Emotional Labor: The Cognitive Load of Grief

Ember, my daughter, is in an urn on my desk. 

I spent the hours following her death pleading for appropriate medical care in an emergency department, as I nearly bled to death from a postpartum hemorrhage. 

Many people in my life will not say her name, or even acknowledge that she existed. She died when I was 6 months pregnant. I used to think that the ambiguous nature of this loss--the death of a child whom no one got to meet or hold--explained this. I now know that this likely would have been the reaction no matter how old she had been. 

Our culture is not comfortable with grief. Instead, we expect grieving people to bear the full burden of their grief alone, without reminding anyone else that grief exists, colors everything, and is the fate that eventually awaits us all. This collective ignoring builds an unbearable mental load for those of us trapped under an avalanche of grief. 

On Futility, Loving Someone With Dementia, and Why Not Everything Has to Have Meaning

My mom, second from right. Research on dementia suggests it was already attacking her brain when this photo was taken, decades before her symptoms appeared. 

One of the last videos I have of my mother speaking features her lamenting the lies of online dating. She's 62 in the video, but still looks like a runway model: tall, with high cheekbones and perfect blonde ringlets. She's a retired marriage and family therapist, a musician, and smarter than everyone she meets. Unlike most women of her generation, she does not attempt to hide that fact.

"I don't know if they think they're going to grow before they arrive to our date," she sighs. "Maybe they just think they're going to grow on me? Like I'm supposed to get excited about a male tumor?" She points to our waiter, draws him over to us, and proceeds to interrogate him about why heterosexual men are so disappointing. "I'm not drunk," she reassures him. "This is natural. Disappointment with men is my natural state."

Four years later, at 66, she could no longer speak.

I watch this video on repeat, searching for signs of what was to come. There's now evidence that dementia lurks in our bodies, waiting in our cells, for 20 years or longer before it stages its attack. 

I see no signs, aside from her obvious humanity. That's warning enough. Time eventually robs all of us humans of everything we have. Sometimes it's in one catastrophic incident. More frequently it's in the slow erosion of aging, lost loved ones, and illness. We cannot predict when or how we'll lose our lives, our health, or our memories. It's terrifying. We have constructed elaborate rituals and cultural lies to avoid this reality.

Dementia forces us to face the futility of existence, and the fact that it will eventually end--probably in suffering and tragedy. There are no fairytales or lessons or triumphs of the human spirit in the cold story of dementia. There is beauty at looking at things the way they are. There's meaning there, even if we can't wrap things up into neat little packages.

Free Online Classes, Storytime, Museum Tours, Field Trips, and More to Support Parents and Kids During Coronavirus Quarantine

Free photo 82954199 © creativecommonsstockphotos - Dreamstime.com
[image description: a row of shelves with books, behind several bright light bulbs]

COVID-19 has introduced parents across the globe--already experienced chaos survivors--to a whole new level of disorder. We're all supposed to become teachers, while somehow maintaining our sanity, working from home, and preventing the house from caving in. There's never been a more compelling case for paying more to teachers (and school bus drivers, and cafeteria workers, and daycare providers, and nannies, and everyone else who serves our children and our families).

No one can do it alone. Sometimes you have to outsource the teaching to someone else--if only so you can get a quick break to go scream into a paper bag. Here's a list of the best resources I've found. Almost all are free. A few are low cost. None require any special equipment. If you've found something that keeps your kids under control for a few minutes, please add it to the list. 

Stop Praising People for Weight Loss

It's a predictable refrain every time I go to a public gathering with my mom: "Wow, your mom looks so amazing and healthy! She's so thin!"

My mom has dementia.

She is thin because her brain is slowly killing her body.

She is wasting away.

She is not healthy, but in a society that conflates thin with health and health with virtue, a woman who is dying can expect compliments on the very thing that is killing her.

Please stop complimenting people on weight loss. Please stop assuming everyone you see wants to lose weight.

Stop Whining, Ladies. Motherhood is Easy

Breastfeeding is one of the many easy things about motherhood.

A few times a day, I take a break from my relaxing, perfect, new-mother life to peruse the Internet. I inevitably find a bunch of whiners. Women posting to message boards wondering why their husbands won't do their fair share. Moms complaining about the challenges of breastfeeding, the agony of postpartum recovery, the fact that no one takes their pelvic floor issues seriously, the boss who won't pay them for maternity leave, the other boss who fired them for getting pregnant, and the family members who keep showing up, demanding to be entertained, and criticizing their parenting.

Please Don't Call My Daughter Pretty.

My baby is pretty.

It's not something she earned. It's not a skill. It's an accident of genetics that may or may not stick around. 

Yet everywhere I go, people stop to tell me how pretty she is. I am always gracious, but I've had enough. I want people to stop calling my daughter pretty. 

I can already hear the whining and gnashing of teeth. "What kind of monster doesn't want her daughter to hear she's pretty? Doesn't she want her kid to have good self-esteem?"

Not if that self-esteem is built on something she didn't earn and didn't work for. Not if it's built on something there is no reason to value. As a recovering pretty person myself, I know that pretty often ends up being a prison. I don't want to lock my daughter in the cage of pretty before she has the chance to explore the other, more valuable, things she can be. 

These Are All the Racist Things You Must Believe to Think Racism is No Longer a Serious Problem

When they think no one's watching, white people like to indulge in what I've begun calling white bonding. White bonding is when white people remove their veneer of civility, quit pretending to be "colorblind" and anti-racist, and say what they really think.

It's when your racist uncle makes fun of your cousin for dating a black guy, or your racist boss implies that a client's blackness reveals something about them. It's the moment when your co-worker tells a racist joke, or your great-aunt starts referring to people of color as "they" and "them." Every white person has seen this. Which means that, deep down, every white person knows that racism is still very real.

Maybe that's why white people get so defensive about racism. We see it all the time. We know it happens. Some of us are complicit in it. Yet white people continue to deny that racism is a real problem. We accuse our black friends of "playing the race card." We act as if differences of opinion about the full humanity of people of color are trivial.