Confessions of a Mediocre Widow

by Catherine Tidd

  At this point I stood up straight, looked her in the eye for one solid second, and said, “I am the single widowed mother of three.”

  It would have come across a lot better if my voice hadn’t been shaking and my eyes hadn’t been filling up with tears.

  “Why don’t you try negotiating with her and tell her that if she stops screaming, you’ll let her down?”

  Negotiate? With a two-year-old?

  Other women started to approach us, and I was immediately afraid that they were going to side with the resident Costco parenting expert while I was doing everything I could to keep Sarah from crying.

  And then I heard, “She’s doing nothing wrong.”

  “Why don’t you leave her alone?”

  “What else is she supposed to do?”

  I didn’t make eye contact with anyone as I loaded my groceries on the conveyor belt. The group of women behind me kept their quiet parenting battle going, defending me against my new blond nemesis while I did my best to function and not sit on the floor in a big, sad puddle. Sarah, of course, had started to watch all that was going on with an interest that had lulled her into complete silence, and she seemed to have completely forgotten what had had her so riled up in the first place. And Haley was cautiously fixated on my face as the cashier tallied up my items without saying a word.

  I didn’t even stick around to see who won the argument. I wheeled my cart out to the parking lot as quickly as possible and threw all of the groceries in the back of the minivan. Haley silently climbed into her booster seat in the back and buckled her seat belt while I walked around to get Sarah strapped in, glaring at her in teary anger.

  My hands shook as I started the car, and I could barely see as I made my way through the maze of the parking lot.

  “Mommy, are you okay?” Haley asked from the backseat.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine. I’ll be okay. Thanks, sweetie.”

  But I wasn’t okay.

  As I made my way onto the road to pick up Michael from the preschool, I suddenly had a vision of a police car waiting at my house, waiting to take my children away. I had no husband they could call who would say, “My wife? You want to question my wife? About what? She’s the best mom in the world!”

  I was utterly alone. With no one home to vouch for me.

  I made a sharp turn into the first parking lot I could find, the parking lot of a new apartment complex. And then I took my cell phone out, told the girls to just stay in their seats, and got out of the car to call my mom.

  “Mom?” I said, hiccuping in hysterics and leaning on my dirty car for support. “I think Social Services will be coming to my house.”

  “Catherine? Where are you? Do you need me to come get you? What happened?”

  I gasped, moaned, and cried through the Costco story, while the girls watched me through the slush-streaked glass on my car. After saying the entire story out loud, I was sure that I should probably just head for the border.

  “Catherine, I think I need to come get you,” she said when I was done.

  “No…it’s okay. I’m okay. But what if someone is waiting for me at the house? What am I going to do?”

  And then in a final wail, “How could Brad leave me here all alone?”Anything—any bad thing that has happened to me in the years since Brad has been gone—can be directly traced back to his death. That I’m stuck in traffic. That I have to go to the grocery store for just one thing. That I have the flu.

  Everything that has happened is really all his fault. Because he’s not here.

  Let me show you how it works:

  Traffic: “I wouldn’t be stuck in traffic right now because I wouldn’t have had to go to a job interview if he were here. I would be at home, cooking dinner, waiting for him to get home because he’s stuck in traffic.”

  Grocery store: “If he were here, I wouldn’t have to pack all of the kids up and go to the grocery store for just one thing. I could leave the kids with him and just run out or, more importantly, I would have remembered that one thing because I wouldn’t have widowhood draining all of my usable brain cells.”

  Flu: “I wouldn’t have the flu right now if he were here because I wouldn’t have had to go to the grocery store for that one thing…which is probably where I caught it.”

  See? It’s called Widow Math.

  The reality is that what happened that day at Costco probably would have happened whether he was here or not. Sarah would still be stubborn. I would still not have any clever comebacks until about a week after the incident because that’s the way I’ve always been. And that lady would still be an idiot, free to roam and impart her damaging parenting tips to the unsuspecting.

  I didn’t sleep for at least two weeks after that happened, positive that the doorbell would ring at any moment and someone would show up and strip me of the remaining family I had left. That whole episode made me a little more sensitive to the fact that a stranger could turn me in at any moment for…well…parenting. And now that I was doing it completely alone, I felt vulnerable and exposed.

  Because even those of us who provide loving, nurturing environments for our children have a fear of getting turned in by some nutty do-gooder who has nothing better to do than take the time to negotiate behavior with their toddler rather than just teach them what’s right and wrong. And I’m too much of a sweet, Southern conflict-avoider to stand up for myself. I needed my husband around to say to that woman, “Hey! You go negotiate with your kids all you want! And when they grow up to be pot-smoking cab drivers, I’ll tell my CEO daughter to tip them well!”

  Sorry. That sounded a little bitter.

  • • •

  One of my favorite quotes is from Karen Kaiser Clark: “Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.” And I don’t think anything better embodies what she was trying to say than experiencing widowhood for the simple fact that once you enter into it, Normal exits at the same time. Which is a disconcerting feeling, to say the least.

  I didn’t know that Normal was only here for an extended visit. I thought that it was here permanently. I didn’t mind that it didn’t pay rent and never did the dishes. In fact, Normal lived so quietly in our home that sometimes we forgot it was even there.

  Until it left.

  Not one of us chose to have this life thrust upon us. But the ability to grow and change with it is within us all. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long, slow process. I mean, I don’t think many of us lie back in a relaxed pose after a long, hard day of widowing is done, pull out our serenity journals, turn on some sitar music, and say in a breathy voice, “Wow. What an interesting, yet life-affirming day. I’m so grateful that my garbage disposal backed up and my two-year-old has decided to use our living-room rug as her new potty. Now…what I have I learned from all of this?”

  If you’re doing that, I think you’ve been reading the wrong book.

  I would guess that most of us flop down in exhaustion across our empty beds—after the kids have been put to sleep, five loads of laundry have been done, and we’ve spent the last half hour trying to stretch five hundred dollars over a thousand dollars worth of bills—and say the wise words of every widow on this planet.

  “This really sucks.”

  I remember feeling incredibly overwhelmed with the fact that I would have to make every decision, every day concerning the welfare of my children and myself for the rest of my life alone. (Insert “This really sucks” here.) Every day made me feel like I was drowning.

  Should I get the kids vaccinated for H1N1? But what about that girl in Texas whose face was paralyzed right after she got the shot? Should I move so that I have less maintenance, or would that be too hard on the kids? Should I start taking my prescribed Ambien that will help me sleep so that I can be less crazy during the day but that is also unpredictable and may cause me to raid my refrigerator and take a sleep-driving trip t
o New Mexico?

  For someone who had been operating at around 30 percent her whole life, this was a lot to take on all at once.

  It’s really hard not having that person around whom you can bounce everything off. Oh sure, our friends and family say that we’re not alone, and that they’ll always be with us. But the bottom line is that we’ve lost the person who is as invested in our lives as we are. We can talk to people we know and ask them if they think we should refinance the house or change cable services or buy a new car…but those people aren’t living with us and paying our bills with us every day. They can offer helpful advice, but as far as those decisions really affecting them…well…

  They don’t.

  So that’s the part of widowhood that really stinks. But on the flip side of the decision-making dilemma…

  We can decide anything we want to. And there’s no one at home to sheepishly look at when we’ve confessed that we spent one hundred fifty dollars getting highlights in our hair.

  One day, I was having lunch with Kristi and she said, “Hey! You know what? You could go out and buy a big, floral couch for your living room and no one will say a word about it! We can make your whole house as girly as we want! It will be like our own clubhouse!”

  Suddenly the heavens opened and a bright light shined upon me. I could hear angels singing as I envisioned all of the square footage of my house covered in shabby chic tied together with a pretty pink bow.

  Well, not really.

  But it did get me to thinking. Hell yes, making all of the decisions on my own was tough. But hey…I get to make all of the decisions on my own. If I want to move, I don’t have to fight with someone about the floor plan. If I want a new car, I don’t have to defend my choice because it’s not “cool” enough.

  Yes, parenting alone is tough…but so is co-parenting. Now I don’t have to hear that I was too hard, too soft, that I shouldn’t have let them watch TV that long, or that I should take a pacifier away from Sarah as he walks out the door for a two-week business trip, leaving me with a screaming toddler who won’t sleep until the night before he gets back.

  Yikes. Guess I have a few unresolved issues. And that stinks because they’re with a dead man.

  Anyway. The decisions, while daunting, were also all mine.

  For the first time in my life, I felt like not only was everything left to me if I should fail, but it was also all up to me to make sure I succeeded. I had visions of taking a cooking class, repainting the exterior of the house in a color I liked, joining a book club. I could have done all of these things with Brad here, but for some reason I didn’t feel the true freedom to do it until I was forced to build a new life.

  That’s right. I said “forced.” Because I could fight it. I could bury my head in my covers and stay in my grief cave for as long as I wanted to. No one could get me out of it but me. I could look at my life as overwhelming or filled with possibilities. I could focus on the things I’d never done before as daunting or a whole new adventure. I could build a life based on the fear that I would fail or the hope that I will succeed.

  How I was going to build this life was entirely up to me.

  - Milestones -

  i’d rather pass a kidney stone than a milestone

  17

  There’s a saying about grief that I have found to be profoundly true.

  If you're not feeling like yourself, take a look at the calendar. Because chances are something happened around that day that will subconsciously turn your world upside down.

  I know this happens because I’ve experienced it firsthand. I would be sailing along, minding my own widow business, and then suddenly…

  I would start to shake.

  I would get dizzy.

  My whole body would feel weak.

  Then I’d look at the calendar and realize that that was the first time my husband had done something significant to my subconscious ten years earlier. And instead of experiencing what I thought for sure was a grief-induced stroke, I figured out I was going through something else.

  Anticipatory grief. Also what I like to call pre-grief syndrome or PGS.

  Anticipatory grief is something that most of us have heard of, and it’s usually associated with the grief we experience when someone we love is dying from an illness. It’s not pretty, it’s not wanted, and, contrary to what most people think who haven’t gone through it, it’s really not that helpful. Despite the opinion of the public-at-large, it doesn’t matter how long we’ve “known”…death is always sudden and somewhat unexpected. So, while pre-grieving is very real, its usefulness to the overall grieving process is somewhat of a myth.

  What most people also don’t realize is that anticipatory grief doesn’t just happen when we are preparing for a death. It also happens when we know there is a milestone approaching and, unfortunately, it can also happen when we don’t know that a milestone is approaching.

  I’ve often thought that grief can just sneak up and attack you, but anticipating grief is more like a long, drawn-out hostage situation.

  Anticipating a milestone is something that all widows have in common and something that we could all really do without. I mean, c’mon, it’s bad enough that we have the days of all those milestones sucking the life out of us. Why does the feeling have to invade our bodies the entire month before as well?

  I don’t think anyone truly understands why we do this and, believe me when I say that just about any one of us would sell everything we own just to make it stop. We know the day will be hard, but very rarely do we see the week (or month) before that coming. If we could somehow anticipate anticipatory grief, I’m sure most of us would be willing to wear sandwich boards strapped to our bodies saying, “Stay away. I am armed with grief and I’m not afraid to use it.”

  Well, we would wear them unless we were curled up in bed. Which usually takes up about twenty hours a day during the pre-grief period.

  And I’ll tell you what makes it worse: we act like complete lunatics the entire week or month before a milestone and no one around us understands what in the hell is going on. And then on the actual day, we’re perfectly fine, which cements our status as the “funny, but insane” person of our social circle.

  I do it on the anniversary of my husband’s death every year. I rant, rave, cry, and go completely nuts for about three weeks before. At some point during that time, every person in my life suggests that I get medicated; my parents start thinking about moving in and taking away my car keys; and even my dog won’t come near me.

  And then on the actual anniversary, I’m bubbly and personable and have no idea why everyone is looking at me like that.

  “What? I’m fine! Never been better.”

  What makes this whole thing harder to figure out is that, as a widow, it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate between anticipatory grief and a hormone flare-up. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been crying, moody, and generally non-functioning, ready to blow the whole thing off as PMS, only to realize that I’ve been this way for an entire month and, unless I’m starting menopause in my early thirties, there must be something else going on.

  I’m PGSing.

  I’ve even had what I call “grief hot flashes,” where I’m sitting in my car, getting ready to cry, and then this heat wave comes over my body and I suddenly start sweating like I’m going to spontaneously combust into one big, fiery grief ball.

  Yes. It’s just as pretty as you pictured it.

  I have people in my life who, after a few years of riding this emotional roller coaster with me, can mark on their calendars with complete accuracy when my “time of the year” is going to happen. (Somehow they’ve figured it out and I never will. Maybe it’s so they know when to plan their vacations.)

  No woman ever likes it when someone tries to tell her she’s PMSing. We get very defensive about it, mainly because what we’re saying is someth
ing we’ve wanted to say all month, and we suddenly have the hormonal surge we need to get it out of our mouths. PGSing is much the same. My grief is there. It’s been simmering for a while. All it takes is one good milestone to make it go from quiet to attacking a large metropolitan city.

  And I don’t want you to tell me that I’m doing it. About a month after it’s over, I will have my “ah-ha!” moment and run around apologizing to everyone I’ve been in contact with for the last thirty days. But while it’s going on, it’s the perfect time for the people around me to practice their sympathetic nod technique.

  And when it’s over and I have a little clarity, then we can commiserate together on how completely insane I was.

  • • •

  Getting through the first round of milestones after Brad’s death was tricky. Days that I didn’t even know I cared about started to bother me. Like Labor Day. Or the Chinese New Year. They were all just a string of reminders that I was celebrating alone, mainly because they are considered “family days” and my “family” had been irrevocably altered.

  For some reason, most widows seem to have a cluster of dates that make at least one or two months out of the year completely unbearable, and we’re always shocked when we talk to others who go through the same thing. In my case, Father’s Day, my birthday, the anniversary of his death, and our wedding anniversary are all within thirty days of each other, making summer my least favorite season.

  I actually spoke with an astrologist once about this phenomenon, and she told me that most people are “clustered” like that and have been since the beginning of time. For many people, birthdays, anniversaries, and death all happen around the same period.

  And while I’m sure that it should make me feel better that we’re all in the same boat, it really just makes me think that we’re all “divinely” screwed.

  If you’re wondering what a milestone is, I can sum it up for you fairly quickly. It’s a day that “normal” people look forward to. It’s a day that we couldn’t wait for in our former lives. It’s a day that everyone else is happy about…and we spend a good deal of the year wishing would never come.