NYMPHE: Childless, Childfree, Parent, Stepmom.

MOVING BEYOND GRIEF: Advice from Sugar

My blog nattering may be helpful now and again, but I'm no Sugar on The Rumpus. Freaking great, amazing stuff. This Sugar post discusses grief, miscarriage, depression, and abused teens---yet it is compassionate, practical, and realistic. It's not depressing at all.

Grieving? In the stuck place? Click that link and go read. Now. And here is a quote:

"You will never stop loving your daughter. You will never forget her. You will always know her name. But she will always be dead. Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live though it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends and other people who live on Planet My Baby Died can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you."

MOURNING WITH MARGARET

 Do you not know how bleeding
 Leaves your mind and guts unheeding?
 Bleed; you are not like man, you
 With your ripe pear contracting, are you?
 Hm. As the end grows nearer
 You may come to hold it dearer;
 Rich within, your secret din
 Sits muffled by your heart of tin;
 And yet you will take it on the chin.
 Now no matter, lady, the course.
 A pear can ride a horse.
 For this autumn you sent; it came
 in gusts ghosting, no name:
 It is the blight woman is torn for;
 It is the seed you mourn for.

        ---moi, miss tiffany lee brown
    (written in 120 seconds, part of my Two-Minute Poem of the Day series)

EXPLODING, FERTILE HEADS.

"On the other hand do not discount your Athena-like brainchildren that spring forth from your temples. They too can take a life of their own."

                        —my friend La M., to me, today

In many myths—and our dear friend Wikipedia can relate some of them to you—the "virgin" goddess Athena, goddess of wisdom, war, crafts, culty ritual goodness, and general kick-assiness, was born fully-formed from the head of Zeus. Whether she just popped out of there like a jack in the box or had to be hacked out of Zeus' skull by Prometheus or some other well-hung god is a matter of debate. Anyway. The image is clear: more than one way to birth something amazing.

She's also occasionally attributed with being an adoptive mom.

A SNIPPET FROM DIANA ABU-JABER

A friend emailed me this excerpt today.

From Diana Abu-Jaber's _The Language of Baklava_:

"Marry, don't marry," Auntie Aya says as we unfold
layers of dough to make an apple strudel. "Just don't
have your babies unless it's _absolutely necessary_."

... (keep reading...)