Grief in Unexpected Places

My nine-year-old daughter picked out a Slayer shirt for me at Hot Topic last week.  So other than my kid being objectively the coolest why am I bringing this up?  Because for me, and the way I see the world there is constant change even when things may be largely the same and I believe for many of us, this can be a lot harder to experience than we may initially realize.  While we certainly anticipate changes in our lives, often we get so lost in the bustle of the days and the stressors we have that we miss the small moments.  Hell, my kids ask to go to Hot Topic not just because I have been going there for 30 plus years and not just because they are badass kids, but because there are not really many toy stores left in existence.  Certainly not the massive stores devoted exclusively to toys like I grew up with.  Now it is usually a section in a retail store that sells mostly other things.  I miss the ability to take my kids strolling through a toy store watching as they see things they have never seen or played with.  In my own way, I am grieving the notion I built when my kids were first born that we could do that.  I see and hear this a lot from fellow parents regarding children, but this also comes up when we start a new relationship.

With raising kids there is always a struggle of wanting to see them grow up and become the people they are meant to be, but then there is also the pining for things that we take for granted.  While most of us celebrate the day we are done with diapers and I sincerely doubt there is much reticence about that period passing us by, there are always the harsh realities of at some point reading our kids their last bedtime story, or the last time we rock them to sleep.  We do not always realize it is the last time, and then it is gone.  There is a great web comic called Lunar Baboon that has a strip that ALWAYS makes me cry (admittedly they have a couple).  The one coming to mind is a father who is saying goodbye to his daughter (I read it as she is leaving like to go to college, or similar) and he remembers back to when she was an infant and how she was crying in his arms.  He recalls how he was wanting to have her be quiet and I think all of us can relate to those moments where we are tired of a crying baby and just want some sleep or mindless moments.  In the comic he asks the younger version of himself in his thought bubble if he wants him to take her for a bit.  The younger version of him says “hell yeah” and sits against the wall reading a book while the older version delights in getting to hold his kid again.  Pulling the comic up to write a description was enough to make me cry because I can relate so deeply to that feeling.

To me, there is a grief in moving on, even if we anticipate it.  I love who my kids are becoming, seeing their personalities, and having these interactions with them like when my daughter chose the shirt for me.  But I also grieve the fact that they are not these small nuggets I can cradle in one arm anymore, and that rocking them is significantly more of an effort than it used to be.  Related, the biggest reason I plan to keep lifting other than like health and longevity benefits its so I can pick my kids up and maybe even rock them into adulthood if they ask.  Mentally, I begged my kids to grow up, and now it feels like time is a train I cannot stop.  I love the process of seeing them become themselves but at times I am overwhelmed with sadness at having taken for granted those precious moments that I thought were the pits at some point, but now…well maybe they weren’t so bad.

We grieve moving on from the lives we expect or build in our mind.  The end of a relationship comes with grief that the future we have been imagining with that person will n ever come to fruition.  The trajectory of our career will not follow the path we mentally laid out when we leave one organization for another or branch out on our own.  None of these changes is loss in the sense we often associate the concept of grief, but there is indeed loss, and it can be hard to say goodbye to those thoughts we envisioned.  Letting go and recognizing that change was inevitable are not things we are usually taught or shown, and often we have to find our own path with these moments of grief.  Hell, in grieving death we at least will often have a funeral and some service to give us a sense of closure.  But in most of the changes in our life we don’t have that feeling of closure.  This is why I often encourage my clients to have a little ceremony to say goodbye to things, because it helps bring us a sense of closure.

So, while I think it is really cool that my kid picked out a Slayer shirt for me, and it may be a full circle moment, because my first one may have actually come from another Hot Topic 30 years ago, I also am saying goodbye to the time my kids were at their smallest, and the visions for shopping for fun things I had with them. Becoming a dad unlocked a much more emotional place in me, and I certainly am leaning into it more heavily, professionally, and personally both.  I hope if you are reading this that you are able to honor whatever it is you are feeling and recognize there is grief in a lot of spaces you would not anticipate.