Yesterday turned into a beast of a day. I was emotional after doing my writing, and stirred up by its angry undertone and my recounting of the “ableist” responses to Sarah’s death. Anger is a hard emotion for me to wrestle with. Then later on yesterday I found a big cache of old photos and some videos of Sarah hidden on a part of my computer where I didn’t know they were stored, and of course I had to compulsively review, watch, and sort all of them. I love looking at photos of her but it can be so painful too. Those pants! How did I forget about those little purple flowered pants she loved to wear! Or that year that she kept breaking out so much around her mouth with eczema, why weren’t we more attentive to that?
It was a day of sadness and reminiscence, plus people were commenting on the anti-ableist part of my post, and that drew me back continually into musing about the people who have not dealt with Sarah’s disability very well, and how I have not dealt with them very well. Or just how I suck at dealing with my own negative feelings.
I think I’ve mentioned before that when Sarah was an infant, I belonged to an on-line mothers’ support group. It was on I-Village, a now largely defunct website that used to run monthly expecting clubs where women would create groups with names like “The May 2006 Mamacitas” and we would all post about our pregnancies and then after the kids were born, their development. A core group hung on and we posted all the time but I remember how anxious I was when Sarah wasn’t sitting up, crawling, walking, playing “Sooo big” and so forth along with the rest of the cohort.
I started virtually hanging around with another group member, let’s call her PG, and we seemed, without planning or discussing it, to undertake a kind of guerilla campaign of undermining some of the “star” mother/baby pairs, the most advanced kids and the most self-assured mothers. We would post post post right after a photo of little Gemma riding her tricycle by herself, to knock the post down the page. We would start nonsense posts about nothing, in order to draw attention from big posts about the baby superstars and their goings-on and posts like “My pediatrician thinks Zayden may be a genius.” I don’t know what PG’s excuse was, but I couldn’t handle this kind of ruthless baby competitiveness and showoffiness. I was too unsure of myself as a mother and too worried about my baby’s development.
It didn’t take long for PG and me to be noticed in our commando attacks on the civilian populus of the message board. I was subsequently banned from I-Village, something I was both deeply ashamed of and secretly thrilled about. I still have a few friends from there (and their 17 year-old babies) that I keep up with to this day, but not PG.
Last night Max and I attended our grief group. It was the first time the group has met in person since 2020 and the return to a conference room was carefully arranged to occur once per quarter balanced with Zoom meetings the rest of the time. Max and I weren’t sure we would make it, because it meant a late night drive home, and I’ve been going to bed so early lately. But we decided to make a kind of date night in Rockville, to go to a new restaurant, do some shopping, and go the group. We had a very nice dinner and a little thrift store shopping and headed over to the group.
A lot of the group members knew each other before the pandemic and recognized each other by sight. They were chatting around the conference table before the group started, as the leader was still in the lobby greeting arrivals. The conversation was about one group member’s 16 year old daughter, how tough it was right now, how moody she was, how the father was her favorite so he was lucky he could deal with her outbursts, and so on and so forth. I just felt a rising tide of anger and sadness washing over me. I remember looking at Max and he put his hand on my shoulder. I spoke up. I was not nice. I said we had lost a sixteen year old daughter and this small talk was very painful. Max added that she was our only child. One of the people speaking in the group got up and left the room. Max and I decided we had overreached and we needed to head home. We’ll try the grief group again next time, when it’s on Zoom again.
I really don’t deal with anger well, especially when it comes from a place of jealousy or resentment. I guess that it’s fortune cookie logic to think that there are people who bear up really superbly well when feeling jealousy and resentment. These are not emotions that bring out the best in people. The most we can hope for is a graceful exit or a grin and bear it. I do know that I slept well, finally, last night, until about 6 a.m., rather than waking up at 3 in the morning as I have been doing. Maybe something needed to be expressed.
The First Year Without Sarah 