Personal Post: Memorial
It's hard not to be disappointed that instead of landing at the airport and being back home with friends and family members, I'm caring for a sick baby who seems to have caught the tail end of the infection that kept me grounded in the first place.
Tomorrow is Dad's birthday. I went in with my stepmother to buy him a new cellphone, which he already received with a stupidly expensive headset that seems to drop more calls than it channels. What I found most odd is that when I called him yesterday (the first time I've talked to him since I had to break the news last week I wouldn't be coming home due to being sick) he was actually over at my mother's apartment. It turns out he was gathering up some wreaths.
As I've mentioned in this journal before, I have a brother and sister who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Their deaths, in 1976 and 1983 respectively, are the best explanations for why my mother is the way that she is. I mean, what else is there to say? I don't know any parent in this age who could lose two children and not be deeply impacted on some level.
My mother has every right to her grief. Of all the things she used as excuses to be the most injured party, this is one of the few that made sense. A mother now myself, I get it. If something happened to H or Sephie tomorrow, I don't know that I could force my lungs to keep taking in air. I have this image of me fading, falling, willing my ability to breathe to disappear.
But, in some ways, my mother has entrenched herself in that loss. We never spoke of them, and grief for them was guarded. When I was young, I went through a mourning process that I never had an older sister, something that I routinely longed for, which my mother dismissed as melodramatic. It wasn't long after that she told me she wished she had never continued having babies after Brittany died, and that it should have been me instead.
She never went to therapy, and oddly enough, she never returned to church. I say this because she forced the rest of us to go to church and would threaten me several times a year with a promise of attending Christian school if I didn't shape up my act.
She also has never visited their graves, to my knowledge. With both my siblings dead over 25 years, the idea that she asked my father (whom, you know, she hates) to put a wreath on their graves is as foreign to me as the notion that she's capable of apologizing.
It reminds me that Memorial Day is coming up, and the scars that I'm fighting to keep from transferring to my children are still very present within the generation before mine.
Tomorrow is Dad's birthday. I went in with my stepmother to buy him a new cellphone, which he already received with a stupidly expensive headset that seems to drop more calls than it channels. What I found most odd is that when I called him yesterday (the first time I've talked to him since I had to break the news last week I wouldn't be coming home due to being sick) he was actually over at my mother's apartment. It turns out he was gathering up some wreaths.
As I've mentioned in this journal before, I have a brother and sister who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Their deaths, in 1976 and 1983 respectively, are the best explanations for why my mother is the way that she is. I mean, what else is there to say? I don't know any parent in this age who could lose two children and not be deeply impacted on some level.
My mother has every right to her grief. Of all the things she used as excuses to be the most injured party, this is one of the few that made sense. A mother now myself, I get it. If something happened to H or Sephie tomorrow, I don't know that I could force my lungs to keep taking in air. I have this image of me fading, falling, willing my ability to breathe to disappear.
But, in some ways, my mother has entrenched herself in that loss. We never spoke of them, and grief for them was guarded. When I was young, I went through a mourning process that I never had an older sister, something that I routinely longed for, which my mother dismissed as melodramatic. It wasn't long after that she told me she wished she had never continued having babies after Brittany died, and that it should have been me instead.
She never went to therapy, and oddly enough, she never returned to church. I say this because she forced the rest of us to go to church and would threaten me several times a year with a promise of attending Christian school if I didn't shape up my act.
She also has never visited their graves, to my knowledge. With both my siblings dead over 25 years, the idea that she asked my father (whom, you know, she hates) to put a wreath on their graves is as foreign to me as the notion that she's capable of apologizing.
It reminds me that Memorial Day is coming up, and the scars that I'm fighting to keep from transferring to my children are still very present within the generation before mine.