It’s that thing that makes me feel like a crazy person - that thing where you have knee-jerk reactions, responses, thoughts as if a person who is no longer living is living again . . . if you know what I mean . . .
For example, something will happen during the day - something funny, sad, stressful - who knows, but then I’ll think - and just for a split second - I’ll just think “I can’t wait to call Mom and tell her, ” or “I really need to talk this over with Mom.” Like my body forgets that its reality has changed and my cognitive habits revert back to what they were in another life. And when the brain jumps back from that reality to this one, goddammit there’s a wicked jet lag.
This happened regularly, of course, for about the first year after my mother died, but then - thankfully - this involuntary thinking slowly waned until it happened - well, never. But last week I went to a drawing class that I take from time to time (taught by an adorable old french woman who’s fascinated with what she can learn about me from my style) and I just thought, “Damn my mom would have been great to learn this from. She was such a better teacher, a better artist, than this woman,” and my yearning for that other reality (what I sometimes feel lives as a parallel, alternate reality to this one, a reality where I have a living, loving mother) once again bubbled up in my chest (a sensation not unlike debilitating heartburn).
And since then, for the last week or so, I’ve been doing that thing that makes me feel like a crazy person, that thing where my brain involuntarily denies its living reality. I got through the holidays, the anniversary of my mother’s death, and myriad familial challenges this winter - but one, benign, 2-hour art class set off a week of accidental moments of grieving.
My mother’s things have become unknown to me. They have become the stuff of archeology. By this I mean that each individual object’s history is lost in her absence. These things that once had the potential to prompt intimate and unknown stories from the recesses of my mother’s memory are now foreign artifacts whose stories are left for me to uncover and interpret (or invent). There is no longer a “native” user, a historical insider, to tell me that this yellow scrap of fabric is torn from the belt my mother bought in 12th grade, her favorite belt, that she wore until it was broken and tattere, or that it was the belt she was wearing when her first boyfriend first kissed her, or when she met my father, or when she graduated from college . . . And that this is the reason there is one lonely, seemingly useless, scrap of yellow fabric at the bottom of her bottom drawer. My sister and I have become the maternal history-keepers, the weavers of my mother’s secret, object-centered narratives.
That said, we have yet to comb through her things. It’s revisiting, reinventing these personal narratives - each object telling of a daily life that no longer exists - that daunts me. It has just as yet been too painful, too sour, to bare. So all my mother’s clothes are where she left them, her desk drawers full of bits of paper with scrawling hieroglyphics only she could decipher, her underwear drawer full to the brim - the last describing the most daily and most intimate of clothing rituals. But it’s necessary, finally, to move on. I feel like I should undertake this work like that of an archeologist, carefully cataloging each thing, marking out the location where it was found, carefully storing it for shipping and later examination and interpretation (ie. this is the heart-encrusted pencil she last used to write my name, this is the ratty black dress with a singular appliqued rose that she wore for chores on the weekends, this is the sweater she started to knit for me 20 years ago and never managed to finish . . .).
And these Things take on an unexpectedly greater importance, as if I could piece her back together from these disparate artifacts. As if these varied and insignificant objects (bobby pins, nylons, paintbrush, single sock) could somehow summon her and make her real to me once more. Like the sweater for which this blog is named. It’s as if the Things become the ashes of her material life. The shadows of each of her actions. Actions which, in turn, describe her lovely identity. The Things become bodily resonances, evidence of her being. And that’s why, by the time I sort through the Things, I will have waited nearly two years since her death.
There are times when I think about my mom and I can’t feel anything. Usually in those moments I think that I’m just doing really well and have just gotten too used to the ever-present feelings of grief to feel anything anymore. and yay, i don’t feel miserable!
Alas, this is never the case . . . instead it more often than not foretells a mama freakout. And this one has indeed. I started feeling it week before last, the numbness, and now today we have full-blown mama FREAKOUT. A good thing happened in my life this week and when good things happen there’s no one else I really want to tell. And then the reality of that loss bears down on me all over again. And then I feel a little nervous about a new activity I’m starting in my life, and she would be the one who would know exactly what to say to me. This didn’t really hit me until I told my sister and she said how proud mom would be and how happy she would be.
I’m so tired of feeling complicated. I’m so tired of feeling, in general. I’m tired of feeling that I have so many feelings that I have to make room for and cope with. Grief, in all its myriad and unexpected forms, is fucking exhausting. I feel these days that it isn’t just one family member I’m mourning, and have been mourning, but an entire family - our entire dynamic (which wasn’t ever a super easy one, but was joyful nonetheless).
I live in Europe, so I don’t see my family very often anymore, whereas when my mom was alive, and immediately after her death, I saw them at least once a month. After moving with my husband to Paris, I’ve been able to distance myself from all of the constant reminders that are upsetting and so so hard to deal with. My sister and my father are arriving for a visit this next week and I’m so nervous about all of the feelings of loss it is bringing up. Just imagining all of us together makes me soo sad because my mom won’t be there with us, because I know how happy she’d be for a family vacation like this. Because it’s just so sad that we all live far apart and it’s so sad that we all hurt all the time.
Since my mom has died my life has transformed into a life that I don’t recognize and I feel like I don’t want it to be so far away from her. And it just keeps moving further and further from her and i’m just swept along with it. I just want to talk to her so badly, to see her.
But I dread dreaming about her as it always ends up with me crying and feeling out of sorts the next day. i’m tired of anxious chest pains and tears and feeling bad and wrong. so tired.
So pay no heed to the bouts of numb, they won’t last - as my sister said, it always comes in waves.