I'm going to write about Newtown, but just about how it affects me. Not you, not us, and definitely not their families, who have an unimaginable future in front of them.
This part is just about me, and might be very terribly self-absorbed. Because of that, it might be inappropriate, given recent events, and if so, I'm sorry about that. As always, feel free to skip.
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Everyone asks if Smoosh is fine. Sure, I say. He's been back at school for weeks. He's happy. He's fine. I'm not fine [insert chuckle], but he's fine. And then we talk about the blessed resilience of kids, and the terror that is child-rearing, and then we're done.
But you know? I'm actually not fine. I forget, for days at a time, because I'm ok at work, and I'm mostly ok at home. But then something will happen, like we'll get together with friends who haven't seen us since October, and I have to rehash the whole thing, or at least the part since the recovery. But he's fine, I always end with. Just fine.
Every time I have to do that, I am hollowed out with fear. Here it is, again. I sometimes start to cry, just a bit, but often I do not, and more often, I've just been refusing to update people. I can't talk about it because I will cry, I say, and people say that they understand but actually I'm the one who doesn't. Why can't I talk about this? Didn't they pray for my baby? Didn't whatever they did work? What's wrong with me? And isn't he, in fact, just fine?
I'm no good at parties right now, is what I'm saying.
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That wouldn't matter so much, because we don't go out much. But the other thing that happens to me is how I react to the world. Every time something in the news happens that involves the death of young kids, I can't stop thinking about those women, and the children they lost. I read obsessively - to the point of occasionally ignoring my blessedly healthy children in the other room. I keep thinking and thinking and thinking about them.
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When Smoosh was sick, there were about 18 hours where I thought we would not have a live child at the end of the hospitalization. I thought this both medically and emotionally. During that time, I had a terrible walk home, with a wonderful friend who held my hand because I needed to be tethered to the earth. I stopped on the way home at almost every corner to squat as terror overcame me, and keen in despair. When I got home, I immediately showered and dressed again, because I was pretty sure I was going to be called in the middle of the night, when he coded.
Those 18 hours destroyed me, in that the world I lived in no longer made sense, and I didn't want to live in it anymore.
And then it didn't happen, you know? We're here, on the other side, with every thing I prayed for, with every thing I wanted. But for 18 hours my reality was tissue thin, and I could see the little holes through to the other side. I could see it. I was almost there. And then we veered away, but I can't unsee it.
When he was getting better, but still sick, I said to someone: "Sometimes I think we lost him. And I couldn't deal with it, and my brain just broke. So I'm just inhabiting a little psychotic delusion inside my own head, where he gets better and goes home." She didn't bat an eyelash, she said, warmly, reasonably, as if I too was reasonable: "But then we'd all have to participate; that seems unlikely." Not true, I thought. I could be making all of you up.
I was very strong, and more than a bit hard, while Smoosh was sick.
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So, the woman who lost both her kids in Hurricane Sandy. and the woman whose babysitter killed two of her three children. And now, oh now. Sandy Hook. It is all so terrible, it is too terrible, it is beyond the saying of it.
I spent Friday in a blur, and spent a lot of today looking at the names, to try to make sure that they all had different last names. I checked and checked again. No twins, nobody could lose two children, right? As if there is a limit to suffering, as if there are rules to this.
I am stopping now.
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I know we all do this. And I'm not saying it's worse for me than for anyone else; I'm just saying that I have realized that I need to be very careful at what I expose myself to, and how I react, and what I allow myself to see. I guess I'm trying to heal. For a while, I didn't realize I was injured, but now that I do, I'm trying to allow myself to recover.
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Anyway, the point is nothing bad really happened to me. But it turns out, I am not just fine. Trying to get there, though.
Yes. There is the terror of sitting in the ICU beside your child. And the ability of mothers to feel the pain of other mothers. Our job allows us to share way more of the joy, and of the pain, of other women. Some days I cry in my car and I don't know whether it's for those mothers or myself. All of us, I guess. But based on my own experience, you can expect it to take years to deal with Smoosh's illness with equanimity.
ReplyDeleteYou write beautifully and with great clarity. I hope it is somewhat healing for you. Love to smoosh, your twins, you, and your bearded economist.
ReplyDeleteOnce you have been that close to the edge with your own child, the world is permanently changed. Even if the outcome is exactly what you hoped for. I'm sorry for you, for me, and for all other mothers and fathers who travel this road or the one we glimpsed that is even more horrible than ours.
ReplyDeleteWishing you healing, Dr. C. I hope you find whatever it is that you need in order to be fine again.
ReplyDeleteI think not being fine seems like a normal response to what happened.
ReplyDeleteI have been very fortunate with good health for my children, but I find that ever since I became a mother I have a very hard time hearing of children being wounded or killed.
I feel it especially with my third child who just turned one. My sister-in-law was due with her first baby at the same time I was due with my third. Sister-in-law's baby, my nephew, was stillborn unexpectedly at 23.5 weeks gestation. I often look at my daughter, think of her cousin who isn't here, and think how very, very lucky I am.
Wishing you the peace that will hopefully come with time.
Thank you for writing this. I do not think it was self-indulgent at all. It helped me, today. I am not fine, either, for reasons I do not understand and that are certainly not as rational as yours.
ReplyDeleteI'm so honored if it helped you at all. And I'm going to go comment supportively on your site now, because you're great.
DeleteI came here via Cloud's blog.
ReplyDeleteI hear your pain. Since I became a mother, I feel a visceral pain for other mothers that have lost their children. This incident literally took my breath away.
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2005/12/universal-sorrow.html
Your post brought tears to my eyes as I remembered a long week in the hospital with a sick child. I looked out on my beautiful city and the twinkling lights from the hospital room way up. I had and probably still have some level of post traumatic stress.
ReplyDeleteI've kept on putting off commenting on this- I feel like I need to say something, and for myself, I haven't let myself really think about Newtown, not really. What you wrote struck home more than the news, and I was speechless. Just without words, feeling the rawness. All I can do is thank you for sharing how terrible and all-encompassing that period of time has become in your life, from here on.
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful post- I only wish our culture wasn't so "snap out of it!" oriented, because I think it's too bad you felt the need for introductory and closing apologies.
ReplyDeleteThis American obsession with moving on and thinking positive could be in part to blame for your feeling like your vulnerability, and sadness, and ongoing anxiety are somehow not ok.
In the day to day it's hard to remember, but really this whole ordeal *just* happened to you, and even though you might well be "fine," someday, it's completely understandable that you aren't yet.
This above sentence is something I have been trying to remember, myself. I have been dealing with a different kind of grief and anxiety for the last nearly 4 months, and so much of the frustration on top of the grief is coming from feeling like I should have figured out a way to move on and think positive already. But it's only been a few months, and those months, as you point out, have been full of external horrors in the news.