The plan that didn't come good
On the grief of the return trip.
"I wasn't mourning the past.
I was mourning a plan."
My father died when I was sixteen. He never taught me to shave, but I figured it out eventually. The way you figure out most things nobody showed you: badly at first, then adequately, then you can do it without thinking about it.
At some point the absence of that guidance recedes into the background. It was a self-learned thing, you wish someone had shown you, but so be it.
Becoming a parent though, reveals those missing moments again, from the other side. This time around, we get to be the one who does the teaching, to offer some of what we once needed.
For the longest time, I had been looking forward to teaching my eldest son to shave. To show him what no-one had shown me meant something big and special.
I’d half-planned it well in advance, the way we do when we assume something will simply happen. I’d bought him a decent razor, some shaving foam, and could see so clearly, standing beside him in the bathroom, handing over little squares of toilet paper for the inevitable cuts a first shave produces.
As things turned out, he didn’t want me to show him. That’s ok. His call, and I respect that. No protesting or guilt-tripping.
I bought him a good electric shaver for Christmas, and he appreciated it. My son was now equipped, and I’d given him a good tool to do the job. I felt proud.
A little part of me longed for the shared teaching moment, though. The procedural, rite-of-passage ritual of it. It was something I’d missed out on and had attached significance to.
Even with the grace of adapting to how things unfolded, I had to sit with something I didn’t quite have a name for. I wasn’t mourning the past. I was mourning a plan. Is that even a thing?
There’s an honesty about this kind of mourning that takes some sitting with to accept: this kind of grief is entirely made by us.
It’s about our lost plan and hope, about an expectation that wasn’t ours to set. My son wasn’t obligated to play the part in my sentimentally-loaded plan. I had written the script for how I wanted things to go, and nobody else was compelled to go along with it.
And alongside that, I was the child who didn’t get to do something, and became the parent who wanted to impart that same thing from the other side.
Sitting with both of these things honestly and acknowledging it is healthy. We are allowed to be sad about twice missing out on something that we came to attach value to.
Because the present grief rhymes with the older one. They are two different losses, pulling toward each other, though they aren’t the same wound.
For a while I managed that grief instead of feeling it fully. I sat with it so carefully, so deliberately, so consciously observing myself, that I went a little numb. Without meaning to, I had turned feeling into watching. It caught up with me though, as suppressed emotions usually do. With interest.
My therapist put it simply: let it be what it is, and feel what it feels like. Be in it and stop just noticing it. I had to actually move through the loss, even if to some it seems silly. It was a big thing to me, and that’s ok. Something I was looking forward to didn’t happen. That’s allowed to hurt.
The do-overs we sometimes get don’t always arrive on schedule or look like what we might want. It’s ok to feel things about this. The grief of the plan is allowed to be its own thing, separate from the older losses it feels like.
There will be other moments and plans that do happen.
But first, the plan that didn’t come good is allowed to be a loss, and not a lesson or a reframe. Something mattered, and it didn’t happen.
Three things to try.
Separate the rhyming griefs.
When a current grief feels like an older one, write them down separately. Two columns, two losses, two dates.
Name what’s actually happening now before the older one pulls it under. They might rhyme, but they’re not the same wound.Notice if you’ve turned feeling into observing.
Next time you’re sitting with something hard, ask: am I in this, or am I watching myself be in it?
If it’s the second, try putting down the analysis for ten minutes. No naming, no framing. Just the feeling, whatever shape it takes.Name the plan out loud.
If there’s a plan that didn’t come good, say it plainly to someone, or write it down: this is what I wanted, this is what I’d imagined, and it didn’t happen. As a fact that deserves to be stated before it gets filed away as ‘fine’.
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