I've been feeling horribly guilty since baby's birth, and it's not of the mommy variety. So far, all I've done wrong in the latter department – that I'm willing to admit to, anyway – is dropping jam onto her head from the toast I was munching above it, pulling her ear while trying to adjust her bonnet, and letting her body temperature drop a bit too much. (Newborns need multiple layers of warm clothing even in 24-degree rooms? Who knew? Well, me ... now.)
What I feel guilty about is the outpouring of love and congratulations that we've received from so many friends, including the ones who've struggled and who are still struggling and whom I have not treated nearly so wonderfully. Friends such as ...
The one who'd had several miscarriages in the past and whose take-home-baby's birth I never said anything about because it happened right after we lost the last pregnancy ....
The one whose second pregnancy I ignored because it wasn't fair she could have another baby so quickly after her first when we couldn't even keep one ....
The one who miscarried after I did and then got pregnant again before I did, almost immediately, who never received a celebratory word from me ....
The one who must have already known she was pregnant when she told me she was planning to wait a few years and whose baby's birth I left unacknowledged ....
The one who I refused to see for a long time because I merely suspected that she might be pregnant (but she's not, she's still not, and my heart breaks for her now) ....
Sweet friends, all of whom I pushed away out of spite, jealousy, and pain; all of whom are celebrating whole-heartedly with us now.
Their hearts are kind and generous. Why couldn't mine have been?
I think it's so hard to "see the forest for the trees" when we're in the midst of difficult times. Those women, if they are true friends, understood/understand why you could not celebrate with them. I don't think I truly felt happy for my SIL's pregnancy until I myself was pregnant. I put on the happy face and was a good girl, but I never really wanted to. That's so selfish to say but it's true.
ReplyDeleteIf they are friends and you still have a relationship with them, I'm sure you can offer the late congratulations/condolences. I don't think you can feel so guilty, though. Sometimes we have to protect ourselves and our emotions first, and sometimes there's just not much left to give after that.
Aw sweetie, we protect our hearts as much as possible while we are struggling. You can reach out to them now. They'll understand.
ReplyDeleteI think you’re right to feel guilty.
ReplyDeleteShould you choose not to immediately erase this comment, I'll defend it against the inevitable response ‘this is not what she needs to hear,’ or ‘that is not productive.’ I do not believe it is literally impossible to do something for which you ought to feel guilty. I think you what you have done qualifies as betraying your friends, though it is certainly far from the worst form that such betrayal can take. Nor would I deny that I have done comparable wrongs. And I feel guilty about them. And I should. But you should too. And though you say you do, I suspect that you’re awaiting a flood of ‘no, don’t feel guilty, you had it really hard, actually the right reaction is to continue to feel sorry for yourself.’
More generally, you’ve inspired me to reflect as follows. We have this idea that pain ennobles us, that it makes us strong. But it doesn’t. For most of us, it reveals our weakness, rendering us self-centered, small-minded, sometimes cruelly thoughtless. Pain makes it harder to be decent, and people are less likely to do what is hard. Someone who can be graceful under pressure, who can be generous while grieving, is a rarity. But that doesn’t change the fact that what you are if you don’t manage that feat is petty and despicable—in the eyes of others, but most of all, in your own eyes. Pain by itself doesn’t ennoble. What it does is allow for nobility to emerge in the rare cases when someone rises to the occasion. Most of us don’t, and the best we can hope for is that the pain will be short-lived enough, as it was in your case, that we will, with some hard work, be able to emerge from it back to decency. Long-lasting pain, now that is a soul-crushing thing. It can make someone not worth knowing.
Sometimes, under the guise of being ‘too hard on ourselves,’ we are actually too easy on ourselves. I understand the importance of supportive, reassuring, feel-good blog-speak, but I do not think that is all there is room for—and that is not my cup of tea. I’ve been reading your (and 10-15 other ALI) blogs for about a year, and this is the first time I’ve seen fit to comment. I'm not sure whether there is room for a truthful and dispassionate voice. This does not come from a place of vitriol, though I suspect it will incite some. I harbor no anger towards you, but if I were one of your friends, I would be justified in doing so. Only you know what you can do to try to make it up to them, and only you know that it really is your duty to do those things. Or maybe you’ve been wise enough to befriend only the strong and generous kind of person, and you’re lucky enough not to need to do anything to salvage your relationships. Then the only person you need to work on is yourself. For as you have acknowledged, you should be better. And, like most of us, you probably can.
First off, if you need to comment anonymously, shame on you. Have the balls to put your own name on your words - or you probably shouldn't be saying them.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth - I think it's clear that you are seeing now that it IS possible to congratulate others and possibly even feel joy for others, even when you are in the midst of horrible grief and pain. Does that mean you HAVE to or that you're a horrible person for NOT doing it or being in that place at the time? No.
True friends will get it - they will understand that your heart wasn't in a place where you could feel joy for them, so instead you stepped away. I agree with anon that we should all strive to do better, to be better, etc. BUT -- and this is a huge BUT -- it's also important to remember the golden rule of "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all."
You've learned something by your friends responses to your good news - and it's awesome if it has changed the way you view things moving forward, but there's no use beating yourself up for past actions. All you can do is apologize for not being there for them, and work on being a stronger, closer friend moving forward, which I'm sure you're already doing!
We judge ourselves much more harshly than anyone else and in my experience you probably thought you did much worse than you actually did. I thought I was a horrible human being in the midst of our infertility and miscarriage...but now that I'm out of it and have finally admitted to some friends everything that happened they always say they had no idea that I was going through all of that. So even though I am still ashamed of how I acted, or how I thought I acted, people (at least claim) they were never offended. You probably experienced different reactions when you shared your pregnancy with others...some were really excited and others may have only congratulated you without going over the top. Both are acceptable responses. I can't imagine you were ever outright rude to a friend or acquaintance when they shared their news with you. Anyway, this is a long comment, but I feel very much the same. In the end, as long as we choose to learn from our past experiences we need to give ourselves a break.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, Elizabeth, ignore that anonymous comment. Truly. It's rude and meek to hide behind an "anonymous" moniker when what you say isn't exactly supportive. And frankly, I think what that person said is wrong. Just utterly wrong.
ReplyDeleteI have felt guilty over similar actions in the past, and I'm not so good at taking my own advice, but to you I say: be kind to yourself, forgiving. Clearly, your friends have, because they are your friends and they must understand that sometimes we have to put ourselves first, to protect ourselves before we are able to offer a safe, celebratory place for others. They MUST understand that grief has the power to incapacitate people. That is just the nature of grief and it is not something to feel guilty about. It does not make you a bad friend, only human. When we are struggling, we do what we must to cope. We draw the curtains around us and push everyone else out. We turn inwards. We think bad thoughts. We don't say the things we know we should and, at times, we say things we know we shouldn't. We lash out because it seems like the world is trying to break us. We do what we have to in order to survive. I think the kindness of your friends in the wake of your daughter's birth is testament to the fact that THEY know this and don't hold it against you...and they don't expect you to punish yourself for it.
Those are really wonderful friends you have and I hope you hold onto them and can one day soon see yourself and your past actions in the way that they surely do. That we all do.
It is totally acceptable to engage in debate of difficult topics on the Internet and in blogs, but "despicable and petty" is quite harsh. Admitting truths like this takes a lot of courage. Like you mention, most everyone has done similar things. Most true friends actually understand and forgive which is what makes friendship so special.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth - thanks for sharing.
Anonymous here, returned to respond to objectors:
ReplyDeleteOn superficialities: Suppose that my recourse to anonymity was and is a sign of my own personal failings such as cowardice, lack of integrity, unseriousness, combativeness etc. (We could explore the truth of this hypothesis in a further exchange if someone wanted to substantiate any one of those charges. It is certainly a familiar one when the anonymous speaker’s contribution is unwelcome...) What I say could still be true. The same goes for my diction. Suppose it is a bit harsh here or there. (I stand by ‘petty’ but GreenGrass may be right about ‘despicable’. Mea culpa.) Even without the ideal choice of words, I could still be making a good point. Truth is not to be ignored, even if it is conveyed anonymously, even if it does not feel good to hear.
On to substantive points:
(a) Has Elizabeth actually done anything bad? I would say she is the best judge of that, and thinks she has (see (f) below on, ‘are we the harshest judges of ourselves’). Sounds bad to me too. Again, not the worst thing ever, not enough to justify calling her a ‘horrible person,’ but, as she asseses, crossing the threshold of something worth beating oneself up over.
(b) Which brings me to: “There is no point in dwelling on the past.” Yes, there is. What do you think drives us forward in the right direction except a knowledge of what we do not want to be like the next time misfortune strikes? (Because it will.) We learn from our past experiences by feeling bad about them. I, at any rate, have never learned from a past experience in another way. If someone has, I’d love to hear the story of it.
(c) Grief incapacitates; ‘we need to protect ourselves’ first. Grief does not incapacitate all of us, as Elizabeth observed in her post. It incapacitates some of us, the weak, the one’s who aren’t as good as we could and should be. And it doesn’t really incapacitate any of us. What it does is make it very, very difficult to be open to the needs of thers. We should have enough self-respect to take responsibility for our behavior, even when we are beset by difficulty.
(d) “If you don’t have something nice to say..” This was a rule of my kindergarten classroom, and I continue to find it appropriate for kindergarteners.
(e) “Surely Elizabeth is already doing everything she can.” Perhaps she is. Only she can know that. My point was only, given what she has shared with us, that she is right to feel guilty.
(f) We are “always hardest on ourselves.” Not true. Conduct the following thought-experiment: do you know anyone (parent, sibling, ex-boyfriend) who you feel was not hard enough on themselves in respect of their behavior to you? My guess is you will say: yes. Perhaps you even feel this way with respect to me, and my behavior towards Elizabeth! If so, you do not believe it to be true that we are always hardest on ourselves. It is just very, very challenging to think that the person who might not be being hard enough on herself is YOU. That is the feeling of true guilt or shame, both of which I’ve known, and both of which, I am suggesting, can be fully appropriate, correct, and true—despite their undeniable unpleasantness.
(g) “Most everyone has done similar things.” True. And most everyone should feel guilty about them when they do them.
A final point: it is not actually that brave to ‘share’ your failings with an audience who you expect will both applaud you for your ‘honesty’ in doing so and work to convince you don’t really have those failings. If I am to be ignored, it simply follows that Elizabeth is not brave.
"If you don't have anything nice to say..." still applies WAY beyond kindergarten. I'm not saying we all should give false support or validate and applaud while ignoring a real issue, but I DO think that a lot of hurtful things are better left unsaid (like Joanna's example about her sister below). So yeah, if you don't have anything nice to say can be a GREAT motto to live by throughout life, not just kindergarten.
DeleteMaybe we should just live by the Golden Rule instead, and the rude way your comments have been written could have been avoided. People would have read and heard the important part of your message then instead of only noticing the cruel way you had of sharing it.
When someone speaks an unpleasant truth, there will always be a rush to dismiss the content of what has been said on the grounds of the form (tone, ‘anonymity’, diction, rudeness etc.)—these are ways of not hearing what we’d rather not hear. One solution is to be very, very careful, when speaking unpleasant truths, to couch them in maximally comforting language. But the danger here is that one will cover over the shocking content by couching it in a fuzzy form. Stark language is the clearest way to say something stark. Those whose feelings are hurt by such speech should ask themselves, how certain are you that what is hurtful is really the words as opposed to what the words are signifying? If the second, the question is not how the thought could better have been conveyed, or even whether it should have been conveyed, but whether it is true or false. (Joanna’s sister shouldn’tve said what she said because it did not express any significant thought or truth. It was mere, cruel venting. But there’s no substitute for asking, did she have a point worth making? Only because she didn’t, can we say she shouldn’t have spoken.) I stand by the underlying claim that it is a mark of adulthood to be able both to produce and countenance speech that is neither comforting, supportive or in any sense ‘nice’—but nonetheless good, because truthful and significant. Of course one should, most of the time, other things being equal, be polite, but no one in the ALI community believes that politeness, appropriateness, or decorum should serve as shackles on expressive speech.
DeleteAs for the Golden Rule, the question is whether one would oneself prefer to receive painful but truthful speech, or pleasing speech that flatters by covering over what we don’t want to hear with vacuous and cliched truisms. I would opt for the former, so I guess I’m golden.
We have all been there. You are brave and you should not beat yourself up. We each do what we have to do and just because we protect ourselves does not mean we are not thinking of others. There is so much time to be the kind of friend you want to be. Hugs.
ReplyDeleteWe've all done it. Feeling guilty just means you have a heart and a conscience. You can't change the past, but you can try to do better in the future. It doesn't sound like any of your friends are holding a grudge. :)
ReplyDeleteI think Victoria's post was put a bit harshly, and as a result her main point was missed: "Elizabeth, you recognized that you'd done something bad, and that you ought to feel guilty." Victoria's post was basically one of support and agreement. Realizing that you didn't do the right thing, that you didn't overcome your own pain for the sake of friendship, is an accomplishment. But it's only an accomplishment if you do better next time.
ReplyDeleteI think the tone of her post was aimed not at you, Elizabeth, but at a reaction she expected to your post, namely people saying 'don't worry about it'. That's the reaction that strips you of what you have accomplished with a post that must have been difficult and painful to compose. Look ahead to what you can do for your friends, and watch out that you don't let yourself get lost in grief. Your friends sound like they're worth it.
I agree with the gist of Victoria's post- though the delivery was off-putting. I've found that the cloak of 'infertility' too often makes people think they have a 'pass' to behaving badly. The majority of us (me included) are fairly self-centered. It's always about 'me' and who suffers most. I don't think it makes us a bad person to have that reflex. I actually it's what makes us a 'person.' But, to Victoria's point- we can grapple with out negative feelings at the time we have them ideally, or in the future. I certainly know some people who never grapple with them and have never thought they did/said/thought anything wrong. But to strive to be better- a better person, friend, spouse, parent, citizen- that's what we can take from the experiences we have. I certainly have friends I've met from infertility that have bettered themselves as well, and those are the people who used the experiences to grow. I think it's a mistake to entirely let go of civility, good manners, and basic courtesy because one person is suffering. There are ways to respectfully tell someone how you're feeling. I had a falling out with my sister several years ago when she said seeing me talk about my son on facebook made her 'want to vomit all over her computer.' Yes, she was hurting. But did she have to react THAT poorly? I still am a human who is worthy of respect, as we all are. And I'd done nothing that deserved that. And that's really the bottom line- a large part of what people in the ALI community complain about are things that people do that isn't anything WRONG. They just don't like it. I had to stop going to a group of women who spent all their time claiming that various friends and family were getting pregnant 'just to spite them' and that they wanted to 'stab all the pregnant women.' There's venting, there's frustration, and then there's just paranoia and worse. So yes, we can all learn from Elizabeth's post, as she can- which is we can (1) try to amend the past by sincerely apologizing to the people we've hurt and (2) use this as learning experiences for the future. And apologies should be real- not 'I was suffering so bad, way more than you, and so that's why I was uncivil to you, but really, we can all tell it was justified.'
ReplyDeleteI'm sure everyone of us has had moments of celebration and moments of self pity on this journey. We are all in it together, but unfortunately we can't all walk the same path at the same time, and that causes us hurt along the way.
ReplyDeleteWhen you were nearing your due date, because of my experience, I just kept thinking - don't count your chickens before they're hatched. A healthy, full term pregnancy doesn't always mean a take home baby. And then when your baby was born, there was a big part of me that thought "I'm so happy she finally got her take home baby" but there was also a huge part of me that thought "well why does she get to take home a baby now and I don't?"
Don't feel guilty for feeling how you feel. I'm sure every single one of us can relate, and nobody will be angry at you because of it xx
Well, this has certainly been one of the most spirited discussions this blog has seen.
ReplyDeleteContrary to at least one assumption, this post was not intended to seek absolution from my sins from those who cannot provide it. And I expect that the positively phrased comments here are not coming from a place where mistreatment of undeserving people is condoned, but rather from one of empathy and understanding. And I appreciate that empathy and understanding without taking from it the message that I am exculpated.
I agree that pain does not usually make a person stronger, at least during its most present moments, and I would hope that such reflection was not provided as rebuttal to anything I've written, because I've been honest here about becoming a less kind, less thoughtful person who has retreated from family and friends in their own times of joy. And I agree that such behavior is spiteful and jealous, as I admitted to in my post, and yes, okay, we could certainly add to that list of adjectives, as has been done, so also: self-centered, small-minded, thoughtless, petty, perhaps even despicable if we wish, although I'd like to think I'd be more generous than that were I labeling somebody else who made a similar admission.
To clarify something that may have been unclear – my bad behavior was of the avoidance variety. I never lashed out or said anything that could be later regretted. That doesn't mean that I think ignoring and avoiding somebody cannot be painful (and in fact, I know it can, having been on the receiving end of it when a dear friend's grief over her failing relationship led her to completely withdraw from me for a very long time upon learning my husband and I were going to marry). But at least there are no cruel words – which do not fade away easily, as Joanna’s example makes clear – to regret.
Also, these are relationships that have already begun to mend. I reached a turning point last winter and began to find both myself and my lost (or paused) friendships again, ones that I had so much difficulty maintaining in the thick of my sorrow. And I think we are okay. Perhaps my absence was not so noticeable. Perhaps I am not so important that it mattered. Perhaps my husband carried the slack for me in maintaining relationships between our couple and theirs. Perhaps they understood implicitly. Perhaps they are still harboring resentment.
In sum: do I feel guilty? Yes. Should I feel guilty? I think that I should, and I do. Do we need to keep flogging a dead horse? Probably not.
This has been very.... Interesting. I think everyone, at one time or another, for one reason or another, feels like they could have been a better friend in certain circumstances. I know I often feel like I could be a better friend, but we get caught up in our own lives and time sometimes just disappears. Elizabeth, I really like your last response here to a very interesting debate.
ReplyDelete