Good grief.
I have a bruise on my forearm where one of the Health Unit’s nurses drew blood the other day. It took two sticks and a precautionary emesis basin balanced on my knee to pull out the three vials needed to figure out if it’s really only “had a baby in the middle of a pandemic and went back to work six weeks ago” exhaustion. Right arm resting on the Mayo stand and left hand ready to pull off my mask if the vomit threatening to come up actually did, I closed my eyes and dreamed of an easy fix. Maybe it will be as simple as popping another vitamin every night. Or maybe the fatigue is really all just in my head.
***
“I think we maybe underestimate how severe the adversity is and that people may be experiencing a normal reaction to a pretty severe and ongoing, unfolding, cascading disaster,” Masten says. “It’s important to recognize that it’s normal in a situation of great uncertainty and chronic stress to get exhausted and to feel ups and downs, to feel like you’re depleted or experience periods of burnout.” Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful
***
I mean, I’m fine.
Of course I am. So much more fine than so many.
And.
***
[The lack of clear ending to the pandemic] means reckoning with what’s called ambiguous loss: any loss that’s unclear and lacks a resolution. It can be physical, such as a missing person or the loss of a limb or organ, or psychological, such as a family member with dementia or a serious addiction.
***
Some days Nicolas still feels like a figment of my imagination. Not, of course, when I’m changing his spit-up-upon onesie for the third time in a day. Or when he’s giggling back at my silly faces. It’s usually when I’ve been at work for a few hours and the only reminder of his existence is the ache in my knees from carrying the extra pregnancy weight that doesn’t want to budge.
I’d worry about feeling as if I had imagined him if I hadn’t already talked to my psychiatrist about what it means to have given birth in a pandemic. So much of a new mother’s identity formation is relational — seeing her new mommyhood being recognized and reflected back by others — and so much of me internalizing that I’m really a mom now has been stunted by lack of contact. I can count on just a few more fingers than two hands the number of people who’ve actually seen me be Nicolas’s mother. And half of those people are his doctors or the ladies at the crèche.
It’s not that I haven’t bonded with my kid (I have). It’s that being a mom doesn’t feel really real 100% of the time. But then again, none of life really does these days.
***
“Night falls, day breaks, time
Has a funny kind of violence and I'm
Tryna keep in mind
It can't leave you the way it finds you
Good grief:
I've heard people say it
What a phrase, what a state to be in
But I don't know where they go to get get
That feeling”
***
I am no stranger to grief. My life has seemed to come with perhaps an over-generous serving of really tough stuff and too many heartbreaks — plenty of my own making and some that I didn’t deserve.
And maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m exhausted because I keep searching for the kind of grief that I know well and know what to do with. I’m looking for a nameable loss so that I can let it go and begin the work of acceptance and finally healing.
I’m looking to move on from lather, rinse, repeat.
I’m looking for good grief.
Good Grief lyrics: Aaron Matthew Mader / Andrew Egan Thompson / Dessa Margret Wander / John Rey Samels © Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd.
