#it was a bit of a stressor that you have to name your baby asap in the us

[thevikingwoman]

So in my country abs culture, you don’t have to name babies right away. You have 6 month to register a name (or baptize), so I’m pretty certain they didn’t have a different gendered name picked out. I do know an alternative name and I’m glad I’m not called that 🤣

[delta-lethonomia]

. (personal under the cut, long-ish) (grief, mother's day)

reading through some of my older posts from last year and I really was a happier person then :(

It's coming up on the one year anniversary of my mom breaking her hip and landing in a nursing home. She died from heart failure a few weeks later. Gotta say, there's nothing like having both your father and mother die in a pretty short period to teach you how society values them differently. /snark

In total, I've cried maybe about 10 seconds when she died, and then another short little spurt a few months later. I kept expecting this grief to hit me? But honestly I'm just relieved she's dead. It's a little frightening sometimes realizing there's no family left to me in the world, no "safe landing spot" if my life fell apart, but the day-to-day stressors are so much less. I don't get 4am phone calls anymore or drunken voicemails. I don't hear from my in-laws that she moved a random dude from okcupid into her house on the first date, or got married to a guy she said she hated last month. Or that she impulse bought a new car despite owning 2 already and being, you know, legally blind.

Sometimes I want to call her, or to hug her. You show a different aspect of yourself in every relationship, and the one with a parent is special in the sense that there's almost a return to childhood in there. I miss that part, sometimes. Remembering the same conversations at 10, at 20, at 30 with the same person, and her remembering them too. But not much else.

Anyway, physically the "must-have-baby-to-replace-dead-family" urge is fading away, thank god. I swear it's the same instinct that people get when their dog dies, so they buy a new dog ASAP. Always thought that was a bit heartless/foolish, trying to replace a loved one like that, but grief makes fools of us all. It's a unique irrational state of being; it really does feel like your brain just blue-screens for a while, and that while can be months or years. Anyway, kids just doesn't seem worth it with the almost-inevitable osteoporosis and malady of other health issues from pregnancy in old age.

Anxiety disorder definitely kicked into high gear this year, aided and abetted by all the fuckery going on in US politics and the job market, but I'm getting a handle on that. Starting to make plans for the future again and the endless anxiety attacks about death are fading in frequency. I still keep deliberately failing a lot at things (paying for art classes, missing one then giving up on attending bc heaven forbid I actually excel at anything) and I still place too much value on getting this fic finished, but it's progress. Considering the numeric measure of stress placed by the death of a parent, selling a house, moving, long-term unemployment, 2 deaths in my husband's family, anxiety, lifelong depressive tendencies and *gestures outside* all of that, my mental health could be doing a lot worse.

Gotta say though, my mother-in-law requesting we visit her for mother's day because her (late-80's, well-off, sensible, rational, and accepting/eager for death) mother died last year too just cracks me up. I get it, but yeah. Husband can go to that alone.

I'll spend my first motherless mother's day the way my mom would have - namely getting shitfaced on the couch, with a nice red instead of some godawful wannabe winecooler/vodka spritz concoction, watching endless reruns of "Murder, She Wrote." Maybe I'll pick up some oysters for dad, too.