I’m going to get a pedicure this weekend.
I know it’s not newsworthy; I’ve had plenty in my life. But it’s Girls’ Weekend between some of my closest friends and me. The agenda is to watch Mamma Mia! and to laugh at the same jokes we’ve been telling for years between us and to go get pedicures. It will be the most fun I have this month, because it is so normal—and part of it comes from the way it will feel like sleepovers when you’re girls and not moms, not professionals in your careers, not having to race back on Sunday to coach softball.
It will be the most fun I have this month, and I’m going to grieve.
Grief does not generally make me uncomfortable.
As a matter of fact, I love to cry. I love the sad parts of myself as much as I do the funny, the curious.
Grieving, to me, feels like unburdening myself, allowing each layer of my soul to breathe deeply. And in that deep breath, there’s such relief in folding myself out, peeling away at the layers until I reach the untouched core and let it kindle.
I would say, by all accounts, I am a happy person. I love to laugh, love the sunshine and feeling motivated to write or clean my house. And I feel very lucky to be able to say that, even having experienced various kinds of anxiety and depression, despite the hopelessness I have come in contact with on more than one occasion, grief does not take away from my joy.
I have often said that grief and joy are not mutually exclusive, at least for me. It is hard to see my friends go on to have beautiful, healthy babies when my pregnancy was cut short months ago, just as much as it is a delight to my soul to see them become parents again or for the first time. It’s weird to be loved by people who knew my dad better than I ever did, and it’s equal parts sad and happy to hear of the many ways they loved him.
It will be happy and sad—and likely not a very big deal—when I sit for a pedicure and have them remove the outgrown shreds of brown paint that I had done the week before my miscarriage. It’s not that the paint symbolizes anything. It’s not that the ritual itself is of great importance.
It’s just that I have to move on.
There’s no real value in having my nails done. There’s nothing overly special about the color I chose all those months ago.
And I would never force myself to tamp down my own sadness, to make it out to be less than it feels. I just mean that time keeps on going, and my due date will come and go like any other day, and my toenails will be a different color, and everything has to change all the time—and what a shame it is that sometimes all I have to carry with me is the comfort of my friend, grief.
It amazes me how something as insignificant as a pedicure can be so fundamental in my understanding of Why I’m Crying Today. But it’s the truth. Much like happiness, grief grows us; it does not sprout weeds—on the contrary, I think grief gives us some of the most beautiful parts of nature, the weeping willow and the mourning dove.
It was after my miscarriage that I found words like these, from a woman who, like me, is a defender of grief. Allyson Dinneen, who runs Notes From Your Therapist on Instagram, wrote in late October,
“Nothing has shaped my life like Grief has.
‘When will you get over it’
my answer is
I hope never.
Nothing has helped shape my life around Living, and who and what matters most to me more than the reality of how short it all is. And how much I want to be me
While there’s still time.”
I’ll get the pedicure because my feet are aching. I’ll say goodbye to a color I chose when I was pregnant and pick a new one for a season I didn’t think I’d find myself in again.
And that’s okay. I am going to be me while there’s still time.