Widows Support, Coaching for Widows

Me. “Tell me I’m not dying.”

My doctor. “You’re not dying Mie.”

Me. “No, no, no say it like you really mean it.”

Doctor. “You really are not dying Mie.” Deep sigh.

Me. “I don’t have cancer?”

Doctor. “No Mie, you don’t have cancer.”

Me. “Okay, just humor me one last little bit. Would you look me in the eye and say it? Like you really mean it?”

Doctor. “Okay. Mie.” Looking me straight in the eye and quite obviously just an itty bit irritated. “You. Don’t. Have. Cancer. Not even a tiny bit. And you are not going to die.”

“Thank you.”

Off the examining table I slid, once again reassured that I would live another day.

This time it was cancer of the cervix. Last time it was my shoulder, the time before that the scapula, then it was the elbow, before that it was my head (head cancer?) and the very first time it was breast cancer. I tell you, sometimes, it is hard being me.

Now I know some of my clients are reading this, and to them I say, yes, great coach and…mildly neurotic. Afraid of cancer and afraid of dying. I make no excuses.

Like Popeye said, I am what I am.

But it is not always easy to be who we are, and many of us would like to be just a bit smarter, more beautiful, grounded, courageous, thinner, curvier, more athletic, blonder, (Okay, that we can do something about. See last post), richer…

How do we get to a place of acceptance? How and when will we finally and fully appreciate the mixed bag that we are?

For me it began with widowhood. The very worst time in my life was also the start of some unexpected self-discovery. When Mike died, and I completely lost my footing, that was when I began to grow up. That was when I began to get some humility and see the truth of who I was.

Honestly, I was so repressed for the first 40-something years of my life that I had no idea that I was repressed at all. I hid who I was and played the role of a quiet, shy daughter, student, then worker,  then housewife and finally caregiver.  It was not until grieving grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and shook and shook until my pretensions went flying and I discovered the truth within.

So, I am no longer quiet or shy, I am still anxious but I don’t bother to hide it, I am awkward and funny and serious and intuitive and (yes, neurotic) and I am sure a whole lot more.

And, so are you.

Most of my clients are widows and widowers. They have also temporarily lost their footing. They most often come to coaching because they want to build a future.  But the rebuilding process is not just about a future; it is also about self-discovery.

There is much to explore in the heart and the mind of a widow.  She is a gold mine if she wishes to be.

Our futures are wide open – if we choose.

If you are coming up with reasons  why this is not true, why your future is not wide open, then you may be still deeply grieving. Or, the idea of a future that is big and glorious may be so scary that you are constructing road blocks.  Sometimes we are so afraid that we stop ourselves even before we start.

Please read the following poem Our Deepest Fear, by Marianne Williamson.

And then, call me for a sample coaching session.

Warmly, Mie      The Widows Coach

http://skdesigns.com/internet/articles/quotes/williamson/our_deepest_fear/

(You may have to copy and paste.)

I am of the age where some of my friends are beginning to let their hair naturally gray. There is courage in this as we recognize that we live in a culture for which the standards vary greatly for men and for women. A man becomes distinguished as he grays around the temples; a woman becomes old as silver predominates.

I hear a bit of pride in my friends as they daringly buck the trend and embrace their natural state.  No longer are they tethered to the beauty shop every six weeks, paying God-knows-what in order to cover up those persistent roots. They are free, free, and FREE!!!

I, however, am not so free. The facts are inescapable. I feel young, always younger than my 56 years, except for when I face the mirror and the lights that surround it, allowing me not a shred of denial. Yes, I also make, every six weeks, a trip to Lisa, my favorite hair dresser of all time and I sit in front of the mirror as she puts some green sloppy stuff on my head while I pray that no one I knows walks in. (As God would have it, always, exactly at that moment someone sticks their head around the corner and says “Mie, is that you? I wasn’t sure…”

As my friends make their conversions, I wonder. Should I too go natural? Gently, and pridefully gray? (And mousily, I must add because my gray is not even close to the silvery gray of my mother.)

No! My inner sexpot screams…No! No yet! Not at 56! No! No! No!

On the other hand, Anneke is now a junior in high school and talking about colleges, colleges that look like they will require a re-mortgage. As I look ahead to payments, the money spent on my hair-genius Lisa becomes harder and harder to rationalize.

It seems to me (and I KNOW I will get in trouble for this) that going gray is easier when one is securely and happily married for 30 years, than for a 50-something widow for whom attractiveness is a social issue.

Yikes…I can’t believe that I even said that and I just know that I am going to get a lot of emails from my married friends.

So I will say up front, yes, attractiveness in a marriage matters, yes, gray can be attractive and yes, I am that shallow.

In my defense, because I think I am going to need some, I don’t mean attractiveness as much as I mean how soft and approachable we become when we care for our insides and our outsides. Self-care. There have been times in my life when I have not given a hoot about how I looked, and the world treated me in return like it didn’t really care about me either. Conversely, when I am careful with myself, the world also responds and is care-full with me.

Widowhood is a financial issue, an emotional issue, a career issue, a family issue.  And, it is a social issue.

Widowhood affects everything. It affects our appearance and it affects our social interactions. These are facts, whether we like them or not.

(Don’t tell me you haven’t thought to your self “How will I ever get naked with a man again?” I sure thought about it. I also thought “who in God’s name would want me now?” as I cried and cried and cried, missing Mike. Mike saw me through pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding. He saw what happened, (the lowering of a number of my body parts) and why it happened. And, he loved it.  But I digress…)

Anyhow, all of this is just me building my case for what I did this weekend, which was to take matters into my own hands, head on down to CVS and to stare down what felt like 62 brands of hair dye and 362 colors. And what wonderful names! Dream Blond,  Espresso, Red Penny, Desert Flower, Chai Latte…

I felt powerful and I also felt a sense of betrayal. How would I face Lisa the next time I needed a hair cut? There would be no hiding my duplicity.

And what if it didn’t work and I exited the bathroom looking freakish, maybe like a 24 year-old-drugged-out-Hard-Rock Groupie? Well then, I would shamefacedly make the trip back to Lisa and she would feel good about repairing the damage, remnants of my temporary insanity. Lisa is forgiving as well as talented.

The bottom line is that when I rinsed Superior Preference by L’Oreal Numbers 6 1/2G and 7LA  (lightest golden brown and lightest auburn) out of my hair I discovered a new me. Gone were the highlights, (from hair painstakingly and painfully crochet-hooked through that plastic martian-like cap… I know you know what I mean) and I now sport a dark auburn-ish look, and although it was not what I had planned and not even close to what the box promised, it is close to what I had as a child, and I feel beautiful.

OK, I know that may seem like a rather bold statement, calling myself beautiful and all, but I feel sexier, flirtier and, dare I say it, I feel young. Yup, beautiful.

Now I know that none of this is PC – but when my 16 year old told me that she liked it, well, that was as good as it gets. This girl is honest to a fault so her seal of approval was huge.

Really, what I want to tell you is that after years spent recovering from loss, my rediscovery of play leads me in all directions. This. Was. Fun. It was experimental and scary, and fun. Go figure. Fun in a box of hair dye.

Rest assured, by about 2:00 this afternoon, I won’t care anymore about my hair.  But waking up this morning, and even now, I feel beautiful.

So, my widow friends, where can you make a difference in your own life for less than 20 bucks?

Warmly, Mie Elmhirst  The Widows Coach   Help for Widows

Please feel free to email me at mie@widowsbreathe.com for a sample session! Mie

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Rainer Maria Rilke

How difficult this is. I find myself pushing and pushing (against my understanding that I must wait), for answers; answers that obviously are not mine yet to have.

Those who have suffered trauma tend to be risk averse.

It takes a whole lot of faith and courage for a widow to make changes whether the changes are about career, family, living situations, relationships, health or money. The buck stops with us and I don’t know about you but I was not happy when I figured this out, nine years ago.

For this moderately repressed, but heart-in-the-right-place, WASP-ish New England widow, learning to trust is a challenge indeed. Mostly, I want the answers before I even know the questions. And I wanted guarantees – especially when it comes to relationships.

It seems that for me and many widows, finding a good man is not that hard. I don’t care what the dating experts say, there are men out there, and most of them are good.

But, trusting in the evolution of relationship…that is not so easy.

I want to know that he will always be in perfect health, that he will always want me, I want to know that he will stay around when he sees my worst behavior, (although I do believe he has pretty much seen it.) and I want to know that Anneke will be Ok even if he decides not to stay. I want to know that I will be OK if he decides not to stay. I want to know what will happen when we hit a rough patch.

Mostly, I want to know that I can trust myself to hang in there for what I really want, whether that means stay or leave, rather than settle or run when I get scared.

Now, I am pretty sure that he will not always be in perfect heath, I don’t know that he will always want me, or that he will stay around, or that I can trust myself to stay or leave… and I can’t even know that Anneke will be OK. I am not in charge.

But I do know that I will be OK. I do know that God/Higher Power/Spirit will nourish me no matter what happens. I lived it when Mike died.

So, although it seems that we not in control of much or, anything for that matter, our job is still to show up and do the best we can. Each year of widowhood we get a little braver, and are blessed with the courage to step just a little further outside of the box.

What is it they say about courage? That it is not the absence of fear, but the willingness to take right action even though we have fear.

So have courage fellow widows…and know that your courage, exercised each time you make a change or try something new, affects all of us and helps all of us be even more courageous. Courageous even without the answers to our many questions.

Best,

The Widows Coach, Mie Elmhirst.

Please feel free to call me 508-640-4421 for a sample coaching session. I look forward to hearing from you!

OK, this may gross you out, but by now you know that I am all about the truth.

So, the truth is that I have rats. Or, more accurately, I had rats. Not those cute little rats that they sell at PETCO; my rats were honest-to-goodness, huge, long-tailed, beady-eyed rats, probably immigrants from the restaurant dumpsters downtown.

Rats #1 and #2 made themselves quite at home under my bird feeder, eating food that was meant for finches, sparrows, and morning doves and not, needless to say, rodents.

You may ask, how this could be connected to widowhood?

When I was married, I would not have given these rats a second thought. I would have reported the situation to Mike, and my thoughts about these scary, possibly disease-infected rodents would have ceased. Mike would have taken it from there and somehow the rats would have been history. Job well done.

I have come to believe that there are girl responsibilities and boy responsibilities, and rats most assuredly are boy responsibilities.

I began widowhood afraid. I was afraid that I would fail as a single parent, afraid that I would fail as a single homemaker and really afraid that I would fail as a single home maintainer. Plumbing, electricity and roofing never interested me and until widowhood, hardly mattered. But gradually, issues presented themselves, (leaks, no heat, water in the fireplace, flooded basement etc) and I took them on, successfully, one by one.

In fact, there were a few years after Mike died when I began to feel powerful in my approach to life.  From fearful widow, I grew into someone who could take care of pretty much anything. I asked many people for lots of advice, and then took that advice home and solved each issue exactly how I pleased, reveling in my newly earned decision-making freedom.

Now, almost nine years later, there is again a man in my life. His name is Patrick. I reported my rats to Patrick, and although his first response was “Cool…get a bb gun!” (Really ladies…are all men like this? Making sport of absolutely Everything??) Anyhow, he stepped in quite wonderfully and took care of rat #1. Which was not at all pleasant because rat #1 had died under the deck and was attracting all kinds of flies and the deck hadn’t been lifted up in over 15 years. Gross. Patrick, my hero.

(About Rat #2… He seems to have left for better fields, either because I cut off his food supply, or, being no dumb rat, he saw the writing on the wall. Either way, he is gone.)

My point is that as widows we are saddled with new responsibilities, some quite masculine in the traditional sense. The trick is to hold onto our female-ness, what is essentially us, our empathy and compassion, and our talents for relationship and community building and then to grow those parts of us that are strong and practical, those parts of us that we might not have needed to exercise when we were married.

I know more about furnaces, chimneys, wood stoves, water heaters and toilets than I ever planned on knowing. That is just the way of the widow. On the other hand, I also feel strong and capable with all this information.

And when, armed with all this knowledge and information, we eventually are ready for love, and love comes knocking, we must learn again to be inclusive and to again, let go.

Really, I could have taken care of rat #1 by myself…as gross as he or she  was. But it seems to me that there is something extremely warm and loving about asking for help. When I asked Patrick to help I really did feel my heart get bigger. As if I was opening up to love just a little more. And when Patrick took care of #1, he felt good about doing this for me.

Can it be that disposing of a rat is romantic? Is it possible that taking care of a backyard rodents can bring two people closer?  Apparently so. For some women, romance is a candle lit dinner, for me it was rat duty. Go figure. It has to do with give and take. The beauty of being able to include someone and then being willing to receive, even if we could have done it ourselves.

Blessings, Mie Elmhirst   Help for Widows.

The widows coach…

Call for a sample session, 508-540-4421

Last Saturday I woke up to a CNN report about  Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and about how the marines stationed there between the late 60’s and 1980 have an unusually high rate of breast cancer – exponentially higher than in the general population – most likely due to the contamination of the drinking water by trichloroethylene, more commonly known as TCE. (Solvents typically used for cleaning).

Mike was stationed there, and as many of you know, he died of breast cancer.

Most of these men have no history of breast cancer in their families. Breast cancer in men is usually diagnosed when they are in their 60s. The men from Camp Lejeune were in their 30s and 40s when diagnosed. The Marine Corps steadfastly denies a connection between these men and the dumping of TCEs. To do so would mean that they would need to provide health care. So the men who served their country faithfully are denied health care for themselves and their families. What a shame.

Anneke and I both went into a little tail-spin this past week. After being in conversation with the CNN reporter covering this story, (Are you SURE Mike had no family history? He was only 40 when diagnosed?) I slowly began to understand what I had denied for so long…that Mike would be alive today were it not for his early military experience.  Essentially, his military experience cut his life short, similar to the men who gave their lives in active duty over seas.

But in Mike’s case, and for these many other men and affected families, there is no acknowledgment of their sacrifice.

After a week of feeling particularly low, I am now better.

Anneke, however,  is not so fine and her wound has been pried a little wider open with this latest news. “It is like he was hit by a drunk driver Mom, but the drunk driver is the government and they are not saying they are sorry.”

No, Anneke, they are not. Not yet.

But there is a group of determined men who are leading the cause, anxious to be heard. And CNN has committed to seeing this story through.

In the meantime,  I will love Anneke and understand that although the world is not always a fair place, in my small way I do get to change the world.

I change the world  when I look at Anneke and acknowledge her beauty even though she has sweat pants on with three different shades of house paint and they are too short and her hair is one big tangle. (OK, I did tell her to change her pants before going away this weekend but I saw the error of my ways and next time I promise I will keep my mouth shut!)

I change the world when I am nice to the telemarketer (OK, I confess,  last night I just hung up).

I change the world when I bring soup to the the cranky lady across the street or when I listen for over 20 minutes while Anneke relates her latest fantastical dream. No kidding – she has the longest dreams I have ever heard.

We all change the world every time we take an action that is right and loving and good.

So. Rather than pretending to be Pollyanna, I do my best when I get scared or angry, to remind myself that I can change the world, that what I do does have meaning, and that the world can feel safe once again.

Blessings, Mie Elmhirst   The Widows Coach

Please call 508-540-4421 for a sample coaching session…