A Little Bit a' Bitter Goes a Long Long Way

At the squealing, shuddering, slow-motion end of my last relationship, my then-partner looked at me with a mixture of what appeared to be disgust and disappointment, and remonstrated, "Oh Kate, don't be bitter." Immediately, I felt like a child being reprimanded for bad behavior, for indulging in a coarse, despicable emotion that had no place among the wise or the mature. I had coughed up a tight-throated comment, both snide and resigned for which I was being chastised.  Wishing to retain some semblance of self-respect, I gathered up the little wounding shards of my agony and sighed, weakly faking a smile, trying to make myself look brave.
    At first, for months, the thought repeated itself, "Kate, don't be bitter" and so I was not. Instead, I was awash in my own living colors.  I was vacant, raw, tremulous, a blur of myself.  I lost 15 pounds and still could not eat.  Bread turned to ash in my mouth, soup tasted like bile. An acquaintance casually told me not to worry about it. She said that I was too busy digesting the past, and resolving the present to take anything into my body.  She said that the feeling would pass, and that my appetite would return. But I felt as if something wasn't working.  In dealing with loss, I was forcing myself to be gentle; I was taking the blame; I was practicing compassion; I was actively understanding, but I was empty, edgeless, skinned.  I was raw and I felt ill.  It occurred to me that because I was having a hard time digesting the past, I couldn't savor the moment.  Intellectually, I knew that life was too short to be wasted.
      In an effort to return to a more balanced self, I began seeking the help of Naturopaths and healers because though part of my problem was my body, the other part appeared to be rooted in my emotions.  I went to acupuncture and was silently ministered to twice a week for two months.  I read about tinctures and supplements. I wanted my strength back and somewhere in my research I happened upon the uses, both modern and ancient, of bitters.  Immediately I took notice because I was still trying to ward off my own emotional bitterness. That bitters are used medicinally struck me as funny at first and then later as profound.
       In my studying, I learned that bitters have long been used in folk medicine to aid in digestion. From everything I read, it appeared that bitter foods might be the remedy to my diminished appetite thereby solving some of the physical symptoms of my malady. I found that mustard greens, radicchio, wormwood, endive, arugula, dandelion greens, chamomile tea, calendula flower, licorice root--all of these were part of the ancient food-wisdom associated with digestion.
       I read that, now, because so many modern-day diets are deficient in bitter foods, these important plants are prescribed as potent tinctures to remedy what more or less can be described as pain in the gut.  Bitter tinctures ostensibly allow people to make use of the food traveling through the intestine, to absorb what is useful and be rid of the rest by increasing the production of bile in the stomach, healthy acids, necessary for digestion.
       I began to think of my former relationship as a heavy meal full of the wrong kinds of food from which I was now sick.  I thought of my desire for some form of sweetness to finish it off (a sure sign that something is missing), and the terrible lack of satisfaction I felt. I thought of my body's own wisdom when, all those months ago, it turned to bitterness as a way of digesting hard facts. And so, I  have come to believe, bitterness has it's important place in our emotional lives, and it applies to all loss: Bitterness is sometimes necessary to digest indigestible emotions. Bitterness gives one the space to move on, to swallow that unthinkable thing and begin the slow work of chewing on the hard facts of our losses.
       It appears that early people knew something of the matters of moving on, of passing through agony of the gut by tasting a little bit of bitterness. It  seems right to me that the natural, external world should parallel the internal, that to pass through what is causing your emotional gut to wring itself out, to knot, might be the small dose of bitterness that allows you to say, "He wasn't worth it"; or "He's dead to me"; or to allow yourself to laugh that sardonic, hard, little laugh, that this might allow you to create space between yourself, and the hurt.
      Since the loss of my pregnancies, I have revisited the notion of bitterness, of its danger and it's usefulness. I have spoken to other women who are waging a battle against their own bitterness, or are trying desperately to hide it, or are being chastised for it. It occurs to me again with a sort of clarity: emotions are like ecosystems, they are beautiful and balanced when they are most diverse so, of course bitterness has it's place. But, you can't be only bitter. Too much of anything is poisonous, it robs the body (or the ecosystem), of its fine balance, its complexity.
     Even sweetness, a life of pure pleasure can lull a person into a sort of over-feasted torpor, a half-sleep that knows nothing but the desire to continue feeding.  Similarly, bitterness alone for too long will corrupt one's view of the world--it's true. But, experienced in small doses (as bitters are taken medicinally) acknowledged as part of the process, I believe a little bit of bitter can help heal, or at least help begin the process by making the indigestible digestible so that you can once again savor the sweetness of the world.

The Important One

Five weeks after I lost my second baby a woman who is a "Channeler" (one who makes contact with spirits or "guides") by trade, asked me if I wanted her to check in with my guides about why I had lost the babies.  My immediate, internal reaction was no, but I said instead, "Okay, sure." I don't know why I agreed. I don't know if it was because I have been trained to be polite, or whether I believed that being "open" meant that I was strong. It was complicated by the fact that this woman is a relation of sorts to my family and perhaps that is why I felt compelled or obligated to allow her to speak with me.

That said,  I knew enough to be aware that the thread of security, of acceptance, I was holding onto regarding the loss of my babies was the fragile and yet magnificently formed belief that my losses were not personal--that babies are lost not because we deserve loss, or have done something wrong but because life is a momentum, it is the sea and not the waves we come to understand as the vast kinetic energy of life; the sea is one great moving body and not a composite of separate shorelines or breaking waves. I had accepted the fact that, as part of nature, I too was bound to laws of expansion and contraction, sudden profound growth, and unexplainable diminishment. I was consoled by the fact that there is no meaning but the meaning that we make of our lives. I found kinship in the world, my lost babies like waves, like weather, like small seasons, not catastrophes or mishaps but part of all that is mysterious, cyclical and unknowable.  I don't mind mystery.  I abhor reduction. As I said, the belief was crystalline, but fragile, as I was still so vulnerable, so deeply sad.  I knew better than to expose myself to someone else's meaning-making, but I betrayed my own intuition.

On the appointed morning, five weeks after the loss of my second pregnancy, three days after agreeing to talk to the channeler but having no notion of what to expect, I sat in my car on a rain-drenched street holding my cell phone to my ear. At the scheduled time I received her phone call. She asked me a few questions regarding motherhood and my feelings about it and then told me that she had already checked in with my guides. I should have stopped her right there but I didn't. I sat in silence as she proceeded to read me a report of their communication. 

As one might guess, the report held plenty of reasons for my unsuccessful births, including rather horrific actions in my past life as well as my current, subconscious inability to forgive myself for those actions.  The result, she told me, was a belief I held without knowing it, that I don't feel worthy of motherhood.

Into the silence, I started sobbing. 

I wanted desperately to get off the phone but couldn't speak. I wanted to say that I had betrayed myself by agreeing to this phone call, but all I could do was choke out broken answers to her continued prompting. I felt complicit to my own violation and this felt worse than almost anything she could say. Why had I agreed to this? What good did I think would come from this? I hadn't wondered why I couldn't have babies. 

She continued to tell me that I could be good again if I could forgive myself, if I told myself I was worthy of motherhood. She asked me if I could do this important work.  Instead of hanging up I choked out a ragged answer like, "Sure, what is life for anyway?" and she heard my sarcasm and was not convinced. She pushed me further.  "You understand about reincarnation? You must keep your heart open. This is your chance to do the work," she told me. 

Fine, I said, Fine. Paralyzed, I felt like a trapped child, my mind shutting down until I could be free of the conversation.  Finally, still unconvinced, she sighed"Call me if you have any questions, if you need any help." 

Driving home I howled. My knuckles whitened gripping the the steering wheel. Over and over I repeated no, no, no as my heart worked to shut out one person's story of my loss. I fired my hypothetical "guides," should they exist, for "speaking" with anyone but me. If there is information pertinent to my soul's journey, then I will accept it only if it is accessible to me directly. If it is not, I assume it is not for me--all of this began burning through the ruptured center of my mind--a wild blaze.

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Later that day I attended an already scheduled acupuncture appointment.  I walked into the office fierce and clear with indignation searing my insides with what felt like white heat. This was a new kind of clarity.  I would not longer allow others offer information to me about my life--and certainly not gurus. I was Athena, fierce, and certain.

My lovely, gentle acupuncturist listened. Hmmm. Nodded. Commiserated. I relaxed.

"You have a lot of aggressive energy around this. Let's see if we can release it." Trusting her, I agreed. She stuck what felt like 20 needles down my spine and left me to rest. 

When she returned to remove the needles, I did feel different. I felt washed out, empty, dull, bleak, miserable.

I left the office exhausted, stripped of everything: my clarity, my peace of mind, my anger and my story. But I wanted my anger, I thought, and now it's gone. My anger had arisen to protect me I realized, a temporary shield to separate me from the unwanted information, from the reasoning of meaning-makers but I could not reinvent it, reignite it however I beckoned.

The trauma of listening to this narrative was cataclysmic and, no longer protected by my own rage, it seeped in, gas-like, silent and invisible.  My trust and acceptance, the purity of my sadness, was lost in spite of my best efforts to shut out the details of what I had been told. The vault of my heart closed, the heavy doors shutting on their dark hinges and only silence followed.

I have been in quiet rebellion since then, against the notion of deserving.  I have anger at the idea that deserving has anything to do with bearing a child and yet the notion seems pervasive.  I don't believe the notion of deserving at all, nonetheless, it is hard to be surrounded by so many people who want to explain unexplainable events, who want to give meaning to loss or tragedy. It takes great skill to shut out these narratives and to choose one's own. This challenge alone has has silenced me for months.  I have wanted to protect myself from those who would attempt to explain me to myself or ask me for a reason for my losses (do you think you weren't ready?).

As the months passed I tested myself by wondering, Well, if her story was true, could I live with it? What do I think about redemption? Do I think the universe is a system of checks and balances? How do I feel about "healers" offering their services unsolicited? What good do stories from supposed past lives do? Isn't there enough material from this life? Don't many of us struggle with themes of deserving? 


And finally, Am I strong enough to withstand accusation, real or fictitious and practice fidelity toward myself? My answer, ultimately, was yes.

Isn't is strange that believing something isn't enough? We must act faithfully towards our beliefs, we must reflect on them, question them, alter and finally affirm them. Believing, in the best sense, is active not static. Believing is not a resting place but a practice in self-knowing and world-knowing.

Spring comes. My heart begins, like the plants, to unfurl its leaves to reveal foliage and blossom, to beckon the bees.  The hurt ebbs away.  I am not angry nor do I feel fragile anymore.  Winter is good for that; it provides the heart dormancy, lets it be nourished in the blind darkness.

I am not bitter at other people nor have I been. I love seeing pregnant women and children.  I no longer find it strange that every third woman I see is ripely endowed with a round belly or carrying a beautiful child, but I am bitter about human limitations, lack of compassion, need for meaning-making. Have not the great travesties of history taught us that heinous crimes are not exacted because the victims were deserving? Have not terrible tragedies occurred that have no meaning, no lesson, besides the lesson of endurance?

I want to walk into the achingly bright world with wonder.  I want to see myself among the living, part of a spectrum of experience, free of what if, because, or any other conditional phrase of deserving. There is freedom out there in not knowing, in not needing to know, just ask the trees, the mountains, the rivers.

I want other women to know that we can't afford to let other people dictate our stories, or interpret the text for us.  We are our own best narrators--these are our stories to tell. It is our own work to do.  If we want the clarity of someone else's perspective, fine, but we must seek it and seek it with care and discernment. Afterall, aren't we are our own best sources of wisdom, lonely as that might be?

It cannot matter what others believe to be the source of our losses or our maladies.  Rather, we must decide what to make of the circumstances of our lives, choose what we wish to learn, be our own gurus, and as Polonius in Hamlet said, "To thine own self be true."

Fermaldahyde

Today the high school science class across the hall from the room where I was substitute teaching was dissecting stillborn piglets; they were 8 inches long and had little arm buds.  I wanted to throw up.

Spring's Return

I haven't written for a long time because poetry escapes me. I still want a baby.  It's been a quiet winter. I read the book Ahab's Wife and dreamed of swimming with whales which felt like flying underwater. All winter, while I slept, I would join the whales, leave the world above to join the blue, quiet power of the deep water.

My sadness about the loss of my pregnancies was buried for so many months that when it did well up, it didn't even look like sadness, it looked like dissatisfaction with my life, like snarly, wolfish teeth-gnashing. I'd feel my body tightening, my mind stalking around to find something to criticize, then someone would say something really kind to me and I would just start crying. Every time it took me by surprise.

As spring unfolds, thrashes, and shines, as the days lengthen, I notice I am saying my baby's name to myself.  I don't think of her as a little angel hovering over me or even as a person--she wasn't but a possibility--still, I feel her as a familiarity within me. Sometimes, this familiarity and I are accompanied by my memories (my fondness?) for my dead grandmother. I'll say to her, "I miss you. I miss your tile floor and the smell of your cigarettes, the sight of cowbirds in the orange trees; I miss watering your petunias, the sound of the filter running and snaking in your swimming pool. I miss your scratchy handwriting, and your long face, your beautiful hands." I might pause. "Do you know about my lost babies?"

Before she passed, my grandmother told me that she talked with her own mother, gone two decades, daily. "We're as close as ever," she told me. To my grandmother, conversations with her own mother served as a kind of prayer.  I think my conversations with my lost-child-presence and my grandmother are the same.  Afterall, to whom would I pray? I don't know who my god is: god of light, god of seasons, god of births and deaths, god of chaos and destruction, god of renewal...but I know that it feels good to converse with the unseen and so I continue to do it often and softly.

Roses

Last night I dreamed that a woman, larger than me, more abundantly built with thick arms, a full waist and large breasts, was near an altar in a darkened church. She was preparing  a baptismal font for the christening of her baby. She was filling the font through a narrow slot just beneath the lip of the bowl which rested on a simple wooden pedestal. As the water poured in, it surrounded and lifted a "cake" of rose petals resting at the bowl's center. As the "cake" of pressed and fragrant scarlet petals lifted with the rising water it began to break apart, petals floating on the surface and within the water. I watched her as if from the shadows, as if from a tandem world, admiring her silent purpose.
        The water continued to rise, almost filling the ceramic bowl. As it neared the rim, an aged priest entered, informing the woman that she was filling the wrong font. The one she was filling was for lost, not living, babies. In that moment, a moment of slow horror, as the recognition of her error registered on her face, I realized that it was in this font that my lost babies had been washed out of the world.  I remembered them, small, brown and delicately formed.
        The woman, in terrible dismay, began sobbing, crying out that she had beckoned the wrong fates. I felt helpless to protect her from her fear that her child was now in danger. I felt a searing agony for her sudden sense of threat, arriving in a moment of such soft, quiet and careful beauty.

Tiny, Hard Little Heart

My uterus has shrunk back to its normal size, but I still feel soft in the middle, as if there is space there, pliant and vacant.  I have been seeing an acupuncturist for over a year now, first to support the pregnancy, then to help me get over the loss, and then again to support the second pregnancy, and then again, the loss.  This week I went because it hurts to take a deep breath.

For the last 10 days have I felt nothing, nothing at all after having lost the pregnancy. People can't believe how strong I am. I seem to be moving on.  I felt strangely fine and report this to my acupuncturist. Sitting in the quiet privacy of the treatment room I tell her the whole story of losing the baby.  I can hear my words enter the air and drop like stones onto sand. It's as if I am reporting facts about someone else. I watch her surprise, how it enters and involves her face, changes just slightly the way she is sitting so that she is leaning forward as if to hear more clearly, as if to comprehend better what I am telling her. Her shock and dismay are curious to me to me and I think, Wasn't this an inevitability? This hard fact? This quiet fate?

There is something about her sincerity that induces a softening, my insides feel like they are beginning to liquify, like I am filling up with water.  I can hear a thickening in my voice as I explain the events. "I can't feel my heart," I say finally. She stills herself almost imperceptibly and nods, leans back. She lets my talking wind down and then takes my pulse. "You're right," she said, "Your heart's pretty disconnected from the rest of your body."  She leaves the room and returns, moments later, with needles. She administers the needles into two points: one in the deep, tender part of my armpit, and the other three ribs down to the left of my heart just far enough so that I can feel the warm pulsation that means she has tapped into my chi, the life-giving force that flows like a matrix of rivers throughout the body. She follows the same procedure on the right side of my body and then leaves me to rest.

The moment the door closes, I begin sobbing.  The sobs came from some dark distant place in my body thundering into the quiet room. Somewhere in the building someone turns on a vacuum cleaner. My body shakes and convulses. Slowly, the sobbing subsides  so that, empty and ragged, I do rest.

When my acupuncturist returns quietly clicking open the door, I explain my wet cheeks, and bloodshot eyes. She nods, "The points we worked on today, connecting the heart and the spleen are often disconnected by shock." So this is not strength I guess. This is denial.

I leave the office feeling as if my joints have been disconnected from my body, like everything has been washed out of me. I don't feel better. In fact, I feel worse.

Days pass. Without the shock, I have only sadness to carry around and it is not elegant or beautiful. It doesn't look strong. It is not impressive. Truthfully I'd rather skip this hurting part because I have already done it once, not so long ago for another baby. I don't want to feel it all again, but I'm afraid I have no choice. I cannot skip the steps of grief and if I try I think that it may infect my life, slowing welling up, hindering my ability to feel other things, like pure joy, like contentment. So I have begun looking at my grief, feeling it, trying to take care of it tenderly as if my sadness were my baby and needed me. Hello sadness, I say to myself. Hello baby. I have even begun to imagine that I might hurt the sadness by denying it, and maybe then I would also be denying the life that was beginning inside of me. So I let the grief live with me for now, for as long as it lasts, hoping that in doing so, I am making room for whatever lies ahead.

Rainier Maria Rilke--10th Elegy

That someday,
at the close of this fierce vision
I may sing praise and jubilation to assenting angels!
That my heart's clear-striking hammers won't fail
to sound from landing on slack, doubtful or broken strings!
That my streaming face might make me more radiant
That my humble weeping might bloom.
Oh, nights that I weeped through, how much you will mean
to me then. Disconsolate sisters, why did I not kneel
more fervently, bending to receive you, and lose myself more
in your loosened hair? 
How we squander our sorrows,
gazing beyond them into the sad wastes of duration
to see if they have an end.
But they are our winter foliage,
our dark evergreens,
one of the seasons of our interior year,
-and not only season,
but place,
settlement,
lair,
soil,
home.