Beth Morey's Blog, page 30

In Which I Do a Scary Thing to My Hair

It took about 30 minutes after writing my last post on saying goodbye to 2012 and welcoming 2013 with the personal focus of "be here now" to realize that that phrase was not complete.

It needed a little bravery, a little boldness.

You see, I wrote that last post while sitting in a hair salon, waiting for a hairdresser to call my name and give me bangs. Bangs. This curly-headed girl wanted bangs, of all things. A gutsy high-maintenance move that, the last time I tried it as a frizzy-mopped middl...

December 31, 2012

It's amazing the difference a year can make - the difference that a year has made.

At this time last year, I'd barely begun to grieve. The new year loomed, and I hated it. I hated the idea of leaving the only year in all of past and future history that my daughter would ever be alive on this earth for. Leaving the year that I've come to think of as her year felt wrong.

But of course all my kicking and screaming could not stop the calendar from rolling over to 2012. And while I dreaded the pas...

In Which I Get Angry at the Ones Who Judge the Grieving

Does grief make you uncomfortable? Good. It should. Because death is uncomfortable. Death is strange and unpredictable and scary and inconvenient. And because death is these things, so is the way we deal with death. Grief is not comfortable for anyone, including the griever - but it is necessary.

Want to know who it helps when you tell a griever to get over it? Exactly one person - yourself. It leaves you feeling helpful and self-righteous, but at best it is useless to the one who has lost, an...

When Christmas Feels Like Too Much

I was dreading this holiday season.  If you're reading this, then by now I'm sure you know why -- because last year, just days before Thanksgiving, my daughter died.  To have to face the holiday cheer so soon after her death felt harsh and cruel.

So this year, I expected the first anniversary of her death and birth to somber the Christmas season.

But it hasn't.  And, and the same time, it has.

Here's what I mean:

In spite of my grief, I find myself looking forward to Christmas. ...

Pictures of Before

From the very beginning of this new life in which loss and grief are major players, I’ve had difficulty with photographs.  I love taking pictures, especially self-portraits, and I take them almost constantly.  So when our daughter died abruptly and without known cause, it hurt to return from the hospital without our daughter and see the photographs from Before.  I felt like they had betrayed me.  Shouldn’t I have known that something so horrible was about to happen? ...

Connecticut in My Heart

“I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

So, Connecticut.

When I was putting my son down in his b...

It's Not Christmas Without You: 8 Holiday Gifts for Grieivng Parents

In my experience, the holidays can be a difficult time.  Between the pressure to buy the perfect gifts, to cook the perfect meal, and have the perfect celebration filled with perfect feelings, expectations and emotions are running high.  And that's for those whose holiday table isn't missing a place.  Factor in the absence of a much-loved and much-wanted child . . . and, well, the holidays can feel downright dismal.

Last year, Christmas fell about a month after Eve died.  S...

Christmas Shopping

The plan was to collect a new Christmas ornament for each of our children every year.  It seemed like a fun tradition to celebrate both our living child and our dead one.  And really, I thought that I was doing well with my daughter being gone from me for the second Christmas.  After all, this year I'd get to celebrate with a living baby in my arms.  And while that does not in any way "fix" the absence of Eve, that is something very, very good.  Something worth celebrating. ...

The Sacred Wrong

I wanted to write a post about how I feel better.  About how now that I have birthed a breathing, screaming rainbow baby boy, things feel different.  About how when I look back on this pregnancy, I can see that I was an anxious, crazy, hormonal, emotional, grieving mess.  That I was not myself. That I am so relieved to no longer be living in a place of such deep anxiety.

I wanted to write about how I am myself again, but that it is a new self than one year ago, before my daughte...

In the Art Studio + Shop: Black Friday/Small Business Saturday Updates

It strikes me that I haven't done an art update in quite some time.  Given that I have some special holiday happenings in the art shop, and that the holiday shopping season starts tomorrow (I can't believe it's already that time of year again!), I figured that I should probably pop in a little update before tucking into a quiet Thanksgiving day.

In the Art Studio   
Between the arrival of our sweet rainbow baby and my gimpy (but slowly healing!) arm, it's been hard to get s...