Ugh, and ugh again

N has asked me to “unfriend” some of his family members on fac.ebook. He doesn’t have much of a social media presence, but I do, and at one point or another, his family members have friended me as a way of getting more news about him. I know that these friendships are more about N and Dot than they are about me, but I still don’t like having another person, even my best person, try to tell me who I should connect with online. For much of his family, facebo.ok is the only place where they see photographs of Dot, or get news about what she is doing. My mom and I talk every week, but N doesn’t talk to anyone in his family that often and this silly social media connection is the best connection they have.

So why the unfriending? Well, N’s dad invited all of his grandkids (except one, except ours) on a ski weekend in Colorado. I’m sure they had good reasons for not inviting us or talking to us about it. We live farther away than N’s brother and sister; we have turned down invitations to visit in the past; N’s relationship with his father is prickly; Dot had a busy January filled with dentistry and her first ever dance program; N’s never been that interested in skiing (I grew up in MT, so no excuse there); right now we don’t have the financial resources to fly out to CO and stay in a ski resort. So, I’m sure they have their reasons, but I wish they would have invited us anyway.

If they’d invited us anyway, the onus of not being there would be on us. Our decision and our call. And maybe they didn’t want the rejection of a no from us, which would be another understandable reason, I guess, but I wish they’d risked at least a phone call to feel us out. As it is, they’ve really hurt N’s feelings. Not mine so much, but I don’t have the long family history of divorce and step-parents and half-siblings and rejection and denial that he’s had to deal with. I’ve always known my family is right there for me if I need them, that they want me with them at family gatherings and that if I’m not invited it’s because they already know I can’t come because they’ve checked with me. N hasn’t grown up with that surety. For me this was a “your family is weird” moment, but for him it’s a “my family forgets/rejects me (and my child) again” moment.

And now I’m in this weird place where I can either just unfriend the family members (unlikely), or try to engage in further conversation about this. Neither of which I want to do. I could also lie about it, which I know is supposedly a terrible thing to do, and relationships should be based on honesty and [insert another commonplace about honesty here], but I can’t help but wonder if it might not save hurt feelings all around. It’s not just N’s decision, for one thing: it involves my connections and also Dot’s relationship with her grandparents, uncles and cousins. It’s pretty sad to have your best connection with your grandchild be through fa.cebook, but I don’t want to cut that connection without further thought and discussion.

I wish they would have given us a call.

 

Regression

I sometimes think, once August and its aftermath are well over, that I am a fully functional, normal human being again. My grief is calm and even mellow. I remember Teddy and remember missing Teddy, and I miss him again, but without ferocity.

I’m not used to it, the absence of the ferocity. Maybe this is why it’s return takes me by surprise lately.

Last night, scanning through faceb.ook (You know, roughly, where this is going already, yes?), I stumbled on a post by an innocent I grew up with (I used to teach her brother at Sunday School, which adds an element of irony to all of this) about how grateful she is for God’s mercy that her son survived her pre-eclampsia and how God must have big plans for his life. And all of a sudden I want to reach through my computer screen, grab her by the throat, and shake her until she can’t say or type anything like this ever again. There’s so much anger here, and it’s so big, and violent, and inappropriate that I don’t know what to do with it. Because, here’s the thing: I’m not kidding or exaggerating when I say that I wanted to throttle her. For several moments that was the only thing in the world I wanted to do, and I indulged my violent imagination with rather detailed ideas of what it would feel like to wrap my hands around her neck. I was grateful, later, that this wasn’t an actual possibility, but the wishful throttling strikes me as an overreaction. I mean, people say these kinds of things all the time. Feeling so horribly angry over this one little thing feels like a regression.

I will, however, pat myself on the back for refraining from doing any of the following:

• Commenting, “Oh, it’s so nice when they live, isn’t it?”
• Explaining to her, in precise and profane detail, precisely how much I value God’s “mercy” and “miracles”
• Driving back to my home town, waking her up, and throttling her (this only seemed like a good idea for two seconds, I promise)

Some of it is jealousy, of course. If Teddy had survived, I would probably be saying almost exactly the same things as this person did. I’d believe in miracles and think, pityingly, of those who didn’t get theirs, but the contrast between my fortune and theirs wouldn’t have haunted me much. Part of me wishes I was that more innocent person, that I were the one throwing out my little reflections on my cheap faith. Damn, but that’s humbling. I feel like I owe the world at large (and myself) an apology from the person I almost was. I’m sorry, so sorry for that.

Of course the fbook is a place that just seems to be rife with these sorts of comments, but they come up all the time in the outside world, too. I guess I’m surprised that I’m still surprised by how hurtful the term “miracle” can be when tossed around the way it tends to be. Heading into the holiday season, I suppose I should gird my loins for more miracle talk. I wish I had a better idea of how to go about effectively girding. How do you do it? Does it involve advanced blacksmithing skills? Because I don’t have those.

If I were a better person, I guess I’d try to talk to this young woman about how many hopes and dreams and plans we had for Teddy, about how much we’d looked forward to getting to know him and watching his life unfold, to seeing what he would do and how he’d make the world a better place. I’d try to show her that her laying claim to a miracle comes at the expense of my baby, my grief, my rage, and at the expense of other dead babies who were deeply loved and frequently prayed for. I’d try to get some real answers about her faith – is that really how she sees things? Is that really how she thinks it works? And maybe I’d be able to help her find a faith that is deeper and more mysterious than what she currently seems to have, or maybe I’d be able to see some kind of beauty in what she believes, possibly even without wanting to throttle her.

Alas, I’m not that strong of a person. I just hid her from my friends feed.