When our lives don't go as planned, it's easy - and natural - to look at the downside and focus on all the things we've lost, but looking for the silver lining, in even the most devastating of cases, can help speed the healing process.
At almost 79-years old, my mother is feisty and self-sufficient, with a packed social life and more hobbies than I can count. She's had to be that way. She was widowed for the first time when she was 52, and again seven years ago. Before my father died she couldn't have imagined surviving alone, but as a widow with a teenage daughter, she had to.
She learned to drive, to fix things around the house, and to manage a household on a small budget She learned those things because she had to. But she made a point of finding the silver lining in living alone. She went back to school and earned a degree, and traveled overseas for the first time, and many times since. " And I could please myself what I had for dinner," she told me.
It wasn't that my mother's life was better without my dad; it was just different, and she kept reminding herself of the positive side of things "because you have to," she said.
Three years ago my plans for motherhood started falling apart. I was out of acceptable options for treatment, and adoption was proving not to be a viable option. More than this, when I evaluated my life - as discussed in the post Letting Go of the Dream - I realized that it was time to walk away from my dream of having children and start figuring out my Plan B.
My list of losses was long. I'd never have the experience of pregnancy, I'd never get the opportunity to raise and shape a young life; I'd never know what it would feel like to touch a person who had been created from a part of me. There were other things too - the family names I'd chosen that I'd never get to use; the prospect of reaching old age with no one to care for, or even care about, me; the treasured heirlooms that no one would want after I was gone. The list went on and one, and the harder I looked, the more things I found to feed my grief.
So I started looking for the positive. It was a short list at first, little things like being able to sleep in on Sundays, and I always had to fight off the negative (yes, but if I had kids we could have one of those idyllic Sunday mornings you see on TV where the whole family piles into bed for snuggles.) But bit-by-bit the list grew. We could travel, we don't have to save for college, we can go to a midnight showing of Harry Potter, and we can go out to dinner on a whim. Eventually life without children started to look pretty good.
Some psychologists suggest that this kind of rationalization is unhealthy and that it doesn't deal with the underlying issue. While I agree that simply telling ourselves lies to cover the pain isn't good, convincing ourselves that everything is going to be okay and finding even some small ray of light in what would otherwise be a hopeless situation can give us the strength we need to start moving forward and dealing with our grief.
I'm not sure I'll ever say that I'm glad I didn't have children (and I'm sure my mother would have preferred not to have lost two husbands.) I can't say that my life is better because of my loss, but it's different to the life I'd planned, and most of the time, it's good.
Thanks to my mother's hard-earned wisdom, I'm reminded to keep looking for the silver lining, because it's almost always there.
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