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If you're tired of feeling never enough, of constantly being derailed by your own fears or the reactions of others, then you are in the right place. I'm Deb, a licensed psychologist, and this is Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to women who've spent their lives trying to stay within the lines of what's acceptable, who've never felt good enough and who are ready to break free and bloom. Let's talk about how you can build a solid foundation connected with your strength and your wisdom. Before we start, I need to make sure that you know that the information I share with you is just that. It's just information. It's not meant to be a prescription for what you should do or meant to replace the advice of any of your healthcare providers. It also doesn't mean that we have a professional client-therapist relationship.

 Hi there and welcome. I really should have prepared this episode in time for Mother's Day. And as usual anymore, time just seems to get away from me. Today, what I want to do is expand on a blog post that I wrote over 10 years ago, and what triggered me to write that post was a newspaper clipping that I had found buried on my refrigerator under photos of young children who were, at the time when I found the clipping, already adults. So it was yellowed and to put the publication date into perspective, the title is Welcome to Holland, which would now be considered part of the Netherlands. Well you get the idea.

This is an old article. The clipping was a letter written by Emily Pearl Kingsley and sent to a Dear Abby column. I had no idea if Dear Abby still exists, and so I decided to look it up, and I was surprised to find it still being published. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Dear Abby is a syndicated column in which people submit their life problems and receive advice. I originally wrote the blog post as a follow-up to one I had written on the second arrow of pain, which I'll come back to in a moment, and which actually might be a good topic for a future episode.

In this letter to Dear Abby, the author describes her experience with giving birth to a child with special needs. I had put that clipping up on my fridge during a difficult time in my life because it resonated with me. I was grappling with the realization.

That it wasn't going to be possible or practical for me to have biological children. To put it mildly, I was having a hard time taking in that reality. I was overwhelmed with shock and by my grief. I couldn't grasp the reality of it. I just kept thinking it couldn't be true, and I was having a terrible time accepting it.

I'm not sure it is something I've ever really accepted. A wise friend of mine, a social worker specializing in adoption, shared the analogy of it being like a heavy coat filled with stones and rocks. Some are small stones and some are heavy rocks. She said that as I moved through my life and I will likely throw out stones here and there, and maybe even a rock or two, and as I do, the weight of the grief and loss of not having children would lessen, and I would always be wearing the coat.

That it will be a part of me and my story. I thought that was such a beautiful and fitting analogy, and it has many times helped to validate the pain and loss of not raising children, imagining that coat that I'm still wearing. Mother's Day is a day when the coat feels particularly heavy.

The reason that I decided to go ahead and share this episode today, even though Mother's Day is past, is that it hit me the other day when I was thinking about the listeners who have requested help in dealing with the changes of aging, that this same post may once again be helpful to me and to possibly to others In thinking about the changes that we're experiencing as we age.

In her post, Kingsley describes her experience of having a special needs child as having planned for an exciting trip to Italy and then unexpectedly arriving in a different destination. She writes, the flight attendant comes on and says, “Welcome to Holland. Holland, you say? What do you mean Holland? I signed up for Italy. All of my life I've dreamed of going to Italy. But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've let they've landed in Holland, and there you must stay.” 

I felt understood at that moment, even though she was describing a very different life event. My plane had landed, and it wasn't where I thought it would be landing, and there was no way to leave. Realizing that I would never have a biological child felt so shocking and so unfair. I couldn't imagine that my life would ever be happy in this different place. I fought against it.

No, this can't be happening. It can't be possible that I will never experience giving birth. I can't stand this. And on and on. As I reread those thoughts and feelings, I realized how similar they are to the way I've been feeling about the changes in my body and the experiences that so many of my clients have shared with me as they have aged. Even though on some level intellectually, I must have known that I would age and my body would change. And honestly, I never really believed it would happen to me.

I thought I knew where my plane was taking me, and that I could count on being able to do what I had always done. And to make matters worse, the rest of the world seems to be going along, doing what they've always done. At least that's what it appears to me. Bodies don't seem to have changed. Well, maybe they have.

 And I keep looking at bodies of people younger than myself because that is where I expect and want to be.

In some ways, it is so similar to that time after my miscarriages and the realization that I wouldn't have a biological child. It seemed I couldn't go anywhere without someone telling me about their children. I was happy for them, and I was also seething inside.

Now it is people who seem to have all the energy in the world, who have maintained their height and don't seem to have these ridiculous accidents that I now have where I trip and end up with a fractured patella. Yes, I know that could have easily happened when I was younger, and in fact I did dislocate both of my kneecaps and being out and about in the winter. I seem to have connective tissue less strong than other people. And I really can't blame that on aging and yet it's hard not to. 

In her letter to Abby, Kingsley shared her experience with seeing what she wanted everywhere. She wrote, “Everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they've had there.”

Certainly back then I had a multitude of feelings watching and hearing almost everyone I knew coming from Italy having and raising children. Now, as I hobble along after doing an activity that I once did with ease, or I look at a body, my body, that I don't even recognize anymore. I want to scream.

 I wasn't supposed to be here. This wasn't supposed to happen. 

What Kingsley wrote next took me a long time to sink in. I wish I could say that I was faster in realizing this and I wasn't. She wrote, “The important thing is that we haven't taken you to a horrible place. It's just a different place.”

Back then I spent a great deal of time feeling sad, angry, and jealous of all the people coming and going from the place I so wanted to be. I wish my skills would have been stronger back then. And I also don't want to be too hard on myself. 

That was a significant loss, as Kingsley wrote, and the pain of that will never ever go away because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss. And aging is also a significant loss. Losing the body I've I have grown so familiar with over the years, the physical strength that has been a big part of my identity, and also realizing that the end of my life is now much closer than the beginning.

Both are significant losses. And the words that Kingsley wrote next brought me some small degree of comfort over the years when it came to having a childless life. And I wonder if they might once again be useful when my plane has landed not at all where I expected it to land at this stage of my life. 

She wrote, “But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very lovely things about Holland.”

Aren't those words so true that when we hold on to what we think things should be, we miss the beauty of what is? I do not mean in any way to mean to minimize the pain of pregnancy loss or infertility or of aging.

 The pain of those experiences is real and the loss is significant. And when we hold on to the shoulds, we add to the pain that is already there and sometimes in a way that makes it feel intolerable.

By getting caught up in the unfairness, we can also miss the joy that is there for us in this different place, the place where our plane has landed. As I reflect on my experience of landing in the childless destination that I hadn't dreamed of, there has been much joy and beauty and much of which I wouldn't have experienced if my plane had landed in the land of having children. I wouldn't have been able to be the fun aunt, spending days filled with fun and then getting to go home and not having to do the hard parts.

Getting caught up in unfairness or the shoulds of a situation is often described as shooting ourselves with a second arrow of pain. Life shoots us with so many painful arrows, and so often we end up shooting ourselves with another arrow through our thinking as well as our expectations.

Of what should have happened.

I hope if your plane has landed in an unplanned destination or one different than you had hoped, whether that is in dealing with infertility, aging, or some other unexpected change in your life, that Kingsley's letter might prompt you to think about this unexpected change as arriving at a different destination.

A destination like most destinations that hold a multitude of opportunities, experiences and feelings, some of which are exhilarating in their excitement and joy, and some filled with pain that can seem unbearable.

 I've been attempting to approach the changes in the shape of my body as I age through the lens of having arrived at an unexpected destination. Over the past couple of years, my body has become a different body than the one that I've lived in throughout my life. It is rounder and I am heavier. Sometimes as I pass a mirror, old wires light up, filling me with disgust at what I see in the mirror.

To counter that, I've been working on being curious about the changes that I'm noticing, thinking about how the loss of height that I have experienced would have would change my upper torso.

Thinking about the wisdom of nature as we know that mortality rates are lower in those who carry extra weight as they age. It isn't easy, and sometimes I find myself kicking and screaming, this isn't where I'm supposed to be, as I look out on where I have landed.

And then there are moments when I'm able to let go of my expectations for how it was supposed to be, and I notice the beauty outside my window, or I feel grateful not to be a teenager again, or I simply enjoy the softness of the chair that I might have time to sit in if I allow myself to be where I am. ⁓

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions. Until next time, take good care and bye-bye.

This has been Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to supporting you in blooming into all you are meant and wish to be. If you enjoyed it and gained value, please consider leaving a review, as it will help other women to find it and please share it with anyone who would benefit from it. And if you would like to be notified when new episodes become available, be sure and follow on your favorite podcast app. Until next time, how will you light a candle of self-acceptance? Because you deserve to be you, even if others disagree.