by Antonietta Bocci
As a grieving mother of a baby girl born and lost six months ago, I’m in the middle of what they call “the angry stage”. I wake up in the morning and start directing my rage at anybody who’s had the misfortune to cross my path: family members for things they said (or didn’t say), colleagues for things they did (or didn’t do), friends for getting in touch too little (or too much)… And then of course there’s also the neighbour, the fishmonger, the handyman, the building manager, all of them guilty of something (or its opposite) and therefore deserving punishment. I don’t actually pick these fights with people in the real world, but only in my imagination; in that secret world of mine, I can shout at anybody and say anything that comes to my mind, whether it makes sense or not, whether it’s fair or not. In light of this, I started using writing as a way to release tension and avoid completely losing my already-precarious “mental health” (whatever the phrase actually means…).
One day I wrote down the various comments I’d heard in the previous months from a variety of individuals, from family members to complete strangers, from PhD holders to less educated people. With some of them, it’s hard to believe that they were uttered with the aim of actually consoling someone for their loss: some are pure cruelty, others are utter ignorance, others still are plain stupidity. Most sadly, some are comments that I myself expressed at some point to other agonizing people like me; no one is without sin. But the cathartic bit of this exercise consisted in finding, for every comment, the answer I’d really have wanted to give but couldn’t find, at a time when I was numb with pain and not fully aware of reality. Those comments have been surfacing again more recently, as I have slowly and painfully started coming out of that cloud that protected me in the early months following my baby’s death.
I eventually picked the ten most significant comments and relevant answers, and put them together in what I named “castrated dialogue”; a potential dialogue that is however impeded by the absurdity and unfairness of events, and by the consequent inadequacy of all the parties involved in it. A castrated dialogue inevitably takes the form of a monologue, but one in which the answers – though not uttered – are all the same real, and as extreme as the comments they aim to respond to. My writing is not aimed at castigating anybody: I think that both sympathetic people and grieving parents are simply equally ill-equipped to understand each other’s experience and engage in successful communication. My poem is simply the report of a dysfunctional dialogue: on the one hand, people unable to understand the pain that a bereaved parent is going through; on the other, a grieving mother unable to make sense of the words she hears from others.
THE RHYME OF THE WISE FRIEND
(AND THE STILL MOTHER)
Ten hurtful things heard as a Still Mother…
(and ten angry things I’ve dared not utter!)
How are you doing, darling? You look well!
(In fact I’m falling headlong into hell…)
I know your pain, it’s there to make you strong!
(You clearly have no sense of right and wrong…)
At least you are alive, you risked your life!
(Some days I’d rather take it with a knife…)
Believe in Mother Nature, she knows best!
(All I believe in is my aching chest…)
Behind all this there is a godly plan!
(I wish I knew that at my latest scan…)
I’m sorry, this was sadly meant to be!
(A sadder thing is you talking to me…)
Trying again will surely ease your pain!
(Filling this void can never be my gain…)
You have to suck it up and persevere!
(I’d rather drown myself in gin and beer…)
You need to stop revisiting that day!
(As if I could just make it go away…)
Better to lose her now than later on…
(It would be best, in fact, if YOU were gone!)
_________________________
My name is Antonietta and I am a Still Mother. My baby girl Maia was born on 15th April 2018 at around 36 weeks. She saw the light through a caesarean cut performed to save her life from the consequences of a severe and sudden placental abruption. She strenuously fought her battle for life and eventually gained wings 36 hours after birth.
The months I shared with her during my pregnancy, the hours I spent talking to her after birth and the minutes I had with her in my arms just before she flew away, are my sweetest and most precious memories.
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