Bitterness.
Any tinge of bitterness I start to smell coming around in my heart, I stomp it out. I just can't feel that way.
And it's true. That's how I feel, that I just cannot feel bitter. I should not feel bitter.
1) Because I believe my Heavenly Father loves me and knows what's best for me and that there this unspeakable joy in this trial that I would not be able to receive any other way.
and 2) Because I believe in the law of compensation. Especially that,
“All that is unfair about life can be made right through the Atonement of Jesus Christ.”
I have pondered this often.
I have pondered this when I feel for people I love that have "unfair" things in their life. "They don't deserve this." That is when I mostly ponder it.
But this has been meaningful to me in mental illness.
When my daughter Hadley was born, I suffered a very painful period of postpartum depression for five months. Even now, even in this journal, I don't want to talk about the feelings I felt.
I'll mention a few. I had no connection to my daughter. I didn't feel she was mine. The guilt for not feeling connection and ownership magnified the loss to depression.
This was a very painful time in my life.
I remember sitting on the floor sometimes, not being able to lift my arms, just sitting there. Can't move a muscle. Just sitting there.
I remember acute pain that I didn't feel she was mine.
I went through postpartum depression for five months. That felt like two years. And when I came out of it, and I was finally looking back and saying it was something that "happened" instead of something that was "happening", I had an immense connection to my daughter. I was insanely in love with her.
And then the talk of bitterness.
I was kind of considering that bitter feeling to become a part of my heart. The first five months of my daughter's life. Her most precious months. Five months as a newborn which I would never have back in all of eternity. Those five months were spent without connection or joy.
I held her. I fed her through the night. I took care of her. But no joy. No connection. No sense of her being mine.
Those five months. Gone.
It was like she didn't become my daughter until she was five months old. Like our bond, our relationship, didn't form until five months. And I was hurt.
Why? Why did I not get my newborn? Why did I "adopt" her at the age of five months and miss out on all that precious, sweet, straight from heaven, tiny stage of loving and rejoicing?
I will never get those five months with her again.
It is extremely painful for me to remember this reality, these feelings, and admit to them. I think that is why postpartum is so painfully suffered in silence. The feelings a mother should not be having are felt. And to admit them is self-suicide. It destroys your self-image of the meaning of the word "mother", it hurts to voice feelings you have tried not to feel and realize that means your admitting to their reality, and it sounds so bad once those feelings come out of your mouth or onto paper that you compound the depression cause now others can judge you.
Postpartum depression. A silent and acute pain.
At least that's how I felt.
So I'm kind of forcing myself to write this post, for all those reasons in the above paragraph I mentioned, cause I don't want to remember these feelings were real. I don't want to feel that pain again. And I'm opening a box of pain.
Forcing myself…Forcing.
So all I had to go on, in the middle, the deep middle, of the feeling called Bitterness that was trying to become a part of the makeup of my heart, was, "Hey. Stop. The law of compensation."
"Everything that is unfair about life can and will be made right." And I know that. It not only will be made right, but God is an overly-generous paymaster. Overly-generous is an even insulting word to put to that. He compensates then adds to to the extent there are no words that can come from my mouth for what He has done for me.
Haha. It makes me laugh to think I thought when I left for my mission that I was "sacrificing". Not a good laugh. But a, "wow. that was pathetic I even though I might be sacrificing." laugh.
Sacrifice? SACRIFICE?
There are no words.
I have stood to bear my testimony about my mission, only delving into the challenge of speaking the unspeakable gratitude I feel for my mission a few select times, when I've felt inspired to take on that challenge, and there I stand. Tears welling up in my eyes. Welling up and welling up. Then welling up again. My throat is caught. There is nothing I can say.
So I stutter.
"There are no words." And I swipe my hand across the air in front of my body like I'm smoothing out a tablecloth with excessive force…"No words to describe what my mission did for me…I thought I was sacrificing?"…more tears…more cat's got my tongue and my throat is suffocating…"Everything I thought I was sacrificing, my Heavenly Father gave it back to me and more when I returned from my mission."
And those blessings just continue to get bigger and bigger and more meaningful and more crucial to my spiritual existence in this world, and as a mother in Zion and as a wife.
No words.
And so here comes Bitterness and I say, "No. Yes I didn't get to be 'here' for the first five months of my sweet eternal daughter's life, but there is a law of compensation. What I think I've "sacrificed" will one day appear to me as nothing compared to the eternal compensation that awaits me. I know that. I've lived it. No Bitter."
And here I am again. The first three months of my sweet baby Ainsley's life were amazing. Heaven. AMAZING. And then the next five? To this day?
Where have I been. Where is Candice. She is only here 20% of the time.
I've turned around and seen my daughter. She jumped from three-months old to eight-months old in a day. She is threatening to crawl. And 5/8ths of her life I have spent…sick.
Bitterness. It tries to creep up. Then I beat it back.
THE LAW OF COMPENSATION.
