“Grief isn’t predictable. It doesn’t involve clearly defined stages. It doesn’t unfold linearly. It doesn’t necessarily end in acceptance. It carves long, meandering, and varied paths that popular myths do little to prepare us for.”
- Ed Yong, “What Happens When Americans Can Finally Exhale”
“Silencing our deepest responses to the condition of the world not only fosters a sense of futility but also mires us in it.”
- Joanna Macy and Molly Brown, Coming Back to Life
I. Bottled
In the 2014 animated film Song of the Sea, the villainess Macha kills with kindness.
Macha, a Celtic goddess, bottles any painful or powerful emotions. Her magic ostensibly relieves the sufferers, but it also imprisons them in stone. Unable to bear—or bear witness to—her son Mac Lir’s grief, she transforms the sea-god into a mute, immovable island. Her home is filled with jars that pickle heartache, preserve despair, and siphon off sadness.
Macha’s reluctance to allow both herself and others to feel has an analogue in the human world of the movie, where a father grieving the loss of his wife absents himself from the lives of his young children. His hulking frame is pictured sitting immobile before the fire or hunched over an untouched pint at the local pub.
Left largely to his own devices, ten-year-old Ben lashes out at his younger sister Saoirse for causing their mother’s disappearance. Until, that is, he takes a magical journey in which he discovers his sister—and mother’s—true nature. They are selkies, mythical creatures who take human form on land but become seals in water.
At the heart of Ben’s quest to save his sister is the imperative to destroy Macha’s jars. Ben must unbottle the emotions that have kept his family in a state of suspended animation. A half-life.
Macha, at home with her glass bottles. From Tomm Moore’s SONG OF THE SEA (2014).
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Who else wants to talk about grief right now? Any takers?
It’s the Roaring Twenties, baby. Here in the U.S., summer beckons, if not with ebullience exactly, then with the enticement of parties, travel, family reunions, plan-making. Why dwell in the past when sundresses and soirees await?
I don’t mean to be glib about the very human and very natural impulse to gather again in-person. We are all hungry to reconnect, and we could use some semblance of fun after the long 14-month winter.
It’s just that I’ve been feeling out of step with the current celebratory mood.
Maybe part of it is that, as parents of an unvaccinated 6-year-old without caregiving support nearby, we’re not booking our post-vaccination getaway to Vegas any time soon. But there’s more to it. This sense of disconnect is not merely about being ‘left out’ of the revelry (which, to get real, wasn’t a viable option before the pandemic either).
Vaccination—while certainly lifesaving and wondrous—has not brought an immediate catharsis from the ravages of the past year. It promises hope, not healing.*
Ed Yong’s latest piece for The Atlantic reassured me somewhat that my emo feelings right now are not an aberration. He writes:
Yong notes that in a range of stressful scenarios, from battlefields to emergency rooms, it’s actually the moment of calm after the storm when individuals experience the greatest mental toll. No longer required to be ‘on,’ to be pillars of strength who are constantly doing, acting, deciding, their mental well-being suffers.
Although parenting is hardly the equivalent of these life-or-death scenarios, Yong insists that “Even Americans who were spared the big-T traumas of the emergency room still experienced a year of fear, uncertainty, and disruption. They too might experience jarring moments of unexpected reflection, even as the national outlook begins to brighten….”
My approach to pandemic parenting has been, paradoxically, to invite more responsibilities—more civic involvement, more climate organizing and trainings, more to-do lists. Part of this impetus even comes from a healthy desire to stay connected to the outside world and to find meaning by working for a better future.
But I wonder if all this Busyness is also a cop-out, a way of plugging my ears at the emotional cacophony within. Over the past year, these rare moments of pause, when the schedule slows—over the winter holidays or now, as summer break approaches—are the times that wreck me. Forced to introspect, to sit with my emotions, I fall apart.
This got me curious about how we as parents can safely deal with loss, in pandemic times or otherwise.
How can we be a steady, reliable presence for our kids while also finding a healthy outlet for our grief? When you can’t exactly take a sabbatical from caregiving, what are your options for processing loss?
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As Yong observes, Americans are notoriously bad at grieving. We refuse to admit that wounds take time to heal, and that scars linger, in both our individual and collective psyches. We have a “societal tendency to bottle grief.”
Instead, we view consumption as cure-all. Hence, the frenzy of activity, planning, spending.
Of course, we want to see our economies improve—so many lives, and livelihoods, depend on them. But there are other indicators to well-being—the strength of our communities, whom our institutions serve, our public health, including our mental health. I worry that the emotional fallout of this year will be buried, along with the many lessons about what’s broken in our society. I’m suspicious of the urgency, the hurry, behind this tentative re-opening, which also seems like a rush to forget.**
You can hand me that glass of rose, and I’ll raise a glass to the human ingenuity, determination, and labor involved in developing and administering the vaccines. I’m just not quite ready to party.
II. Crying in the Bathroom
If Yong’s article provided some helpful context for my troubled mind, a recent episode of The Double Shift podcast soothed me on a more embodied level: it gifted me with my first cry in months.
On the episode “Liberating Grief,” hosts Katherine Goldstein and Angela Garbes ask, “For mothers, is allowing ourselves to feel our feelings an act of political liberation?”
Their guest is Andrea Landry, an Anishinaabe who teaches in the indigenous social-work program at First Nations University. Landry had an intimate acquaintance with grief even before the pandemic hit. Her mom died suddenly while Landry was pregnant with her daughter. Her brother committed suicide a few years later. And as Landry observes, collective grief and trauma have percolated through indigenous communities like hers in northwestern Ontario for generations.
While pregnant and grieving her mom, Landry faced a decision point. She was reminded of a teaching that the baby she was carrying could hear her thoughts and feel her feelings:
Landry resolved instead to “(allow) myself to feel regardless of where I am, regardless of who’s watching,” even though it went against the messaging mothers receive to hide away our emotions.
Landry notes that in early motherhood, she grappled with “this societal belief ingrained in me as a mother [to] hide your sadness, even hide your anger as a mother.” She began questioning why “Mothers are forcing themselves to hide in closets and bathrooms to feel their feelings rather than openly expressing their feelings in front of their children.”
Landry has come to believe that it’s important for parents to find healthy and safe ways to express our emotions openly—without asking anything of our kids, without placing any burdens on them to ‘fix things.’ She notices that her 4-year-old daughter now copies her example, that Landry’s open-hearted approach has become her daughter’s “frame of reference to healthfully express emotions.” She also notes that we can be more present and engaged as parents when we take those 10 minutes to sit with our feelings.
When host Goldstein asks Landry what might come of dropping this perceived need to “manage our emotions” as mothers, Landry’s reply is instantaneous:
“We’d feel more liberated. We’d see more liberated mothers out there.”***
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Landry’s words made me realize that I have been hiding away my full self, my full range out of emotional responses to both the personal losses of this year and the troubling ‘condition of the world.’
Listening to Landry’s interview made me question what lessons I am imparting to my child when I hide my emotions—whether by literally retreating into the bathroom or burying them in my work. Yes, I want my son to be resourceful, resilient, capable of positive action. But I also don’t want him to think that adulthood requires a silencing of the Big Feelings that move us—and which ultimately move us to act.
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For the first fourteen months after my baby was born, tears refused to come. There were the sudden, torrential bouts of tears in the first two or three weeks postpartum. Then, nothing.
Being unable to access the release that tears can bring added to the misery of those sleepless, jarring months of adjusting to new motherhood. I wanted so badly to cry at my exhaustion and sore breasts and failing short-term memory and thwarted ambitions and at the sheer monotony of the days home alone with a newborn.****
The hormones involved in nursing were certainly at play. But during the height of the pandemic, I noticed the same inability to cry when I needed to most. The more I took on that steady, reliable, nurturing role for others, just powering through each day, the less connected I was to my own interior life. A numbness descended. I was like the stone fairies that Macha had enchanted, like the stone-faced father paralyzed in his grief.
Hiding-in-the-bathroom selfie, circa 2019.
III. The Activity Jar
On the morning of Friday, March 13, 2020, when we’d gotten news that Austin was shutting down, I immediately opened The Activity Jar. I’d set it up the day before in anticipation, not of a pandemic, but of the Spring Break ahead with my then 4-year-old. The jar contained little slips of colored paper with activity prompts that he could draw at random. That first day, we made bark rubbings from trees in our yard, Macgyver-ed a fishing pole out of paper clips, construction paper, a stick, and magnets. It was a veritable Camp Mom of craft projects and outdoor play.
In the coming weeks—and as the weeks stretched out into months—we would turn to the jar for inspiration in moments of boredom or frustration.
Every time I encountered a new activity or art idea online, I’d add a slip of paper to the jar. Write a poem about your favorite color. Create binoculars out of toilet-paper rolls. Make aquafaba foam. Design an indoor obstacle course. I’d squirrel away those ideas with a kind of single-minded obsession, making sure the stockpile never dipped too low.
For my kid, the jar was meant to inject some spontaneity and fun into the endless days at home. For me, it offered a measure of preparation and control against the looming uncertainty.
Watching Song of the Sea with my family last weekend called to mind this long-abandoned jar. But the film also stirred a sense of recognition, self-awareness. Engaged in a swirl of endless activity myself, wanting to be strong for my child, spouse, students, community, I’ve been accumulating grief, anger, bewilderment, fear, powerlessness, despair: a collection of bottled-up emotions to rival Macha’s cupboard.
In these early-summer days of cautious optimism, tenuous renewal, my hand hovers over a sea of shimmering glass jars—both fearing what they might contain and longing to smash them wide open.
NOTES
*Another challenge to healing: the pandemic is not over! India has been facing a hellish revival of COVID-19, and throughout parts of South America and Africa, cases are rising again. According to Yong, the number of global dead is anticipated to be higher this year than in 2020. Even here in the U.S., we have not reached herd immunity; kids under 12 are not yet vaccinated; and the most vulnerable communities among us are the ones with the lowest rates of vaccination.
**A friend told me recently that the 1918 influenza pandemic is so poorly documented because survivors were so darn eager to forget it, preferring instead to drown their sorrows in jazz and bathtub gin.
***OK, maybe this claim sounds like a stretch, but, as Garbes suggests, in small ways ‘feeling our feelings’ could challenge the culture of individualism and divisiveness in the U.S. At minimum, we could recognize those emotions in others, tap into a shared grief over this time in our history.
More generally, though, the pandemic has shown the dangers to our physical and mental health when we leave parents unsupported, with the expectation that we are supposed to ‘do it all.’ As caregivers, we have some abandonment issues. The basic supports we had depended on, that we had cobbled together for ourselves, vanished overnight. And they were never stable or adequate to begin with.
In her interview, Landry talked about kinship structures pre-colonization:
The forced isolation of the pandemic has amplified the loneliness of both modern parenting and aging in the U.S., trends underway for decades before the pandemic. We need to restore those intergenerational bonds, community relationships, and extended networks of caregivers. To truly heal from this pandemic, we need to get back to some sense of collective responsibility for, and to, each other.
****Even though I wasn’t experiencing postpartum depression, this condition needs to be discussed more openly. It affects at least 10-20% of new mothers, though the numbers can be misleading. For instance, they fail to include women who have experienced miscarriage or stillbirth. Postpartum depression is also woefully under-diagnosed and under-treated; the actual rates could be twice as high.