I went to the cemetery today. Just for a few minutes...just to remember.
I told Steve the other day that I can't really stand to visit there anymore because it's like a colossal monument to my failures as a woman and mother...it's like my own little battlefield strewn with the bodies of lost soldiers.
Alex
Travis
Little Bug
It's getting to be a lot like one of those Memorial Day remembrance ceremonies where they read the names and you think to yourself, "Is this going to last all afternoon? We have brunch reservations."
Individually, I still remember them as best I can, what with all the historical re-writes and the pickling of my brain from too much wine and ambien. All the insignificant details that will be lost forever as time erases them from my memory. I don't know whether to hope for that relief or not. What kind of mother hopes for the peace that comes from forgetting her children? And I don't EVER want Sam and Myles to think they aren't enough. So I hope that they can fill up as much space in my memory as possible? So I hope that we have enough happiness together to help me forget?
I'm so tired.
And there is no counter-attack that will avenge their loss. Everything that was supposed to be easy...everything women have been doing for centuries...I wasn't able to do it...and they paid the priced. There will be no justice for them until the day I die.
Until then, I hope to forget. And yet...I still feel compelled to visit my babies in that cemetery...and remember.
3 comments:
"I don't know whether to hope for that relief or not. What kind of mother hopes for the peace that comes from forgetting her children? And I don't EVER want Sam and Myles to think they aren't enough. So I hope that they can fill up as much space in my memory as possible? So I hope that we have enough happiness together to help me forget"
I'm struggling with these same questions myself. Ever since IZ died, I have truly wanted to forget, because remembering is not only too painful, but it seems wrong somehow, to be so consumed with their memories. I already feel like I have, without intention, made it seem like A is not enough. If I am still obsessing over my lost family when she is 4, 6, or 10, how can she possibly ever feel like enough? But, on the other hand, how do I forget? My sons were basically nothing, except to me. It is confusing and maddening.
Thinking of you, Catherine.
"everything women have been doing for centuries...I wasn't able to do it...and they paid the priced. There will be no justice for them until the day I die."
you know your thinking is skewed on this one. women HAVEN'T been able to do it for centuries...stories of dying during labor and too much blood lost and all kinds of deformities, stillbirth, etc... we like to think that pregnancy and birth has always been (and IS) a flowery, happy, sunny kind of thing. Truth is, it isn't. Shit happens...and when it happens to US, it rips so much from us...because so much of what we feel we're supposed to be is wrapped up in our ability to reproduce. It's messed up, really...I've been thinking about it alot.
As my OB says, "Human reproduction is a messy affair." SO true.
I just wish the scars didn't run so deep when the shit hits the fan. And, truth is, we keep telling ourselves that "if we can get it right" again, then we won't feel so skewered by the loss.
I'm realizing that that's not true...it's indelibly imprinted on us, you know?
Rach said what i was going to say. For years it wasn't true that most babies lived, and many mommies died too. Yet the living children grew up and thrived, in their turn.
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