Something that has been coming up a lot when I read about grief is storytelling and how, through writing, we shape how we understand our lives or our trauma. Some of the authors I've read - Geraldine Brooks, Kate Bowler, Joan Didion - frame it as control. In a situation in which we have no control, we can at least control how we talk or write about it. In Memorial Days, Geraldine Brooks quoted Salman Rushdie's speech at Columbia University in the midst of the fatwah. "Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless."
I was reading a blog post this morning that talked about how, after traumatic events, the narratives we construct about our experiences can dramatically affect how we process and heal. It's interesting to me that as much as I've read about writing and as much as I have personally written through challenging moments in my life, I never thought about it in those terms - as taking control of a story and shaping how I move through it. I have always thought of my journaling as a tool to figure out why I was feeling a certain way and how to explain it to others. When I was younger, I felt like there was a stopper between my mind and my mouth preventing me from explaining out loud how I was feeling. And in some cases, there was a stopper between my emotions and my mind preventing me from knowing why I felt the way I did until I had a moment to really think about it. This is probably why I'm resistant to talk therapy. Well that and all the crying I'd do.
But, writing about my daughter's cancer in this format is a way to enact some control on what is happening. It helps me to understand all the information doctors are throwing at us, to construct a timeline of what has happened and what may happen, to pull out the threads of meaning I can make sense of.
It's also a way to help me remember these days. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion keeps revisiting the same moments over and over. At times, it is a way for her to make sense of the chaos and shock, to try to remember how the events of her husbands death played out despite the gaps in her memory. At other times, it is a tool to remember all the little moments with her husband and their long life together so she won't forget them as she gets further removed from his living presence.
I think about that a lot. Even before cancer. What do I remember about my children as babies? What do I remember about their little toddler mannerisms and all the cute things they used to say? What moments did I try to etch into my brain that are now gone? My mom tried to tell me to write it all down, but I didn't. Life was too hectic. And now as I try to reconstruct it, what story am I telling about who my kids were or are based on the things I remember and the things I've forgotten?
Some memories I have of my oldest as a toddler that immediately come to mind:
- She loves watching TV. When she was 2 or 3, We watched Trolls every day after school for at least a year and we listened to the soundtrack in the car. Her favorite song was "Get Back Up Again." She was Poppy for Halloween 2 years in a row.
- She is a completionist when it comes to TV and books. She wants to watch every episode in order and read every book in a series in order. We watched every episode of Octonauts in order at least twice. For a minute, my husband and I weren't sure we should be letting her watch it because she would get so stressed out and worried about the characters being in danger.
- She sobbed at the end of Smurfs: The Lost Village when <spoilers> Smurfette dies briefly.
- She would get excited when we went to playgrounds and "her friends" were there. Her friends were just other kids that she had never met before.
- Once, she told me that she wished all of our family lived in the same neighborhood. She didn't understand why anyone would move out of their parent's house. After some discussion, she said that moving to Charlotte would be ok.
- Once, she told me that she wanted to stay 3 because she didn't want to get married and she didn't want to have a baby.
- She used to be afraid of "darkie monsters" that lived in her closet. I taught her to yell loudly to scare them away. We would walk up the hallway in the dark trying to scare the monsters.
- When she was 4, she had a lot of questions about death. She asked me where people went when they died. When I didn't have a confident answer, she told me to Google it. She told me that wooly mammoths lived after the dinosaurs, and then asked what animal was going to be here after humans were gone. When I said I didn't know, she told me to Google it.
- She used to be really into "cute scary" Halloween. She wanted to be a banshee. We settled on a skeleton. When we would drive past graveyards, she would tell me that was where the skeleton people lived.
- During a lesson on penguins, she told her preschool class that babies come out of their mom's vaginas. The daycare teachers were not prepared for that.
- At preschool she learned about different types of families. When we were out places, should would point out different types of families...loudly. See a kid with two women - that kid had two moms! See a kid with three adults - that kid has two dads and a mom! She did the same thing when she learned about different skin colors.
- She memorized a ton of books. Her two favorites were The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food. The latter is so ridiculously long, I don't know how she memorized it.
- We went to the beach and a hermit crab pinched her toe. She talked about that for years.
- She used to tell me she had "pink magic." She was pressing on her eyes until she saw colors - magic!
- She learned that plants like music and kind words, so she would sing to the tree in our front yard and give it hugs.
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