This was a sweet sip to read this morning, as we approach (or have arrived) moving on with trying to get pregnant after 5 years.
To relinquish, and well, ‘forget’ the hopes and vision of traditional family life and open-handedly anticipate, with joy, a different way of being here. Space for a new story, memory-making.
Loved this so much! This reminds me of the time my first year out of college when I got a new phone and hadn't backed up my iCloud storage (sigh). All of my photos and videos on my camera roll from college were deleted. At first I was devastated (especially because I was experiencing the same post-grad malaise you describe above), but quickly realized I was...fine with it? Similarly, I got a new laptop last year when my old one crashed, and a lot of my data was lost, including 100-page long Word Docs that served as my journal in high school. Again, I expected to feel grief, but didn't. (Maybe this story is only proving that I'm really bad with technology?)
Anyway, as someone who was always the kind to scroll through my camera roll or reread my old journals for a trip down memory and nostalgia lane (and would often feel a pit in my stomach while reading, for unknown reasons), losing these artifacts of the past has been kind of freeing. What I do remember feels important enough, and I no longer have to look to journal entries or a camera roll (which were often very skewed towards particular moods -- journaling when depressed or anxious about something, photo-taking for special occasions and good moods) to guide (and therefore distort, in some ways!) my memory.
thank you as always for scratching my brain on a Sunday morning <3
also, I am generally disgruntled when my phone decides to show me “memories” — you were here 2 years ago today! — it feels spiritually wrong. I don’t want an iphone choosing what I remember!
this reminds me of an article i read once (maybe i found it on maybe baby? idk) about a guy who accidentally permanently deleted everything in his Gmail, which was like ten years' worth of stuff, from receipts for old orders to correspondence with family. he found it freeing, ultimately. sometimes i am tempted to do the same, especially as i am perpetually running out of storage space in there
Im genuinely baffled by the way you manage to enrich the way I see the world so regularly with your beautiful writing and eloquent way you shed light on the ideas you think about!! Thanks a million once again 🫶🏼🫶🏼
Years ago, I read a piece by Molly Young for N+1about taking Adderall in college. She said that while she enjoyed how much easier it was to complete her schoolwork quickly, she ultimately found that it robbed her of her ability to notice what actually interested her. Everything was interesting! I sometimes wonder if this is what my iPhone is doing to my memories. It saves everything, so everything seems worthy of remembering.
Ever since I read your piece last year about forgetting, I’ve been thinking more and more about the value of photographing and taking videos of my kids. We chose not to share any photos or videos on social media, so from the beginning, I saw this documenting as something valuable I was doing for myself (I’ll never forget how cute they are!) and for them (What a gift to have lots of photos and home movies from your childhood!). As they get older, I find that while looking at old videos and photos is usually fun, sometimes it also brings up mixed feelings for me and for them too. Though they enjoy seeing themselves on vacation or saying something funny as toddlers, other times they seem unsettled to see a video of themselves playing with an old classmate they can’t remember, or toys we no longer own. All this to say, as grateful as I am to have these hi-def iPhone “memories” at my fingertips 24/7, I wonder whether it might be nicer to look back on their early childhoods with the hazy memory nature intended.
I’ve always been a forgetful person, and for the most part I’m grateful for it - I do think in a lot of ways it’s been my brain’s way of protecting me. It only really started bothering me when I became an immigrant. When I first moved to the U.S. there was so much I found strange and unlikeable about the culture. I told myself I would never let myself internalize or normalize these modes of thinking (ex: being overly formal with friends). Now, four years later, I’m rarely surprised by anything and participate more seamlessly in that same culture. I struggle to recall my old self who was more in touch with my home culture (and not diaspora culture which is very different), and how she would have reacted to certain things. I know that assimilation is a natural outcome of spending long enough somewhere but it’s always been hard for me to reconcile the fact that I now have more American friends than I keep in touch with back home, that my memories of a country will be frozen in time. Four years ago I laughed at my aunts and uncles who live here for their antiquated ideas of our country — the one they used to know 20 years ago but had changed so much in the time since they left. But I can already see the day, not too far in the future now, when I meet a newly arrived immigrant and seem just as out of touch and ‘Americanized’ to them… All this to say I’ve built a life for myself here that I love and cannot imagine giving it up and this essay was a good reminder to embrace that, to know that “anything worth preserving will carry over.” ❤️
This is a fascinating concept, and sparked in me something I have been wrestling with for several years. Without giving TMI, I had a traumatic childhood that encouraged coping by dissociation (forgetting). As an adult, I have been continuing to cope with substances and work. But over the last five years, even when working through therapy and remembering more of what happened, I began to lose myself more. Part of this was also the insanity of what pandemic isolation did to so many of us, but I think in trying so hard to remember my past and face it, I lost who I was, I forgot myself. Now, as a newly sober person, I am wrestling with the loss of those coping strategies and mourn a future life without them. I have heard from many folks in recovery that they lose a desire for that lifestyle (or forget its value) once they have been sober for a while and I always struggled to accept that, worried I would be white knuckling my way through life forever. But your essay today really resonated with me, and while this is a very clumsy collection of loosely related thoughts, the notion of forgetting being helpful and remembering keeping me stuck really clicked for me. Sorry this is so rambling, but I wanted to just say thank you!
love this. made me think of nothing more than that devastating breakup where you swear you'll never love again because the risk of hurting like that again is just too much. anyway on Friday i will have been married for ten years
I'm a cognitive neuroscientist, and this idea holds up biologically :) The way memory works at a neural systems level is broadly by pruning away unnecessary details from prior experiences and maintaining the "gist" of what's important to extract from those experiences over time. It's not useful to remember the specifics of every time you've ever unexpectedly gotten caught in the rain, but instead to learn that all those instances involved cloudy weather, so you should bring an umbrella along on cloudy days. The specific events we remember best are those that we retell as stories! We would not necessarily even remember some of our more emotional experiences clearly, but because we return to them again and again, this repetition yields stronger memory traces (although, of course, the details of a traumatic car accident or the day your child was born are both more evolutionarily adaptive to recall than what you wore to work on a Wednesday three months ago). But even memories of highly salient experiences are reconsolidated and altered each time we recall them. It's why sometimes looking at old photos or reading diaries can be jarring, because your memory has shifted with time and might not match those snapshots taken in the moment. Forgetting is a crucial part of the memory system! And as someone else already noted, it's this forgetting with time that actually heals emotional wounds, rather than time itself. Great piece as always! <3
Thank you for sharing this! I was also going to also ask if this whole brain exercise with forgetting has any relationship to the somatic therapy concept explored in a previous newsletter from Haley. I guess I’m feeling kind of overwhelmed and intrigued by these concepts right now as I’m going through a terrible amount of transition atm.
I can’t find the newsletter referecing somatic therapy, so I’m not sure how to answer this! I should emphasize I’m a researcher, not a clinician, so my expertise doesn’t lie in therapeutic practices. But I might be able to help clarify some of what you’re confused about if you give me a bit more info on what you’re seeking. Sending you peace as you navigate your current transition.
Thank you! What I read from a link in the MB newsletter I’m referencing was related to trauma’s impact on the somatic nervous system…where the somatic system craves to complete a response loop when faced with a threatening experience and when the response loop is interrupted it can lead to a trauma incident which can manifest in physical ways. (Note: I’m definitely no expert and fully paraphrasing based on my understanding of what I read, lol)
I guess I’m wondering how memory plays into coping and healing mentally, physically, emotionally. What I feel I’ve read is that forgetting helps someone move on, but if the pain has already found a home in your system somewhere, can memory help you find it and heal it before or even after it starts to wreak havoc on your systems in some way? Maybe I’m overthinking this…lol
So interesting! Again, not an expert in treatment methods, but it is definitely the case that things you don't remember can still affect you in terms of how you respond to certain situations, your expectations about the world, etc. (e.g. babies need to be snuggled to develop normally even though they won't remember the snuggling) so forgetting isn't enough on its own to heal from a traumatic experience! It's just that the sharpness of the pain of something hurtful, embarrassing, or threatening dulls over time as you gain distance and the memory fades. But if you're holding on to a response you developed as a way to cope with a traumatic situation, I imagine that working to remember and process what you experienced and why this response served you at the time, while acknowledging that it now might be maladaptive and need to be released, would help you move on as a healthier and happier version of yourself. I hope this helps!
I really recommend the novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (it won the women’s prize for fiction a few years ago). It’s a great book to go into with as little context as possible but it explores this (lack of memory and the emotional ramifications) in a profoundly moving way. It’s a pretty fast read, and changed something in me around how I consider memory and identity to this day.
I don’t listen to many audiobooks because I’m so picky about narrators, but I’ve listened to Piranesi read by Chiwetel Ejiofor countless times! Highly recommend. You can listen to it for free on YouTube.
So true that when people say “time heals all wounds,” it’s really that forgetting heals, and with time, we inevitably forget. Such is the fragility of memory. I think the feeling of this being some great loss or tragedy is especially pronounced for writers and artists, because storytelling and meaning-making are so rooted in remembering one’s life, from the particular nuances of a feeling to the sensory details.
I used to cling to memory with an iron grip, viewing it as a kind of loyalty or commitment but now I write so I can forget. Recording to release. Forgetting feels like part of resilience now, not a betrayal.
Sharing an episode of This American Life, Act 3 in particular, “Forget Me? Not!” which I found fascinating. It’s about people with HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) a rare condition that allows people to recall events in their lives with staggering detail and precision. Ofc this comes with so many challenges for the reasons you mentioned (dealing with grief and weathering life transitions, for example) but it’s interesting how they discuss how much grief they imagine feeling if they weren’t oriented in this particular way. They can’t fathom ordinary forgetting. Maybe so much of processing one’s life is coming to terms with your default way of processing experience, whether remembering or forgetting—there’s a kind of loss in both alternatives.
I was speaking with a vibrant 82 year old ceramicist (still active, still creating) and I asked her “how she keeps going/gets through?” and she said she doesn’t dwell.
I love that. I can imagine her, focusing on her ceramics and her little voice. Not sure why! Inspiring! “I just don’t dwell” like a gentle approach, stepping lightly into the world of your own emotions.
I relate to this so much! I'm 38 and knowing mid life is on the horizon, I keep having these existential debates about what's "appropriate." With that comes this overwhelming grief: am I never allowed to get crazy at a music festival without looking like those ladies from The White Lotus? That's a superficial example but you get it. A microcosm for the larger question: "are my fun, spontaneous days behind me?" But I also recognize that I look back at my 20s and early 30s with this reverence that conveniently ignores how painful and chaotic those times actually were (really fun though!). The wisdom that I have now was earned from living in consequence of those periods' repeated mistakes. Anyway, this was so insightful. I think so many of us are navigating this shift, wondering what it means to let go without feeling like we’ve given up the parts of ourselves that we cherish.
Totally identify! I sometimes feel something akin to grief when I leave a restaurant to go home at 9 PM as the 20-somethings are just emerging for the night. I miss those days! I wouldn't trade my current life and I know trying to recreate those experiences now wouldn't hit the same, but I think that's what leads to the nostalgia for a version of myself and my life that no longer exists <3
What an interesting way to think about forgetting. This made me think of Matrescence by Lucy Jones, specifically the part about how pregnant women’s brains look notably different for 7 years (!) because they undergo synaptic pruning in preparation for new connections being formed in motherhood.
I have nothing profound to say other than: you are my favorite writer on here, and one of the only people I’ve read who’s captured my experience of parenthood so far (9 months in). I’ve been to therapy, support groups, mom meet-ups, and more. But I feel most seen and validated reading your posts about Sunny. Thanks for doing what you do! ❤️
"While interviewing her, I was devastated by the idea of her loss and captivated by her apparent indifference: It was hard to mourn something she couldn’t remember, she told me then." This hit really hard. I lost my mom when I was two but have no recollection of it, and hence, have never really felt her absence. This was brought up in a recent interview I did for a volunteer position at a grief support group. They asked me if I had grieved that loss yet when I brought it up (in response to them asking if I'd experience any personal loss), which I answered sheepishly with a stuttered yes, so that we could move on to the next question. After the call I wondered if I should've grieved it, but that felt unnatural to me, because she was never really present. Her loss has been brought up as the primary reason for why I suffer in the specific ways I do relationally, but it always felt far-fetched to me. Obviously the loss of a mother is devastating for any child, and I'm not dismissing the potential impact it could have had on me (and can, for others). But that I've forgotten about her seems more a gift than a loss. My sister, one year younger, feels the same. I asked her if she still visits our mother's grave, and she simply said no, it's not something she thinks about anymore, and hasn't, for years. I thought this was strange at the time, but I think I get it now. If I had lost her when I was somewhat older, I think this would have been a different story. Who knows: it's pretty surprising what will come up if you dig enough, and also when you least expect it.
This was a sweet sip to read this morning, as we approach (or have arrived) moving on with trying to get pregnant after 5 years.
To relinquish, and well, ‘forget’ the hopes and vision of traditional family life and open-handedly anticipate, with joy, a different way of being here. Space for a new story, memory-making.
Thanks Haley, as ever for writing.
Loved this so much! This reminds me of the time my first year out of college when I got a new phone and hadn't backed up my iCloud storage (sigh). All of my photos and videos on my camera roll from college were deleted. At first I was devastated (especially because I was experiencing the same post-grad malaise you describe above), but quickly realized I was...fine with it? Similarly, I got a new laptop last year when my old one crashed, and a lot of my data was lost, including 100-page long Word Docs that served as my journal in high school. Again, I expected to feel grief, but didn't. (Maybe this story is only proving that I'm really bad with technology?)
Anyway, as someone who was always the kind to scroll through my camera roll or reread my old journals for a trip down memory and nostalgia lane (and would often feel a pit in my stomach while reading, for unknown reasons), losing these artifacts of the past has been kind of freeing. What I do remember feels important enough, and I no longer have to look to journal entries or a camera roll (which were often very skewed towards particular moods -- journaling when depressed or anxious about something, photo-taking for special occasions and good moods) to guide (and therefore distort, in some ways!) my memory.
thank you as always for scratching my brain on a Sunday morning <3
also, I am generally disgruntled when my phone decides to show me “memories” — you were here 2 years ago today! — it feels spiritually wrong. I don’t want an iphone choosing what I remember!
this reminds me of an article i read once (maybe i found it on maybe baby? idk) about a guy who accidentally permanently deleted everything in his Gmail, which was like ten years' worth of stuff, from receipts for old orders to correspondence with family. he found it freeing, ultimately. sometimes i am tempted to do the same, especially as i am perpetually running out of storage space in there
This makes me want to throw everything out! 😂
I am you with technology !!!!! Have done all of this multiple times.
Im genuinely baffled by the way you manage to enrich the way I see the world so regularly with your beautiful writing and eloquent way you shed light on the ideas you think about!! Thanks a million once again 🫶🏼🫶🏼
Years ago, I read a piece by Molly Young for N+1about taking Adderall in college. She said that while she enjoyed how much easier it was to complete her schoolwork quickly, she ultimately found that it robbed her of her ability to notice what actually interested her. Everything was interesting! I sometimes wonder if this is what my iPhone is doing to my memories. It saves everything, so everything seems worthy of remembering.
Ever since I read your piece last year about forgetting, I’ve been thinking more and more about the value of photographing and taking videos of my kids. We chose not to share any photos or videos on social media, so from the beginning, I saw this documenting as something valuable I was doing for myself (I’ll never forget how cute they are!) and for them (What a gift to have lots of photos and home movies from your childhood!). As they get older, I find that while looking at old videos and photos is usually fun, sometimes it also brings up mixed feelings for me and for them too. Though they enjoy seeing themselves on vacation or saying something funny as toddlers, other times they seem unsettled to see a video of themselves playing with an old classmate they can’t remember, or toys we no longer own. All this to say, as grateful as I am to have these hi-def iPhone “memories” at my fingertips 24/7, I wonder whether it might be nicer to look back on their early childhoods with the hazy memory nature intended.
Here’s the link to Molly’s essay: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/kickstart-my-heart/
I’ve always been a forgetful person, and for the most part I’m grateful for it - I do think in a lot of ways it’s been my brain’s way of protecting me. It only really started bothering me when I became an immigrant. When I first moved to the U.S. there was so much I found strange and unlikeable about the culture. I told myself I would never let myself internalize or normalize these modes of thinking (ex: being overly formal with friends). Now, four years later, I’m rarely surprised by anything and participate more seamlessly in that same culture. I struggle to recall my old self who was more in touch with my home culture (and not diaspora culture which is very different), and how she would have reacted to certain things. I know that assimilation is a natural outcome of spending long enough somewhere but it’s always been hard for me to reconcile the fact that I now have more American friends than I keep in touch with back home, that my memories of a country will be frozen in time. Four years ago I laughed at my aunts and uncles who live here for their antiquated ideas of our country — the one they used to know 20 years ago but had changed so much in the time since they left. But I can already see the day, not too far in the future now, when I meet a newly arrived immigrant and seem just as out of touch and ‘Americanized’ to them… All this to say I’ve built a life for myself here that I love and cannot imagine giving it up and this essay was a good reminder to embrace that, to know that “anything worth preserving will carry over.” ❤️
This is a fascinating concept, and sparked in me something I have been wrestling with for several years. Without giving TMI, I had a traumatic childhood that encouraged coping by dissociation (forgetting). As an adult, I have been continuing to cope with substances and work. But over the last five years, even when working through therapy and remembering more of what happened, I began to lose myself more. Part of this was also the insanity of what pandemic isolation did to so many of us, but I think in trying so hard to remember my past and face it, I lost who I was, I forgot myself. Now, as a newly sober person, I am wrestling with the loss of those coping strategies and mourn a future life without them. I have heard from many folks in recovery that they lose a desire for that lifestyle (or forget its value) once they have been sober for a while and I always struggled to accept that, worried I would be white knuckling my way through life forever. But your essay today really resonated with me, and while this is a very clumsy collection of loosely related thoughts, the notion of forgetting being helpful and remembering keeping me stuck really clicked for me. Sorry this is so rambling, but I wanted to just say thank you!
congratulations on your steps into sobriety 🩵🩵
love this. made me think of nothing more than that devastating breakup where you swear you'll never love again because the risk of hurting like that again is just too much. anyway on Friday i will have been married for ten years
I'm a cognitive neuroscientist, and this idea holds up biologically :) The way memory works at a neural systems level is broadly by pruning away unnecessary details from prior experiences and maintaining the "gist" of what's important to extract from those experiences over time. It's not useful to remember the specifics of every time you've ever unexpectedly gotten caught in the rain, but instead to learn that all those instances involved cloudy weather, so you should bring an umbrella along on cloudy days. The specific events we remember best are those that we retell as stories! We would not necessarily even remember some of our more emotional experiences clearly, but because we return to them again and again, this repetition yields stronger memory traces (although, of course, the details of a traumatic car accident or the day your child was born are both more evolutionarily adaptive to recall than what you wore to work on a Wednesday three months ago). But even memories of highly salient experiences are reconsolidated and altered each time we recall them. It's why sometimes looking at old photos or reading diaries can be jarring, because your memory has shifted with time and might not match those snapshots taken in the moment. Forgetting is a crucial part of the memory system! And as someone else already noted, it's this forgetting with time that actually heals emotional wounds, rather than time itself. Great piece as always! <3
Thank you for sharing this! I was also going to also ask if this whole brain exercise with forgetting has any relationship to the somatic therapy concept explored in a previous newsletter from Haley. I guess I’m feeling kind of overwhelmed and intrigued by these concepts right now as I’m going through a terrible amount of transition atm.
I can’t find the newsletter referecing somatic therapy, so I’m not sure how to answer this! I should emphasize I’m a researcher, not a clinician, so my expertise doesn’t lie in therapeutic practices. But I might be able to help clarify some of what you’re confused about if you give me a bit more info on what you’re seeking. Sending you peace as you navigate your current transition.
Thank you! What I read from a link in the MB newsletter I’m referencing was related to trauma’s impact on the somatic nervous system…where the somatic system craves to complete a response loop when faced with a threatening experience and when the response loop is interrupted it can lead to a trauma incident which can manifest in physical ways. (Note: I’m definitely no expert and fully paraphrasing based on my understanding of what I read, lol)
I guess I’m wondering how memory plays into coping and healing mentally, physically, emotionally. What I feel I’ve read is that forgetting helps someone move on, but if the pain has already found a home in your system somewhere, can memory help you find it and heal it before or even after it starts to wreak havoc on your systems in some way? Maybe I’m overthinking this…lol
So interesting! Again, not an expert in treatment methods, but it is definitely the case that things you don't remember can still affect you in terms of how you respond to certain situations, your expectations about the world, etc. (e.g. babies need to be snuggled to develop normally even though they won't remember the snuggling) so forgetting isn't enough on its own to heal from a traumatic experience! It's just that the sharpness of the pain of something hurtful, embarrassing, or threatening dulls over time as you gain distance and the memory fades. But if you're holding on to a response you developed as a way to cope with a traumatic situation, I imagine that working to remember and process what you experienced and why this response served you at the time, while acknowledging that it now might be maladaptive and need to be released, would help you move on as a healthier and happier version of yourself. I hope this helps!
It helps a ton. Let me know if you have any recommendations for books or podcasts to consume on this topic! Thank you!
I really recommend the novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (it won the women’s prize for fiction a few years ago). It’s a great book to go into with as little context as possible but it explores this (lack of memory and the emotional ramifications) in a profoundly moving way. It’s a pretty fast read, and changed something in me around how I consider memory and identity to this day.
I loved that book so much!! I read it so fast that I honestly forget it (lol) but now I want to reread
I don’t listen to many audiobooks because I’m so picky about narrators, but I’ve listened to Piranesi read by Chiwetel Ejiofor countless times! Highly recommend. You can listen to it for free on YouTube.
oooh i'm not usually an audiobook girlie but i see that this is included in my spotify premium so you've influenced me, gonna check it out
So true that when people say “time heals all wounds,” it’s really that forgetting heals, and with time, we inevitably forget. Such is the fragility of memory. I think the feeling of this being some great loss or tragedy is especially pronounced for writers and artists, because storytelling and meaning-making are so rooted in remembering one’s life, from the particular nuances of a feeling to the sensory details.
I used to cling to memory with an iron grip, viewing it as a kind of loyalty or commitment but now I write so I can forget. Recording to release. Forgetting feels like part of resilience now, not a betrayal.
Sharing an episode of This American Life, Act 3 in particular, “Forget Me? Not!” which I found fascinating. It’s about people with HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) a rare condition that allows people to recall events in their lives with staggering detail and precision. Ofc this comes with so many challenges for the reasons you mentioned (dealing with grief and weathering life transitions, for example) but it’s interesting how they discuss how much grief they imagine feeling if they weren’t oriented in this particular way. They can’t fathom ordinary forgetting. Maybe so much of processing one’s life is coming to terms with your default way of processing experience, whether remembering or forgetting—there’s a kind of loss in both alternatives.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/585/in-defense-of-ignorance
P.S. I’m consistently in awe of your ability to churn out such quality writing and depth of thought every week…and as a mother too! ❤️
I was speaking with a vibrant 82 year old ceramicist (still active, still creating) and I asked her “how she keeps going/gets through?” and she said she doesn’t dwell.
I love that. I can imagine her, focusing on her ceramics and her little voice. Not sure why! Inspiring! “I just don’t dwell” like a gentle approach, stepping lightly into the world of your own emotions.
something about this essay makes me want to be so gentle toward myself
I relate to this so much! I'm 38 and knowing mid life is on the horizon, I keep having these existential debates about what's "appropriate." With that comes this overwhelming grief: am I never allowed to get crazy at a music festival without looking like those ladies from The White Lotus? That's a superficial example but you get it. A microcosm for the larger question: "are my fun, spontaneous days behind me?" But I also recognize that I look back at my 20s and early 30s with this reverence that conveniently ignores how painful and chaotic those times actually were (really fun though!). The wisdom that I have now was earned from living in consequence of those periods' repeated mistakes. Anyway, this was so insightful. I think so many of us are navigating this shift, wondering what it means to let go without feeling like we’ve given up the parts of ourselves that we cherish.
Totally identify! I sometimes feel something akin to grief when I leave a restaurant to go home at 9 PM as the 20-somethings are just emerging for the night. I miss those days! I wouldn't trade my current life and I know trying to recreate those experiences now wouldn't hit the same, but I think that's what leads to the nostalgia for a version of myself and my life that no longer exists <3
100% <3
What an interesting way to think about forgetting. This made me think of Matrescence by Lucy Jones, specifically the part about how pregnant women’s brains look notably different for 7 years (!) because they undergo synaptic pruning in preparation for new connections being formed in motherhood.
I have nothing profound to say other than: you are my favorite writer on here, and one of the only people I’ve read who’s captured my experience of parenthood so far (9 months in). I’ve been to therapy, support groups, mom meet-ups, and more. But I feel most seen and validated reading your posts about Sunny. Thanks for doing what you do! ❤️
"While interviewing her, I was devastated by the idea of her loss and captivated by her apparent indifference: It was hard to mourn something she couldn’t remember, she told me then." This hit really hard. I lost my mom when I was two but have no recollection of it, and hence, have never really felt her absence. This was brought up in a recent interview I did for a volunteer position at a grief support group. They asked me if I had grieved that loss yet when I brought it up (in response to them asking if I'd experience any personal loss), which I answered sheepishly with a stuttered yes, so that we could move on to the next question. After the call I wondered if I should've grieved it, but that felt unnatural to me, because she was never really present. Her loss has been brought up as the primary reason for why I suffer in the specific ways I do relationally, but it always felt far-fetched to me. Obviously the loss of a mother is devastating for any child, and I'm not dismissing the potential impact it could have had on me (and can, for others). But that I've forgotten about her seems more a gift than a loss. My sister, one year younger, feels the same. I asked her if she still visits our mother's grave, and she simply said no, it's not something she thinks about anymore, and hasn't, for years. I thought this was strange at the time, but I think I get it now. If I had lost her when I was somewhat older, I think this would have been a different story. Who knows: it's pretty surprising what will come up if you dig enough, and also when you least expect it.