. You’re feeling a little extra tired from the week. So you sleep in. Until your body wakes itself.
You go to church. Last minute, someone asks you if you’d like to join them for brunch afterwards. What a relaxing and joyful proposition. You go and you socialize, enjoying a nice meal with friends. No worries of impending nap times or the lack of a family-friendly atmosphere.
You want to read a book. You just pick it up and read it.
A friend invites you out for a girls night. That’s a simple yes. No need to rifle through childcare contacts and budget out the added expenses of literally buying yourself some time.
I can see it y’all. In fact, my early twenties are so fresh I can still feel it. And while I would never trade the life I have, I sure do miss the freedom.
My counselor looked at me that day and he told me,
“It’s okay to grieve the life you don’t have anymore.”
Woah. What did he just say? Grieve? Geez, heavy much? No one died dude.
But in fact, someone did. The old me died and took my old life with it. And I had just continued on living as if nothing had happened.
The truth is, while I love my life and I love being “wife” and “mom,” I don’t love everything that comes with those roles. I don’t love the extra weight I carry on my shoulders to make sure everything is running smoothly at all times. I don’t love the constant stress I feel to be a good wife to my husband and a good mother to my kids - the stress of showing up as my best self to everyone around me.
When life starts getting crazy and I start to wonder what the heck is my life right now and how in the world did I get here, I remind myself to pause for a moment and grieve the person I used to be, the life I used to have, and the sheer weight of my roles and responsibilites right now. It reminds me that I don’t have to love everything that I’m required to do right now, and that helps. Not every aspect of this life is beautiful. Much of it is hard and ugly. But when I allow room in my life for mourning, in turn it reminds me that the beauty of my current life far outweighs the grey.