Making the Right Mistakes

It there such a thing as a ‘right mistake’? Since Evie died, I have made a bucket-load of mistakes. At home, at work, anywhere and everywhere. I have found that the trick isn’t the mistake itself, it’s how you deal with the outcome or impact that matters. When your life unravels following the death of your child, it’s so hard just to get the simple stuff right let alone a complex decision.

Mistakes mean that we learn; hopefully. Mistakes mean that we add to our knowledge base and when other things go wrong in the future, we are better placed to sort them out because we have experienced it all before. When Evie died I had never experienced anything like it before. Now though, I have made so many mistakes that I feel much better prepared to confront anything else that crops up.

The right mistake though. What’s that about? From my perspective, it’s a mistake that does no long term harm, to anyone or anything. One that, largely, you can chuckle over a few years down the line. One where no-one else gets hurt. Before Evie died I was striving to get everything right first time. Anything else was failure. Not surprisingly, I set the bar too high a lot of the time. Now though, making a mistake is just an opportunity to learn. That sounds a bit like some poncy team-building bullshit doesn’t it? But I also believe that the depth of pain that we feel after our child dies means that we need to make easy mistakes and then fix them. That way we can build our self-confidence back up slowly. We can re-build our internal resilience after it was wiped out.

In some ways, it’s almost like being a child again. Evie’s death destroyed great swathes of me, my self-confidence, my ‘backbone’. By making mistakes, figuring out what I had done wrong, and then sorting it out, I was learning what my new environment was all about, where the boundaries are and what my new limitations are. Not much different from being a baby or young child. The main thing though is that you mustn’t let getting something wrong bother you.

Grieving for a child is so different from anything else in this world that we can only learn about it by getting things wrong. If we toddle along happily, then I think we have missed the point, or are burying our heads so deep in the sand that we aren’t going to cope. Some day, some time, the grief will catch you, and when that day comes, it is going to bury you.

So I’m quite happy to make mistakes. That way I can learn, without hurting anyone, take it on the chin and keep going.