Dealing with grief

It's been 2 years since my mother died, and I still have moments of intense grief. It's just the way it is. There are moments when I still break down crying, even though I have a strong religious faith and a deep core belief in the resurrection hope held out in the bible.

There are a lot of grief management books, websites, and support groups out there. Lots of acknowledgment that people need to grieve, that suffering loss is a healthy thing, that there are many stages of grief, that not feeling or showing grief is unnatural and creepy, yada yada.

Yeah, so?

So two weeks ago I saw a new doctor, and on the initial visit while explaining what types of work I have done that may have led to some of the health problems I now suffer I broke down in tears when telling him about my mother's illness and death. He then offered me the phone number to a counselor and told me I obviously had some unresolved issues I needed to deal with. He may be right, and I did take the number, but my appointment was also almost exactly on the anniversary of my mother's death... Why wouldn't I cry over her loss? While my religious faith makes her loss easier to bear, it is still a loss. Old age, illness, and death are ugly, why is it wrong or unacceptable to show grief over these things?

I think that society today is very good at labels, professed concern, and intellectualizing feelings, but very poor at actually having them or dealing with them in real time.

Just Don't Get Hurt

I always tell my kids 'just don't get hurt, cause I'm not taking you to the emergency room!'

Why would I say a thing like that?

Have you taken a kid to the ER in the last few years?

If you have, you know exactly what I'm talking about! "So, honey, what really happened?" being the operative sentence, asked repeatedly and at length, with accompanying suspicious looks at the family.

When my youngest was about 6 he and his older brother were wrestling around in the living room while I made dinner, when the little guy started crying pretty hard and holding his arm clutched to his chest. We quickly decided this was something that required care, so we drove him to the ER, where we did the obligatory 4-hour wait. He was x-rayed, and finally we were told he had a condition known as 'nurse-maid's elbow' which is usually caused by an adult yanking on an uncooperative young child's arm. It's more common in preschool children. You've seen what leads to it, it's that thing that makes you just shiver when you see impatient parents/caregivers haul a little child through midair, flailing and screaming down the aisles of the local grocery store. It causes a partial dislocation of the elbow. It was easily remedied, thank goodness, but it was overshadowed by the adversarial attitude of the hospital staff.

I applaud the caution that doctors and nurses take with children in the ER, don't get me wrong, but there's a point at which it becomes over the top after repeated questioning, suspicious looks, and just plain old 'attitude' on the part of young doctors on their first rotation through a hospital. Despite what these barely-out-of-school-themselves people believe, parents who don't watch their children every second are not neglectful or bad parents. Kids are people, they move fast, they do goofy things, and when they're boys they usually have a bad case of  'look ma! no hands!!' to freak their parents out with.

It's sad enough to live in a world when the first thought we have when we see evidence of an injury is that it must be someone else's fault, especially the person that should love that child the most, but please give us enough credit that we don't have to stop and think twice about taking our kids to the doctor when they need it.

Wow..

Looked at my last post, and realized I totally lost track of time, and a lot of my fun. Well, it's time to start again.

Recently I bought a new camera, a Nikon D5000, very intent on gaining knowledge of running this thing after a couple of years without a camera in my hands. My old Minolta Maxxum 7000s were getting creaky and temperamental, and since I'm often in a situation when I have to have the shot NOW, I stopped having fun and put them away. I gotta say, the Nikon is fun! When I first brought it home it made me very testy, as there were no simple dials and knobs, just menus, but I'm getting there. Anyway... the point is that I was so overwhelmed by doing it "right" that I lost fun. Come on, most of us have been unemployed entirely too long and life is getting serious. We're exploring options that we would never have thought of before, and that reflection of hopelessness that is surrounding our world can often affect our personalities and playtime. Everything just turns brown, and we forget to look up and see the beauties surrounding us in creation. Everything becomes about making money, spending money, should we spend money, justifying the spending of money... Yeah. You know.

So I brought home this toy because I have a nephew getting married in a few months, and I'm the family's designated photographer. First thing I did was head to the library for a stack of wedding and portraiture books. Then I started sweating. Ooooo, gotta do it right, gotta be perfect... and forgot the nice work I'd done before with the geriatric Maxxums. All I could do was find fault. It wasn't technically perfect, it wasn't amazing, but my victims--um, subjects--were happy with how I made them look. Then I found this awesome book. "Mastering Photographic Composition, Creativity, and Personal Style" by Alain Briot. I have to say it brought me back to myself. It explores photography as inspiration, creativity, vision. It's an artist's photography book. Love it. (BTW, that's not a paid link, don't freak out)

So now we're having fun. The kids are half way between sick of being photographed, and hunting me down to take shots of their latest exploit. Now I just have to mentally prepare myself to walk away from the call to perfection and just let some creativity flow. Between picking up socks, washing dishes, feeding the dogs.... ;)