On Sunday, March 25, 2018, we had to put our family pet to sleep.
I am a sober person. For me, this means I was really good at hiding from emotion. It didn’t matter whether a feeling was positive or negative. I didn’t want to be sober long enough to feel forced into it.
I have mentioned before that I have never been a picturesque representative of what healthy grieving should look like and I used to blame my inability to withstand grief on any scale on having suffered traumatic, unexpected, early, and unexplained loss as a child.
I have since learned that it was never any solitary circumstance that damaged my ability to endure turbulence. It seems that for several reasons, I never developed healthy coping mechanisms or any amount of foundational, emotional stability to scrape together any measurable amount of fortitude to get through any challenging life things.
Anytime I sensed instability coming or felt the unknown creeping in, I would hide. If I started to feel even a hint of loss or sadness, I hid. I hid when I felt any emotion, positive or negative.
This time, I didn’t hide and I didn’t want to. Which is great because after almost twelve years of sobriety that means that I have learned a thing or two and may have accidentally grown a little. I didn’t feel overwhelming pressure to run for the hills but there were a few things that I haven’t been able to stop thinking abo…..
Love-
For so many reasons I have grown to admire what love represents. To love and be loved is a courageous thing, and deeply crazy for people who struggle with vulnerability and facing uncomfortable emotions. To love and let yourself be loved, while also being a person in recovery is particularly badass, in my opinion. Not that it isn’t for everyone else, but specifically for sober people in recovery, it can be a really hard hurdle. For me personally learning to love freely and deeply has been terrifying but has been indicative of my emotional progress. To be deeply known and loved by a God who IS love, allows me the freedom to give that love away to the people in my life. I don’t always do it fearlessly, and never perfect, but I do it to the best of my ability anyway. For me, grieving hard means that I loved hard. When you love hard, you can always expect to hurt when you experience loss. So while it hurts, it hurts so good.
My kids are watching-
If I have taken one major lesson away from my own childhood absorb their environment. Of course, how much is left for debate, but they see us. They watch how we cope, respond, and react. I would rather my children not watch me spiral downhill and faceplant at the bottom of a dark, empty, pit every time life gets hard, or sad, or messy. It matters to me who they see when I am faced with adversity. I can’t change how they interpret things and I cannot make life perfect for them. I am not a perfect mom, (ask them!) but I am in control of the toxicity levels within the walls of my home. So, in this instance, I let authenticity rule the roost. I let them see me cry. Hard. They heard my voice shake during prayers to Jesus as I asked Him for His unwavering comfort and reminders to them of His promises and presence. I hope that they could see that it was totally okay to not be okay because that is how we deal when we come face to face with the unexpected. We stand firm and we cling to hope, and we walk through as slow as we need to, but we don’t run in the opposite direction.
Gratitude-
I am not sure it ever subsides, gratitude that is. I have had people tell me that it’s high time I let this all go, as in, this recovery stuff. I don’t know what the right response to that should be, but I know that my commitment and loyalty to this lifestyle and to my faith is a firm one. My life didn’t change by chance it changed because of God and because I chose my sobriety. That’s it. So to ‘let it all go already’ would mean to forget about what and who saved my life. My gratitude for this time of grief doesn’t feel out of place, as weird as it may sound. I feel so thankful to feel grief. I am still so thankful to have had the chance to be alive long enough to connect with people, or dogs, or any other living thing. I am thankful to know what it’s like to care about other people, people whose name isn’t Brittany. I can’t apologize for that or turn my back on the very road that led me to this place. Gratitude was part of my original program and it’ s ingrained in my recovery’s DNA. No matter how ‘old’ I get in the sober world, almost twelve-years-old or not, I still find that my gratitude carries me to the next right place doing the next right thing.
Like most parents out there I do my best and figure things out as I go along, but I do believe that my sobriety plays a huge role in the way that I parent. It isn’t that I want to lead a mistake-free journey as we raise these three young men, I simply want them to know that life has ups, downs, twists, turns, and peaks and valleys, but that is just it.
That is what its all about: Enjoying the journey and understanding that to build confidence and tenacity and bold courage, we have to face the hard things head on. We don’t have to do it alone, and we don’t have to run as fast as we can to get through it, but we do have to keep our heads facing forward, and sometimes facing something isn’t standing up to fight against it. Often, it means sitting back and accepting that it’s happening. Understanding that there are things in life that will happen that aren’t in their control. Believing that God takes us under his mighty hand, and shields us from what would kill us otherwise, protecting us from the bulk of the storm we are walking through at any given moment.
So here’s to deep and profound grief; the cost of loving boldly and connecting deeply. The giving and receiving of love is a gift and a such a beautiful responsibly.
