My mom had thousands of kids

...A dispatch from bewilderness

My mom used teddy bears like this with her “kids”

Grief is a taboo subject that is too sensitive to discuss openly. Like sex or money. Aphasia means nothing can be discussed openly because nothing can be discussed. Aphasia means there are no words. Or there are no words that make sense.

When my brain broke, I acquired three problems that all ended with “sia.” Aphasia. Amnesia. Agnosia. A few different agnosias, in fact. Brain break often comes with heartbreak and can mean the life you grieve is your own and the person you mourn is the person you were.

If you try to speak, syllables drop out like a radio station to which you’re not quite tuned, or to which you’re not tuned at all. Thoughts do the same. Drop out. Unsaid and unsayable.

The memory center of the brain is called the hippocampus. Or Google. Most of us pass through the Google search bar a few dozen times a day and find on the other side of it a world or the world depending on what we choose to search and whom we choose to believe.

Perhaps the difference between hope and despair boils down to different ways of telling stories from the same set of facts. Or non-facts. And to what we choose to believe.

When I was young and my mom was home, which wasn’t nearly often enough from my point of view, we were buying Vermont and Boardwalk, and conquering the world via the board game, Risk.

My mom had thousands of kids, but I wasn’t one of them. Or didn’t feel like one of them. She was a pediatric social worker in a large New York hospital where kids “needed comfort” from “people who cared.”

She walked her kids to the O.R. very early every morning and met them in Recovery and prepared them/stayed with them for scary procedures. She told me their names. Their own parents were rarely there, likely because they were working. She didn’t tuck me in at night and didn’t wake me with a kiss.