More family calculus
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It’s Saturday night, we have a giant bowl of popcorn, we’re in our pjs and have assumed our cozy positions on the couch, and now comes the hard part – the almost impossible part – of choosing the movie to watch. E is in grade 11. M is in grade 6. A sixteen-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy. The genders don’t matter as much as the age gap, but they do contribute to the choices each suggests as we scroll through options and to the difficulty of finding something where their interests and preferences overlap. This task can take half the time it takes to actually watch a movie. Sometimes, like tonight, there are arguments. And sometimes I wonder, what would E and Anja have chosen, if it were the two of them? Sisters, only 3 years apart. Would they have been able to settle on something quickly, or would we still be here, bickering and almost out of popcorn?
We are planning a holiday, the first spring break holiday we’ve taken as a family, and trying to decide on some of the things we might want to do. The same dynamic asserts itself, and I wonder: would it be easier with two girls, with less of an age gap?
This kind of wondering is agonizing. It feels wrong on so many levels. Wrong because it’s futile. She died and our family didn’t turn out the way I thought it would, with sisters sharing secrets and clothing and adventures, conspiring and conjoining.
And wrong because it imagines him not here. How could I do that? I don’t want to imagine a world that he isn’t part of – not at all – but there is no world that they both are alive in, and no way my mind can accommodate a version of that world, even imaginary. So, if I imagine her here, I imagine him not. And it’s impossible not to wonder at times like these. Mundane, silly times where I’m frustrated that we can’t agree and my mind slips off into that world-that-might-have-been. And more serious times, birthdays, milestones, all the rest. What would it have been like if she were here? Then he wouldn’t be.
Nori wrote once about family calculus, and I find myself butting up against those equations all the time. It's when the thoughts surface at these mundane moments – family movie nights, picking a restaurant for lunch – that I feel the worst. What kind of a monster wonders if things would be easier without one of their kids? Except, that’s not how it feels in babyloss-land, is it? It’s just another way this kind of loss messes with your head. And your heart. You can’t help but wonder. And the wondering is another form of terrible erasure, suggests another terrible kind of loss.
Babyloss is an eternally lopsided equation. No amount of figuring can balance it. It’s a test no one can ace.
I know, rationally, that it’s normal to wonder the things I wonder (‘normal’ in the should-be-supremely-un-normal world of dead babies), but I feel guilty and sneak my arm around him on the couch, pull him in close, snuggle him for as long as he’ll let me. Because, yes, I’m so glad he’s here even if the infinity loop in my mind whispers “she is not.” It never makes sense. It never will.
This one felt vulnerable to write. What kinds of things remain hard for you to say about babyloss?