A Mother’s pov on grief

A Mother’s pov on grief

“Have you cleaned out his room?”

“Yes.” I lied. I have not touched his room. I have not moved a single thing. I left it as if he was still sleeping in it.

“How have you been sleeping since the accident?”

I stay silent. How can I sleep when the sole reason I stay awake is gone. I can’t dream any more. It’s not a dreaming paradise but a hell full of a broken future.

Every week for the past six months I’ve walked into this room. It’s supposed to bring comfort to the grieving but I just feel like I’m on TV. My actions and words are tuned to please the audience. It’s dark, like it’s meant to hide my suffering, to stuff it away like it’s not there.

I know my suffering can not be seen. But I hear it, in the little pattering steps of a child, to the giggling of a baby. And yet, his room shows no grieving. It’s the only room in the house that’s been shielded from my wails. And at night, I sit there and rock, as if he’s still in my arms.

I had a neighbor when I was still a kid myself. I remember all the school kids’ mothers gathering in a circle. They whispered about her, she was a wife and a mother. Except her husband was no good and she was getting a divorce. She was the talk of the track meets. They whispered poor her, poor kid. Things were easy then, run, and listen to the mothers talk about the women next door.

It was on the news. Her baby went missing. She was knocking on our door one night, begging us if we knew anything. Tell her everything we remembered, she shoved the picture of her toddler into our faces. I still remember what she said,”Please! If you know anything, tell me! Please, my baby is missing.” She grabbed onto my arm, falling to her knees as she cried. My dad had to call the cops to come get her. It was the first time I had seen a sorrowful act of love in a mother. The week after, the news had reported the death of her child, Malcolm, dead at two years old. The murder was none other than her husband, her baby’s father. We could hear her screams in the streets that night. She was calling for Malcolm. My mother cried for her, her wails saddened her to the point my dad had to come and comfort her.

“What are you thinking of?”I think about her often these days. I never expected her grief to be a mirror of mine.

“I’m thinking about a young woman named Louis. And how she killed her ex-husband out of revenge.” A mother’s grief can be the strongest weapon. Her ex-husband might have killed her baby, but he also killed her. He left the memory of a mother and nothing to hold.

“I’m going to talk to your doctor about upping your medicine.”

No amount of medicine is going to box away my grief. Society thinks my grief is unnatural, that since I’m a woman, I can just bring another child into the world. My baby is not an object, I can not replace him just to please society. There is nothing wrong with me, this is nothing alien, I’m just mourning the loss my heart feels.

My husband left me a long time ago. He couldn’t handle it. He could not handle his grief and mine. The divorce was finalized last month. He didn’t want to stay stuck in the past with me, he wanted to move on. But I couldn’t move on after what they did.

We fought over everything after his death. He fought me on packing up his toys, donating his clothes, even turning his room into an office. He wanted to erase his very existence. He was no mother, he could not understand how I wanted to keep the very life I had created. I tried to understand him too, but I was also not him, I was not a father. So when he left, I didn’t cry, I saved them for my baby’s grave to water the flowers that covered the day of his death.

Unlike the woman next door, I had no single person to blame. I could blame society for its priorities, or I could blame the sickness he contracted, blame the schools for not cleaning up properly. But no, instead, I blamed the hospital and its staff for its lack of care and its negligence in the face of a life. My stages of grief didn’t happen in the same order that it is written in a text book.

I experienced denial at first. I acted like Louis, I cried and wailed. I cried in public when I saw children. And I begged for understanding of my grief. But unless you’re a parent, you can not understand the choking of a grieving mother. It took me a long time to understand what Louis had felt. I knew what she was feeling back then, I knew the name and labels, but I did not understand. I did not understand until I was in that hospital room when the machine flat lined. My baby was not missing, there was nobody looking for him. I didn’t have to wait for his body to be brought back to me.

The second emotion I felt was depression. The feeling of being a cup with a crack in it. That is what I remember feeling like. I’d surround myself with his clothes, his toys, and I’d lay on his bed. You’d think that you’d feel happy being around the things of the person you love most. But it reminded me of what I lost. I felt as if I was leaking, like you can’t love somebody if they aren’t here. I felt like I failed. There was no reason to be here any longer. I couldn’t remember and move on. I just wanted to relish in the past. So I took all my vacation days, and I stayed in his bed. I stopped taking care of myself, forgetting to eat, to take showers, I couldn’t do daily tasks without remembering how he would help me fold laundry. He always wanted to be a big boy and eat from big boy dishes. He’d create a mess and I’d have to wipe him down. But just wiping him down would bore him and he would get distracted, so I had to put on a show for him. I had to entertain his young mind.

Next was bargaining, one of the worst parts I experienced. I thought of possibilities that never could happen. I kept telling myself, if I had just tired harder, been a bit smarter, I could’ve helped him. He would be here growing up, we could mark his height on the wall one more time, mark it until he’s taller than me. I could hold his hand until it’s larger than mine. He could graduate school, get a good job, get married, and have kids of his own. My day dreams went far into the possibilities, years into the future. It hurt the most, imagining what would never be. I begged at night for a second chance, I would be a better mother if I could just have my baby back. I wanted to see all his moments in life, and if I couldn’t see them, I wanted to hear them from him. If he got in trouble, I wanted to hear it from the school, I wanted to experience all his phases and truths. He was my baby boy and no matter what that was what he was going to be. But even that got taken from me. I was robbed by the health system, my baby was abandoned by those he didn’t even know.

I felt rage, it was pure, unfiltered rage from a mother. It was a fire that wasn’t easy to put out. And it benefited some in a way. You could even say it benefited me too. But it hurt, it was a rage fueled with hurt. And no matter how many times old ladies told me to pray to God, it was something that couldn’t be concealed. No ice bath was going to freeze my boiling blood. So I went out and told our story. I told them things that made me feel vulnerable. I spoke in front of crowds about the failure of health systems and those of the middle class was least on the priority list. I asked them, “What would you do, if they killed your baby?” I made the public aware of the things happening that nobody talked about. I put the fear in them that this could happen to them if they sat back and denied its possibility. Perhaps it won’t and my baby was just unlucky. But either way, I can not accept that as a fact. I’d stall fear into the rich before I let my broken heart be ignored.

“How has it been since I last saw you?” This room again. It’s gloomy, there is no light. “What are you thinking about?” She asks the same things every time. I’m supposed to confront my misery to a person who has never even held a baby, never even sacrificed her breasts to feed her young. She is no mom, she has only been trained from the textbook to comfort me. But it is no comfort, she cannot understand my pain, she has been raised by society to fit in like all the other women. I too used to be one of the women that was groomed to fit in.

I had a good life, a loving husband, a beautiful child, and a decent paying job. It was what all middle class people considered a good life. We wished for nothing more than what we were taught to yearn. It must’ve been when I was sitting in the hospital room, pushing my baby’s sweaty hair back off his forehead that I realized I was just a mere puppet in the eyes of the system. And yet, even though I knew that, I wasn’t angry. It was because of this system that I got my husband, I had my baby, and was living an average life. It wasn’t like the movies, love was tough, taking care of a kid was tough, but it was my life.

But it didn’t last. My baby got sick, very sick. He couldn’t play, eat, or even stand. He was sick, in a way nobody could fix him. If love could heal, he’d still be here. My love would have equaled a world worth of love. If he needed a heart, I’d give him mine. But there was nothing I could give him that would help him. My presence was the only thing I could offer and it wasn’t enough. The machine flatlined. I called for help but nobody came. I was the only one there when he had no more strength to hold my hand. So, to the lady that asks me what I am thinking about, I am thinking about burning the world down with the same passion that I loved my baby with. A mother’s grief is twice as much as their love.

I never really got to the acceptance stage of grief. I was always filled with sadness, like being drowned, a hand around your neck. It was cold and nobody was coming to save me. I had a sadness that couldn’t be cured. It was like the common cold, there was no medicine for it. I came to accept that my baby is gone but I never accepted the way he died helplessly. I have his sick face engraved in my mind, sometimes I dream of it. And I remember the anger I feel when I wake up. Grief will never go away or be forgotten. There is nothing you can do about it. But revenge, that’s something anyone can do. A mother’s grief can be twice as much as their love. Even if I’m diagnosed with a mental illness, it does not define who I am. My love as a mother is what has made me who I am today. If there is one thing I wish I could change, I wish I could have stayed a mother, even if it was just a day longer.