Things You’re Allowed to Grieve

It’s an emotion, not a size.

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A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.

Dear Friend,

Two weeks ago, I attempted to throw a party. Well, “party” isn’t really the right word. I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: I’d invite new parents to my house during a window of time that babies usually aren’t napping on a Saturday, I’d get huge bins and label them with baby-clothes size ranges, and everyone could come and bring their babies and the clothes their babies had grown out of, and we could all hang out and trade stuff. It was based on something in Portland my sister takes her kids to called Swapnplay: a community center basement filled with toys and tables so parents could let their kids play and get rid of old things while picking up new-to-them ones. We don’t have this in my neighborhood, but my baby is rapidly growing, and so: why not make it?

I know a lot of new parents. Pro tip: you can meet new parents pretty easily as they tend to come with an obvious tell (living baby). Meeting a new parent goes like this:

Here’s the amount of time new parents have to hang out with other new parents: zero minutes. And that’s also not true, because time in Baby Land is WEIRD. It exists, and it passes, and sometimes you’re incredibly bored, and you wish you were hanging out with a friend, but it is impossible to predict when those times will be, so there’s no planning for any of this. So I’ve met all these cool-seeming people and accumulated all these phone numbers, but I never actually hang out with any of them. Hence, the swap-and-play. I made sure to clarify that I intended for the swap-and-play to be “aggressively casual.” You didn’t even have to RSVP! “Just come if you can, and there will be another one every month, so it’s fine to miss it.” I invited too many people and stressed out about not having enough space or enough food. We spent a few days cleaning and reorganizing the living room, and I did a Target run for the plastic bins. I made a Good Housekeeping recipe for roasted pepper and walnut dip. I dressed my toddler in cute clothes (that one day she’d swap!), and waited.

And no one came. 

Well, actually, my across-the-street neighbor Sean came with his son. He and his son are both wonderful, and they even brought some never-been-worn-before dress shoes to swap out. But let me tell you what is slightly more awkward than planning and setting up a whole event no one comes to: planning and setting up a whole event that only ONE person comes to, so that person feels stressed and overwhelmed by the social pressure of being THE ONLY GUEST.

This particular Saturday was COLD, and so many babies were sick, and TBH, I would not have gone to this party if someone else had thrown it. But nevertheless, the little middle schooler in my heart who never threw parties because she was terrified that no one would show up felt heartbroken and validated. “SEE?” She said, loudly.

But I had another voice going, “Jesus, Sophie, don’t be disappointed about this. So you have too much dip. This is simply not a big deal.” This is not a big deal is one my brain’s favorite refrains. It loves to complement this statement with a giant eye roll, which is an amazing thing for an imaginary voice without an actual face to manage. 

Another not-big-deal was that I applied to some grad programs this year, and they all rejected me. I didn’t even make it to the interview stage: they just flat-out rejected me. The rejection letters seemed to be holding back their laughter. “We understand this is not easy news to hear,” they managed to stammer out, dryly — but then they went into the back room with all the accepted applicants and said, “Can you BELIEVE this underqualified weirdo? What was she THINKING?” I knew I wasn’t qualified for the programs I applied to, and I applied anyway. My experience is in English and writing, and I wanted to go off and study sociology. You should feel relieved. You would have been in way over your head. 

I applied for some jobs I felt excited about, but no one bit. No kidding! Jobs are all about networking, and you don’t know anyone! What did you THINK was going to happen? I did some client work I felt competent enough to do, and received harsh critical feedback on it. Do you need a cookie every time you make something? Suck it up! At least you HAVE client work to do! Desperate to feel better, I tried to secure a few Sure Things, but was, alas, likewise rejected. Cry me a river, Narcissus, so you can stare at yourself in it, why don’t you? 

Then my chicken Scratch died. I don’t want to beat around the bush about it: her face was eaten off by a predator. (I assume a raccoon. I am not anti-raccoon. Do not send me hateful facts about raccoons in order to make me feel better about my dead chickens.) I’d bonded with this chicken over the summer in such a way that I knew that I was cutting myself in a shark tank, emotionally speaking. She suffered a head injury and I washed her head and put Neosporin on it and held her, bundled up, in my lap for hours while she purred. She was always excited to see me. She’d hop on my foot and then onto my shoulder whenever I went to feed the chickens, and she’d want to stay there. All summer, I let her sit by the inflatable pool with my daughter and me for hours; I fed her watermelon and she’d coo by my toes. I thought, “Uh oh. This is a special chicken. This chicken is a pet. Pets are like happy hour snacks for predators.”

My love.

I’ve written extensively about this before, but chickens are wonderful teachers about death. They are going to die, and they are going to die in sometimes-gruesome ways. They briefly mourn losses in their flock. (I caught several chickens lying down in the pile of dirt where Scratch’s body had been left; not eating, just resting, just being.) They move on. They learn about danger and they adjust, changing their roosts and forming new bonds after predators attack. Sometimes they’re brutal with each other; they DO kill each other when it’s beneficial for them to do so. If you want more pontification on this, read this essay or this one. I have a lot to say on this. But anyway, I saw that a predator had gotten one of the chickens from the kitchen window. I did a clumsy prayer: “Not Scratch not Scratch not Scratch not Scratch.” Of course it was Scratch. But I didn’t have time for it to be Scratch, because Scratch required something approaching a funeral. All I had time for was to put her body in some plastic bags and throw her away. 

There are people who will understand easily that a dead favorite chicken merits a little grief. It felt like a good excuse to give in to what I was already feeling.

There is one more part you need to know about, and maybe you already do. For two years, I’ve been needing to mourn the loss of the life and the body I had before I had a baby. A huge part of me is relieved that you can die and come back — because motherhood is exactly that — but another part of me feels tricked and cheated. And there isn’t really time to mourn it: parts of my body feel used up; there’s a layer of sludge; I look like a mom, which means that I am a certain kind of invisible that I haven’t been since I was a child. My students this year have affectionately been calling me “mom,” and it secretly pains me — why not “cool aunt?” Or “hip older sister?” It’s because I’m not those things anymore. I am a person whose identity is mostly about caring for other people, and it’s amazing and beautiful and fulfilling and also a total annihilation of what used to be there.

So, there have been losses. There are always losses. Like, I’ve been thinking about the year we went to see the cranes in the height of the pandemic.

We met up with my friend and her teenage daughter, who was home from school, and was wearing really hip pants. (It was the first time I realized that the jeans I owned were now patently for old people, and I decided to be OK with that, because her ankles were showing and it was COLD.) We stood outside, waiting for the sandhill cranes to fly in, and I looked into her eyes and it was clear that she was something. What was the word?

And then the word clicked in. She was grieving. She was grieving a lost year, and she didn’t want to use the word “grieving” because, well, grieving is for when someone dies. Grieving is for tragedy on an epic scale: for floods and house fires and car crashes and above-the-fold stuff. Grieving isn’t for “I miss my friends; I haven’t seen them in a long time.” And yet! That’s what she was doing. Grieving isn’t a size: it’s an emotion.

Like: sometimes you’re hungry, and a spoonful of peanut butter will truly fix it. You are a little bit hungry. The word for what you are is hungry. But there are people out there who are life-threateningly starving, for whom a spoonful of peanut butter would be a miracle, but would still absolutely not be enough to make up the deficit. Nevertheless, you are hungry. The size of your hunger doesn’t change the word “hungry.” You being hungry doesn’t cloud the greater hunger others experience. It’s not as though you are trying to hog all the peanut butter. The fact is: your body is hungry.

The fact is: her body was grieving.

The fact is: me too.

The voice in my head trying to convince me that I wasn’t grieving, and that I was over-dramatic and hypersensitive was too loud, and so I decided to write to it. It had been pushing me around and pushing me along, asking me to keep working in order to survive, and a day came where I needed to stop, turn around, and look at it in its constantly-rolling eyes. The time had come to journal.

First I wrote: “It’s my fault. I am to blame. I guess I should just try to sit outside it and try not to care so much. I am too sensitive. What do I possibly have to even contribute.”

Then I wrote: “Oh, look. That’s the spiral.”

And then I read it all back and imagined it had come as a text message from my best friend. I wrote a lot of things in response. One of them was: “It makes sense that you feel sad. You can grieve your losses privately. It seems like you feel the need to do some deep grieving right now, but you don’t feel like you have the time or resources to do it. It’s possible you just need to move slowly, thing to thing, moment to moment. You don’t have to rush out of your grief.”

The thing about grief is that it can really suck you in, and I didn’t want to get sucked in. But, as I’ve written before, it also needs to be acknowledged. I told people the next week, when they asked.

THEM: How are you?

ME: I’m in a period of grieving, and that’s OK.

I said no to things. I intentionally did not perform. I did the caretaking duties I had to do, but I didn’t do the ones that were extra. Some things got pushed aside for a later version of myself — one who is coming, I’m sure of it, just as I am sure that every day we will have more sun in the Northern Hemisphere.

Here’s something important: You don’t have to explain why you’re grieving. You’re right that people can be judgemental and cruel, and that not everyone will understand that you were emotionally attached to a chicken in a way that you weren’t necessarily proud of. You don’t even have to say, “I’m going through some family stuff” or “some health stuff” or “there have been a lot of crises lately.” You can choose to grieve on your own terms. You can get quiet. You can gather the people you trust and tell them what you want to tell them, and ask them to hold you. (I wrote a list of desires in my journal, and read them to my partner. They were, roughly: 1) Acknowledge my sadness. 2) Help me honor my losses. 3) Show curiosity. And 4) Do some planning for us, for me. There are plenty of people who are looking for instructions, and my partner is one of them. He wrote these down on his phone. Even THAT act made me feel so much less lonely.) 

Basically, I took a week off to grieve. Kat brought over flowers for Scratch. We stood awkwardly in the dining room and said our thank-yous to this wonderful chicken, and it was good. Privately, between you and me, on the morning Scratch died, I held her body so close to mine, and I wept into it, and I said how sorry I was. I said, “You were special. You were too special for this world.” And at school, I had all the kids draw her. (They wanted to, for our two-minute index card drawing time. I’m not an emotional tyrant.)

I’m still in it, but it’s better since I slowed down to look at it and name it.

So here are the things you’re allowed to grieve: All of them. Any of them. Whatever and ever. No one came to the party. You miss your friends. You didn’t get in. You DID get in, and now you have to go. You’re leaving. You’re staying. Someone lied to you. You misunderstood. Things didn’t go the way you expected they would. You’re disappointed. You’re so tired. You don’t even really know. You don’t HAVE to know. It’s all allowed. You can.

Love,

Sophie

This Week In Sophie:

A few things this week:

1. I published a piece in BuzzFeed about polyamorous folks and how they manage their finances. I talked to some amazing people for this. Here’s a little excerpt:

   “While I acknowledge our privilege, I also wanna talk about the financial synergy that is involved in operating the way that we do,” Kendall said. She and her three partners are kitchen-table polyamorists, which means that everyone in the configuration knows everyone else in the configuration. Since Kendall’s polycule is relatively small, and everyone involved enjoys spending time together, dating is less expensive for them than it is for people who go on multiple one-on-one dates a week.

2. I published this cover profile in SAIC Magazine about the extraordinary interdisciplinary artist Nyugen E. Smith. Here’s a little excerpt:

   He used to tell people he was an interdisciplinary artist who primarily made mixed-media works, focusing on the impact of colonialism in the African diaspora. But in some ways, these days that description feels too broad; in other ways, it’s too narrow. 

   “That broad umbrella gives me room to play. And within this play, I'm able to learn new histories by researching and investigating, and continuing to make this work,” Smith said. And that makes sense: so much of Smith’s work is deeply grounded in histories that have been stifled or erased. His way of carefully investigating these histories through language, materials, and construction has made his work definitive and singularly about the experience of African descendants. At the same time, its core is the human experience.

3. A gentle plea to consider subscribing to the paid tier of this newsletter! We have a tender little core group, and we have quarterly book clubs, open threads, and I post more suggestions for this particular group.