I started writing this two nights ago, on the eve of a full moon, as the rest of the house was quiet, even the Guinea fowl. Last night, I was supposed to go to a gathering of wonderful women but I found myself too raw to be with people I didn’t know, so instead I continued writing. By the time I finished, I wasn’t at all sure what I’d do with these words. This is intensely personal, The thought of people I don’t know reading this makes me feel very vulnerable, but actually there are some things I really need my friends (and by friends, I mean my actual friends not just those slightly random people who’ve friended me on FB but I’ve never met) to know and maybe this will end up being read by, and resonate with, other women who’ve shared a similar experience.

We don’t usually have chocolate cake and ice-cream in the house but yesterday we had a special occasion, today there are leftovers and tonight I’m eating – without really tasting, fully aware that I’m self-medicating with food – my second bowl of chocolate cake and ice-cream.

A couple of hours ago, one of my close friends told me, with thanks to a sperm donor, she is pregnant. This evening, as she sat in front of the fire chatting excitedly to my husband about the amazing story of how quickly and easily she became pregnant, I stood in the kitchen out of sight, tears silently rolling down my cheeks as I cooked dinner. How could I possibly let her know that I found listening to this wonderful news almost unbearable? How could I tell her that this pregnancy, triggered in me a wave of grief so embodied it made my chest ache?

Last week I listened to a podcast entitled “Getting Grief Right‘ with grief counsellor Patrick O’Malley. He talked about the disservice that has been done by the dominance of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief and how there is in fact no one roadmap for grief. He went on to say that after decades of working with people who are grieving, it has become clear to him that one of the most important things people need is the opportunity to share their story and for it to be witnessed. People who are grieving need empathy, real empathy, which is actually much harder than it sounds (I know this from being on the giving end as much as the receiving one) because basically it means being able to be fully present for someone without giving advice or making well-intentioned comments designed to try and make the person feel different.

Over the last four years, when I’ve talked about the miscarriages nearly everyone has responded with undeniably well intentioned comments which are intended to shift the way I feel. For example ‘At least you know you can get pregnant’ or the variation ‘At least you know what it’s like to get pregnant’, then there’s ‘So many women go through this and go on to have a healthy baby, this will happen for you’, or ‘You just have to trust your body’s wisdom to have miscarried for a reason’, or ‘You’re still not too old’.

Even more challenging I think, has been when I’ve shared the decision to not continue trying and my process of making my peace with that decision and then having someone say ‘Oh that’s when it will happen for you, just stop trying and relax and you’ll get pregnant.’ I know they’re only trying to make me feel better, but essentially what this person is doing is disagreeing with me – I’m saying I’m not going to have a baby and they’re telling me I probably will.

Hardest yet, I think, has been this. A while ago I ran into a distant friend who is an older Mum to a new baby. She told me she was ‘shattered’ and went on to say that she wasn’t sure she’d recommend motherhood. She seemed to not entirely be joking, but I mostly took it as being something a wickedly sleep deprived new Mum might say. However within half an hour, she’d sent a follow up message saying that she knows babies is a sensitive topic for me, so she mostly wants to hide from me, but in this instance didn’t and said what she’d said because she didn’t know what else to say. Again, I have no doubt at all that she meant well and that she was exhausted but it had the opposite effect of making me feel better.

Four years ago I lost three babies, all less than eight weeks old, within six months. It is only recently I’ve been able to refer to them as babies rather than ‘miscarriages’. I am still grieving, although now not so much for them — as I consciously made time and created space to grieve after each miscarriage — but for me. For the loss of something I really, REALLY, really wanted and felt, deep in my soul, was a part of my future. I am now grieving for the loss of an opportunity to feel a baby grow inside me and to be a Mum to a tiny human Adam and I created together. 

I’ve just turned forty five. I’ve been unwell for the last four years. Losing those babies knocked the stuffing out of me. A whole bunch of tests later it would seem that a considerable amount of stuffing had been knocked out of me before I got pregnant. After years of prolonged stress, I was, the doctor assumes, adrenally fatigued before I conceived. Four years later I feel infinitely better, but it’s anticipated that I’ll need another two years to fully recover. My child bearing window is rapidly closing (if it hasn’t already). I would really love to have a baby but to be perfectly honest, right now it feels like a choice between me and a baby. At the moment, even a few days of insufficient sleep sets me back and while it seems that nothing is guaranteed with motherhood, I’ve yet to meet a mum who doesn’t suffer through months or years of sleep deprivation.

To add another layer to this story, I was, as a psychologist once said, a parentified child. I’ve spent a lot of my life being a mother to my alcohol dependent mother. I was still doing that, in many respects, when I got pregnant. It was only when I moved Mum into dementia care a couple of years ago that my whole body heaved a sigh of relief and I felt that weight of responsibility lift. So while it might seem to some people reading this that I’m being selfish choosing my health and vitality over a baby, the decision follows decades of putting someone else’s wellbeing ahead of my own. However this layer doesn’t diminish the grief I feel for the loss of mothering my own baby and it is a grief which is impossible to avoid because I’m surrounded by friends who are mothers of young children or babies or who are mamas-to-be.

I read this to Adam last night and he gently reminded me that I need to ask for what I need, not just for what I don’t need. So here goes. I need my friends to know that I love you and love spending time with you but sometimes it’s just too hard to go to your children’s birthday parties or your baby showers. I love hearing about your children and sometimes it would mean a lot if you would stop and acknowledge that I lost mine. Pause for a moment and say ‘I’m so sorry Tink, sometimes it must be really hard to hear me talk about my children all the time.’

I wish I’d had more time with my Dad to talk to him about his experience as a doctor. I have a deep interest in healing and I remember one of the few things he said about his life as a surgeon was that one of the great failings of Western medicine is it’s non-acceptance of death. In 2013, in June, then September and then again in December I lost a baby. Now I’m coming to terms with the loss of my dream of being a mother. Friends, wherever you are but particularly those of you I see more often, I need you to witness that grief and if you can, when you can, I would be so very grateful if you could hold a bit of space for it.

Originally posted at tink.nz.

A little while ago, a friend admitted that when we first met four years ago, she found me slightly intimidating. I was, she said, doing all these amazing things and well on my way to becoming like another friend of ours, who is often cited as an example of an Amazing Woman Doing Amazing Things. But these days I’m not doing anything noteworthy and a part of myself, my ego most likely, felt deflated by her words. “Oh” Tink’s Ego said “but I want to be amazing again…”

An even littler while ago, I had a dream about not being enough. I dreamt of familiar people who do exceptional things, busy as bees in a collective working space and I felt I should be there with them. Instead I was on my way to a leisurely lunch with my husband and I was conflicted, the familiar voice of my inner critic was fierce with her Shoulds. “You should be doing something worthwhile” she said.

What haven’t I been doing? I haven’t had a job, I haven’t been out saving the world, I have not aimed for fast and/or high growth for ElementAll, my online clothing business. Why? Quite simply because I haven’t been well. Savings, a very small business, a family inheritance and a husband have supported my much lower key lifestyle.

What have I been doing? I’ve tried to rest but I’ve also moved my mother into dementia care, sold a family home, got married, taken care of our animals, slowly cultivated my relationship with Peka Peka, equally slowly cultivated ElementAll, tried to recover from miscarriages and learned a lot about food as medicine. None of these things are ‘tweet-able’ (with the possible exception of the clothing, although slow growth is far from sexy). For me, of course, they’re all significant but as far as my tribe goes, they’re not noteworthy, they are in fact very ordinary.

Of all the things I’ve been doing over the last four years, the most challenging and – in my experience – the most culturally unacceptable (apart from not drinking alcohol) has been rest. I differentiate here between sleep and rest because there would seem to be widespread consensus now that good sleep is critical for health. Rest, however, is a much more slippery creature.

If you search for synonyms of rest you will find a list of verbs that describe actions which are mostly neither aspired to nor celebrated: Relax, ease up/off, let up, slow down, pause, have/take a break, unbend, repose, laze, idle, loaf, do nothing, take time off, slack off, unwind, recharge one’s batteries, be at leisure, take it easy, sit back, sit down, stand down, lounge, luxuriate, loll, slump, flop, put one’s feet up, lie down, go to bed, have/take a nap, nap, catnap, doze, have/take a siesta, drowse.

If you search for antonyms of rest, you will find a list of actions we reward with praise, money (although generally much less of that in the world of non profit endeavours) and social media attention: Advance, awakening, busyness, action, energy, employment, action, labor, strive, struggle, toil, slave, sweat.

However it turns out that rest is essential for a healthy mind. “Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets,” essayist Tim Kreider wrote in The New York Times. “The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration—it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”  (See also Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime)

The body also needs rest. “Right now you’re reading. But for a minute your thoughts may wander (you’re reading about rest, after all) and your mind shifts to random thoughts. You’re doing “nothing.” Meanwhile your body is re-making you with extreme velocity.”  As Matthew J. Edlund M.D. pointed out in a piece for Psychology Today, rest is regeneration. “Inside each of your ten trillion cells fly a billion protein-protein interactions every second. Every one is an information event. Every one helps change you, remake you, so you never, ever stay the same. But as far as you’re concerned, you’re doing “nothing.” You’re just “wasting time.”

The stress of significant life events and decades of relentless doing have left my body and mind depleted. This has shown up as fatigue, digestive issues, allergies and anxiety. Test results this week have confirmed – finally a diagnosis – I have adrenal fatigue or adrenal insufficiency. This means that my body is producing much lower than normal levels of cortisol (the “stress hormone”) which influences, regulates or modulates many of the changes that occur in the body in response to stress including immune responses, anti-inflammatory action, blood pressure, blood sugar levels and central nervous system activation, amongst other functions.

Adam has encouraged me, and my body has forced me, to rest. There are days where cooking meals, walking the dogs and vacuuming is all I can do before sinking into the sofa with a cup of herb tea. Until I find my attention caught by the long grass and drag myself outside to do twenty minutes of weed eating. Because it turns out I’m not very good at not doing and I’m very good at worrying about the things I’m not doing. I sit down and quite quickly become subtly agitated by the joint forces of my inner critic and busyness addict and within minutes I’ve thought of something which needs to be done.  A big house, an online business, animals and a spray free garden mean that there is never nothing to do and in case I run out of chores, I’ve also accumulated a huge pile of non-fiction books laden with information. Thus I get caught in a loop of needing to rest but resisting it and I end up doing everything – including the rest – in a kind of half assed way.

But finally I’ve had enough of taking one step forward and one backwards and slowly (everything seems to be slow these days) I am learning to rest, to provide myself with the essential space I need to heal.  Unexpectedly this space is teaching me other things. It is teaching me to befriend my Inner Critic,  thank her for The Shoulds and remind her that she is not in fact driving this vehicle. It is teaching me to befriend my fear, particularly of the unknown (being unwell for four years and not knowing why has done a stellar job of generating fear of the unknown). It is teaching me to find joy in the ordinary, in slow cultivation rather than instant gratification, and it is teaching me to unwind much of what my culture has taught me about growth and progress and success….It would seem that sitting in the vegetable garden and quietly observing has taught me as much as getting stuck in with tools and a determination to create order.

Poet, peace activist and spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh has said that “We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing. We worry too much. We don’t allow our bodies to heal, and we don’t allow our minds and hearts to heal.”  Slowly, one very mundane day at a time, I’m reconnecting with this wisdom, disconnecting from the addictive busyness, letting go of The Shoulds and allowing my mind and body to heal.

Originally posted at tink.nz.

I became aware of many of the lessons I learned from my father Clive after he died. In many ways, he provided an example of what not to do. As a workaholic surgeon, single figure handicap golfer and for most of my childhood also a more-than-part-time farmer, he’d nailed how to not sleep and how not to rest. How not to have a supportive, loving partnership. How not to eat well.

As I went to sleep one night in July 2014 (six months or so after three miscarriages), I noticed a tremor in my left thumb. I didn’t pay too much attention until I woke around 2am and noticed it was still twitching. Dad died of a particularly grim dementia called Lewy Body Dementia (patients experience the symptoms of both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s) and it occurred to me in those wee small hours, that a muscle twitch in the thumb or a finger is one of the early signs of Parkinson’s.

I’d previously been conscious (at least to some extent) that I wasn’t particularly well – I was really tired, had little energy and was often irritable. My twitching thumb and memories of Dad made me sit bolt upright in the middle of the night and realise ‘oh shit, I’m actually really unwell’. Of course I didn’t know I had any kind of neurological degenerative disease but from somewhere deep in my body a visceral awareness of a lack of well-being emerged.

Coincidentally, Adam had been researching nutrition and psoriasis for several months and he’d been sharing with me compelling evidence showing that nutrition can play a significant role in healing autoimmune conditions. As I lay there listening to my body, it occurred to me, that maybe Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are autoimmune diseases? My smartphone and Google confirmed that inflammation plays a causative role in both those diseases and there is increasing evidence for the hypotheses that both these conditions are autoimmune. Another Google search confirmed that people appear to be successfully using nutrition and other lifestyle factors to reverse the symptoms of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

As I lay there wide awake, I became aware of what felt like a message from Dad forming in the shimmering dark space of the room. “Do not follow in my footsteps” it said’ “you can heal yourself with food. Decide now, in this moment, to look after yourself.”

My road to recovery began with paying attention to my body and the wisdom of my elder. I listened when my body said “Oi, listen up kid, everything is not hunky dory in here, we need you to make some changes.” Our bodies are smart. They tell us when things are out of alignment. Recurrent colds, low energy, ongoing digestive troubles, achy joints, erratic menstrual cycles, mood swings. These are signals to ease off the accelerator a bit, even perhaps pull up, turn the engine off for a while and peer under the bonnet.

My healing began with listening and I heard my body telling me that my resources were severely depleted. Figuring out how to remedy that was the next step but there was no doubt in my mind that nourishing my body and mind was critical. However healing also began with learning from Dad and listening to the advice he gave (intuited or imagined) from beyond his grave. His DNA may live in me, but this does not condemn me to his disease. Epigenetics has much to say on this subject, but that’s a story for a future post.

In the meantime, I wholeheartedly encourage you to close your computer or put down your phone. Close your eyes, connect with your breathing and slowly sense into what your body is saying.

Originally posted at tink.nz.

Precious Snowflake: a term used sarcastically by my husband’s family to describe a person who takes himself, or herself, too seriously.

This evening, four sets of neighbours are gathering at one house for dinner. We take it in turns to host and tonight the most senior of our hyper-local citizens are wining and dining us. And wine and dine us they will, as they used to own a very successful restaurant. There will be beautiful wine and mouth-wateringly good food. However I need to take my own simple food and sparkling water because I simply can’t ask them to cater for my dietary restrictions. Which to be honest, makes me feel like precious snowflake and part of me wants to make up an excuse and not go.

Years ago I worked at Te Papa (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) when it was a project in development on the Wellington waterfront. As a member of the corporate sponsorship team, I was involved in organising a fancy pants dinner for sponsors on the eve of opening. I can still remember how grumpy the chef was and how judgy I was of someone’s wife who sent through a list of things she couldn’t eat. I would have called her a precious snowflake. If only I’d known then what was in store for me.

Two months ago, I ate bread with gluten for the first time in two years, by mistake. The following day, intentionally I tried goat’s milk – cow’s milk is clearly a no – go but I thought I’d try another kind of milk. Within a few hours I began to feel distinctly out of sorts, the following day I had a panic attack, muscular aches & pains and digestive upset followed. I was anxious, not sleeping well, it knocked my menstrual cycle off it’s regular course and two weeks later, when I thought I was safely out the other side, my lower back seized up from all the muscular tension.

I have no doubt that the cause of this autoimmune flare up was gluten and dairy (although it took me a week to figure out there was gluten in the bread) and as wickedly uncomfortable as the experience was, it was useful confirmation. I’d been feeling really good beforehand and the flare up happened at what was usually a hormonally very stable time of the month, so the culprits were obvious. I may well sound like someone who takes themselves too seriously to the eye-rolling waiter at a cafe, but I’m not kidding when I say I can’t have dairy and gluten. My body has been a strict, but very responsive and consistent teacher.

Two years ago, on a good day, I could just manage a gentle one kilometre walk. I was sleeping badly, waking up panicky in the early hours of the morning and not going back to sleep. My digestion was dodgy. I remember gingerly walking down the single flight of stairs at home, with one hand braced against the wall, wondering if I’d ever be able to bounce down them again without effort. My thinking was foggy and I couldn’t concentrate.

Today, I regularly sleep through the night. Often I wake around 3am but not with anxiety, and a short practice of breathing sends me back to sleep. I’m pooping everyday. Walking several kilometres a day and practicing yoga. My mind is increasingly clear, my body increasingly energised. My mojo is returning!

In anticipation of writing about my process of healing, last week I asked Adam (my husband) to write a few paragraphs on ‘then and now’. As he handed over his laptop he said “I’m a bit nervous about you reading this as it’s not very flattering … but you did ask?” Yes, I did ask. And no, it’s not very flattering. I read his words and feel very vulnerable. My inner critic cackles with glee and tells me I am indeed the most precious of precious snowflakes.

Two and a half years ago you were exhausted and everything was hard. Any unexpected thing was too much, dropping something, a wrong look or word were enough to tip you into meltdown. You had a hard time concentrating and focusing. You slept badly most nights, you were grumpy, stubborn and unpredictable. Your brain was foggy so processing information and making decisions was hard. Making choices to care for yourself, or allowing others to care for you, were challenging. You didn’t want to admit that you were sick, you desperately just wanted to get on with your life. You stayed awake at night researching what was wrong with you, worried that you were dying. You were seeing doctors every week, sometimes twice a week. You had panic attacks every time something unexpected happened. Days where you felt like ‘Tink’ were rare and it was crushing as they faded. 

There hasn’t been any magical fix, but slowly over the last year you’ve become healthier. You sleep better, are more comfortable in your body and your emotions are more stable. You have taken ownership of your health. You pay attention to the effects rest, food, stress and practice have on your wellbeing. You do more of the things which make you feel good and less of the things which make you feel bad. You have energy reserves and are more resilient when things go wrong. You are able to focus, make decisions and get things done. Maybe best of all you laugh more.

I do indeed laugh more. I attribute so much of my healing to nutrition and to eating food I know is giving my body what it needs, not the food which I know sends it into an inflamed tail spin. Yet learning how to rest, for someone who has been responsible for taking care of others as long as she can remember, has almost been the hardest lesson of all.

Over the last few months, as I’ve shared my story of learning and healing with friends, they have encouraged me to write about it. About my experience of using food, rest, gentle exercise, contemplative practice and the support from family & friends, as medicine. Between the lines of this story is my growing understanding that Western medicine doesn’t have the answers I need.

And so I will continue, although not in this post, to share more of my recipe for healing and the new science which is emerging to validate (for those of us who require validation from the scientific community) the role of lifestyle factors in healing. In the meantime, I will go to dinner with neighbours and try to be a less apologetic precious snowflake. While continuing to be mindful of others and I am also learning to say “this is me, these are my choices and they keep me well.”

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Originally posted at tink.nz.