Uncontrollable Weeping and Chronic Sorrow

Sparrow:

I’m going to begin this post by relating a funny, though not funny, event that happened recently in my life, and by extension yours, in order to share something that I think will benefit you, and many of our readers:

Just before Christmas, as I reported to you in emails and to our readers via this blog, I ended a relationship with someone that I had come to feel strongly for. I felt sad and confused by the breakup and, in order to alleviate the pain, I threw myself into Christmas prep with fervor. The day after the breakup, I bundled myself up and, with intent to “wipe it out of my head”, I went to Farm Boy, a local fruit and produce store, to stock up on food for an impending visit from my Father for the holidays. I stepped up to the butcher counter and placed an order for 2lbs of ground pork to make a traditional Tourtiere for Christmas Eve. To the horror of everyone around me, right there and then, I started to cry.  I wasn’t openly sobbing, but I was crying, and trying hard to wipe the tears away. The more I wiped, the more the tears came and they kept coming: unbidden, uncontrolled, unwelcome. 

Suddenly, the idea of me crying in front of the butcher made me laugh. I realized the ridiculousness of it all and I couldn’t hold back the laughter, much as I couldn’t hold back the tears! I got control of myself, paid for my groceries without any further incidence and “hightailed” it to the car where I called you in a state of emotional panic. I cried long and hard the moment I heard your voice and you were so gentle and caring, cooing in your beautiful British accent and letting me just spill it all out, though I claimed I didn’t want to talk about it. God, we laughed hard at the people passing by staring at me as I openly wept in the car!

We both realized, in that conversation, that while I was sad over Ikea Man, this wasn’t the problem. The sad that I felt, (as my eldest daughter pointed out, not unkindly), was disproportionate to the length of time I had cared for this person. I quickly understood that my sadness wasn't completely attached to the breakup. Don’t get me wrong, I’d hate for Mr. Ikea to read this (if he reads the blog) and think I wasn’t affected by the end of the relationship; I was.  My sorrow just seemed incommensurate with the event.

What I didn’t realize, at the time, was that this sense of sadness has a name: Chronic Sorrow. It’s different than depression, it’s different than grief but, yet, similar in many ways.  Here’s where I need you, Sparrow, and our readers, to be patient while I, yet again, diverge with another story in order to explain “Chronic Sorrow”:

As you know from our conversations, I had yet another assessment for Fledgling with her psychiatrist yesterday. I dropped her off with my mother and I met “the ex” at the doctor’s office ready to take part in a questionnaire aimed at diagnosing “high functioning” children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. While we have often been told that Fledgling’s symptoms appear to place her on the Autism Spectrum, we’ve had trouble pinning a label to her because of the multitude of issues going on.

During the testing, questions were directed at each of us about our experiences with our youngest daughter, and a rating was then attributed to our answers. The questions, however, had a deep and profound impact on me. With each question about my experiences with my child, memories of pain, fatigue, and difficulty came rushing back at me, memories formed over 12 years of living with a child with “higher than average needs”, and these memories hit me like a tonne of bricks. The questions brought back difficult days of navigating around my little monkey to keep her happy, healthy, and on track. I came face-to-face with the denial of my own needs and the needs of my family, with the loss of what is conceived of as “norm” when you have a child, and with a guilt for what I perceived as a loss of my oldest daughter’s childhood as it bent to make room for a sibling whose needs came first. A certain innocence of everyday life evades you when you have a child with any illness and I didn’t realize just how affected by it I was.

There was a point in the questionnaire where painful emotions came back so strongly that I started to weep, much like I did in Farm Boy. Again, it was an uncontrollable, unbidden, weeping that, no matter how hard I tried, wouldn’t end. The psychiatrist stopped the conversation to talk to me and she let me know that mine was a common reaction, though she was deeply moved by it, and she told me there is a name for what has been happening to me after years of “high alert”: Chronic Sorrow.

Chronic Sorrow

I immediately understood what she was talking about when she said this.

Chronic Sorrow

Walk through it with me Sparrow, and anyone else living under a constant “high alert”:  You love someone and you do anything and everything to make their world better because they deserve it. You dedicate all your time, all your energy, all your emotional health to them and, without your permission, comes fatigue, a sense of loss, and regret. You stop talking to people about the issues because they either no longer want to hear it or because your life is so different from theirs with your “high needs child” that you can no longer connect to friends with “normal” children. You feel guilt because of your sense of loss, you feel sorrow or, even, shame. Sadly, you learn to hate yourself for all of these emotions. How can you possibly feel these emotions when you love your child and the condition is not their fault?

Chronic Sorrow

Sparrow, we talked on Skype the other night and, without knowing the word, we were talking about “Chronic Sorrow”, remember? We brought up issues of loss, guilt, fatigue, and sadness. We’re afraid to say it out loud to too many people, aren’t we, in case they, or our families, interpret it as “my child is a burden”. They aren’t “burdens” in a traditional sense, but they are draining, of no fault of their own, and neither of us would trade that. EVER.  A child on the Autism Spectrum is a “difficult to parent” child on a multitude of levels but the extraordinary value they bring to everyday life is STUNNING.   

Absolutely STUNNING.

But…it has caused “Chronic Sorrow”.  http://www.chronicsorrow.org/

I hesitated to write this piece in case either of our children should read it and hear “you broke me, bad you”. This is NOT my intention. I am very open with Fledgling and I hope she hears from me everyday, in all my actions, that I LOVE HER and not DESPITE her issues. In many ways, her issues have taught me about love. Rather, I wrote it because I feel obliged to pass on the information so that others out there, with children like ours, can start forgiving themselves and taking care of themselves.

I’m going to spend a few days thinking about the concept of “Chronic Sorrow”.  I’m going to meet with the psychiatrist in the future in order to work through my own issues and, hopefully, finally forgive myself for being, as I thought, “a terrible excuse for a mother”. I’m going to embrace the idea that I’m not alone in this feeling. If there is a label for what I’m going through, then I'm not alone - there must be entire populations of mothers and fathers feeling exactly as I do.

I love you, Sparrow,

A “willing to learn to forgive herself with time”, Birdie