Other People's Sorrow

I have stumbled across the beautifully written blogs of a couple of mothers who lost their babies.  It’s inevitable in the linked up world of blogging – at the moment, mommy blogs are resonating with me in a way they never have before, so they are where I tend to be drawn.  Other mothers are also drawn to them.  Some of these mothers suffer unimaginable loss.  Other mothers who suffer loss find these women and they all comment sympathetically on one another’s blogs, and suddenly I am in a forest of links to grieving women, and I click them almost pathologically, going from tragedy to tragedy like a gawking driver crawling 10 mph past a bloody wreck.

The funny thing is, I make a point of not looking at wrecks as I drive by them.  I don’t want to be ghoulish, or revel in people’s pain.

So now I don’t know why I drink these stories up the way I do.  Though I risk god-wrath by typing this, I do not think something awful is going to happen to me – at least not with this pregnancy.  I feel Jack move every five minutes, so the chances of him suffering major stress in utero without me knowing are slim.  At 35 weeks gestation he’s already past the danger point developmentally, and if I had him today he’d be fully formed and ready for action.  Chances are very remote, given Patrick’s and my set of genetic circumstances, my age, my health, and my environment, that he is going to come into the world with some horrific disease or malformation that will negatively affect his dramatically foreshortened life.  Reading all of these worst case scenarios does not make me worry any more about my own child, but it also doesn’t give me any reassurance that God is indiscriminately kind to little babies and pregnant women.  So what does it do for me?  Perspective?  Sigh of relief?  Pseudo-intimacy with other young mothers, since I interact with virtually none in real life?

I just don’t know.  I do know that my big mommy-to-be worries are about money, and space, and how my social life is going to change, and oh-my-gosh-is-labor-going-to-kill-me?  Reading these sad stories doesn’t make me feel guilty about having such superficial worries.  I know that each of these mothers probably worried about the same things, before Misery came knocking.  It’s what you do.  If you thought about all of the threats to your physical, spiritual, emotional well-being in this world . . . well, then you’d be my mother, and there can only be one Cathy W — trying frantically to anticipate and stop up all of the cracks in the dam.  (Love you, Mom, but is it not true?)

It is my guess that each of them would trade with me, if they could, my healthy baby for their lost one, and so I do not comment and tell them about my impending good fortune, though sometimes my deeper competitive animal urges prompt me to: “As I am about to become a mother of a healthy baby boy myself, I just cannot imagine the depth of your pain right now etc etc etc.”  Women, especially when competing in the handsomest mate and best-behaved child contest, can be cruel, and snide, and disingenuous, me included, and it takes constant monitoring to make sure I keep my self-awarded blue ribbons and gold stars locked away.  I rarely comment on these blogs at all, not feeling particularly genuine when comforting a total stranger in such REAL circumstances.  If you got a bad haircut, I’d be your biggest bloggie cheerleader.  If you had to choose to remove your newborn from life support – well, what have I to say that could mean anything real to you?  I do cry sometimes for the other mothers, the sisterhood of pain, and it is a relief to have an outlet for my hormones, a REASON to cry, even if it is about as real a reason as watching a sad movie that is based-on-actual-life-events.

I have nothing to do now but revel quietly in my own spectacular health and normalcy, and complain with good nature about my pregnancy discomforts, and continue to live as I have.  Once in a while I will take a slow dip into the deep black pool of someone else’s life and sorrow, and then slip back into my own warm bubble bath life, and lay my head on my husband’s shoulder and as he smiles at me, puzzled by my melancholy, I will whisper to myself There But For the Grace of God.