I realize yesterday’s post was dark and fairly ghoulish. I’m sorry to have offended or crossed the boundaries of good taste. Sometimes I do feel very bad about myself. I guess I tend to think that if Sarah died at 16, that’s just a prima facie case (as we say in the law) that we must have been lousy parents doing a crappy job. That we are bad and guilty people who deserve to be punished somehow and shouldn’t be trusted ever again. That especially I, as the mother, should have known something was wrong with my child, always. A mother should not leave her child, and I did and she died. Just like that woman (in Florida probably?) who left her baby for 10 days to party and go on vacation, and the baby died. I left Sarah, and she was like a baby in so many ways. Sometimes I wish I could just be arrested and go to jail.
These are all my grand overarching guilty themes, sort of the structure of this opera of guilt and shame. Then there are specific arias that flash through my mind (sorry, I could probably come up with a better metaphor if I actually played a musical instrument, but I don’t. That’s a long story for another day.) The way Sarah’s toes had begun to contract and bend under her feet. The way that she was becoming inclined to skin irritations and skin pressure sores during the Pandemic because she sat so much, either in her bed or her comfy chair. The way that she wasn’t getting regular physical therapy so much since the Pandemic began. The way we weren’t making her wear her AFO’s. All of these things made me feel like a BAD MOM (BM).
The anxiety of being a BM really makes it hard to feel good about myself and want to be around people. Peoples’ natural response when they hear this stuff is to rush to reassure me that I was a great mother, so attentive, loved Sarah so much, devoted to her, blah blah blah. That doesn’t help, unfortunately. It just creates a dissonance between what’s inside my head and the rest of the world.
I remember the summer I worked as a summer associate for a big law firm before my third year of law school. For some reason the gods smiled kindly on me that summer. I was considered the star summer associate and received top reviews on my research and memo assignments and so forth.
I stayed in the firm for a long summer, like May through August, because I needed the money. Most of the other summer associates had come and gone and my mentor in the firm, a third or fourth year associate, would say to me “You’ve got them all believing in you. You’ve got them fooled. Now is the time to make your exit and go.” He was only joking with me and teasing me a bit, but I felt he was fundamentally right. My success was some sort of well-managed act on my part, and I risked exposure. I was relieved to go when I finally did, and still have them thinking well of me.
I know a lot of people feel like imposters, and that many people have a hard time accepting praise too. Is there a group of people who feel like, if only they could atone and do some sort of Circe-style Walk of Shame (but with clothing optional), they would feel better about themselves as people? Maybe I should look on Meet-Up.
The First Year Without Sarah 