City Place

One of the reasons I feel kind of crazy right now, so I’m told, is that serious grief involves identity re-formation and search for new meaning. Being Sarah’s mom was a huge part of my identity and so I’m basically walking around without an identity and that’s crazy-making. When (if?) I integrate or stumble on a new identity and sense of meaning, I will feel more sane again.

I remember some of this dissociated feeling right after Sarah was born, when we were in the no-sleep newborn stage that involved constant bodily fluids all over both of us. I felt a bit like I didn’t know who I was anymore, like I was starring on some weird Reality TV show where you were forced to answer your own doorbell in pajamas covered in spit-up, baby poo, and human breast milk while carrying a screaming infant and listening to some teenager talk about Saving Sligo Creek. But then Sarah started sleeping, and she had a great nanny too (Alba) when I was at work, and we found our groove and I started to love being a mom.

So the answer seems to be that I have to find some sort of new groove or meaning to my life, other than watching documentaries and reading dead child memoirs. This is scary and daunting.

It’s been pointed out to me that I’ve lost more than one piece of my identity, since I not only lost Sarah, but my mother died a little less than a year before Sarah. My mom lived up in New York City and up until Covid she used to like to come down on the train (with my dad) every few months and stay a few days. My mom was a bit of a character. She claimed there was no good shopping in New York City – zero – all the stores there were gone! There was nothing! She really liked shopping in our little suburban DC mall, and she and I and Sarah would often head over together.

I remember once she needed to get a dress for a Bar Mitzvah, and I took her and Sarah to a slightly larger mall nearby and parked and got Sarah into her stroller-wheelchair and then got Mom’s rollator (a kind of walker) and set that up and got each of them on one side of me and the other, and we were slowly making our way into the mall from the parking lot and a woman in a car stopped for us. She looked at me and mouthed “Wow.” I just nodded and smiled. I liked being their caretaker and protector.

It has always made me feel good to have people to take care of, and I really don’t anymore. That makes me sad. I have Polly the Beagle of course, and Max my husband. And my Dad. There are various ways we can become involved again with special needs kids, foster care, respite care, etc. I think this may be too painful to do at this point. When I allow myself to think about it, my fantasy always goes bad — the child doesn’t like us; CPS investigates; we go broke, or some such catastrophe.

In fairy tales, the childless older couple always discovers a new child or baby in their garden, or sleeping in their house, or through some other magical or natural mechanism like the sea. I wonder if this is wish fulfillment left over from an era with a lot of child loss. It would be so much easier to just jump to the part of the story where we came home from Safeway and there is a new kid in Sarah’s room for us to love, maybe with Down Syndrome or a non-fatal genetic disorder. I don’t think that’s going to happen.