Author: Sheila Quirke

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Mothers Dying: It Ain’t Right

It could be the gray skies and damp, chill air.  Maybe it’s because it is All Souls Day.  Perhaps it is just my morose mood as I gird myself for the upcoming daylight savings time change this weekend.  Winter is coming, yada yada yada.  Whatever the reason, right now I am thinking a lot about mothers dying and leaving their babies.

mother-grave

Beth is the writer and activist behind a blog I follow, The Cult of Perfect Motherhood.  She is dying.  Right now.  Today.  She may even be dead and the news has not yet trickled down to me, a mere fan.  This makes me very, very sad.  And angry.  Beth is fond of anger. She has used hers as a very effective tool to fight for women living and dying with metastatic breast cancer.

We started following one another a few years ago.  It might have been cancer that brought us together.  Or our mutual friends.  I don’t know.  We follow one another online, both blogs and personally.  I think the world of Beth.  She approaches her cancer with raw honesty, humor, directness, and truth.  No rose colored glasses, no sugar coating, just the power of her words and the sheer force of her will.

I will miss her tremendously.  I will be sad when I learn of her death.  I think a lot about her husband and children — a young son and little girl.  Beth spoke openly about wanting to be here long enough to see her girl start kindergarten.  It’s November now, and her girl has started kindergarten. That wish was granted, but not too many more will be.

Having followed Beth as she approached her death, I am reminded of another mother I knew peripherally almost ten years ago now.   Angela, an old acquaintance of my husband from the college days they shared.  She died in 2009 after complications from liver surgery related to her own cancer diagnosis.

Angela wrote to me in 2008, before Facebook.  At the time, she referred to all of us — herself, Donna, and my husband and I, as “survivors.”  It was the spring and Donna was in a good place in between her winter stem cell transplant and her summer relapse. Angela used old fashioned email, having tracked it down through a trail of mutual friends.  She wanted to thank me for writing about our daughter’s cancer struggle.   I will never forget the humility of reading her first email to me.

Donna’s youth and innocence, for me, highlighted cancer’s particular cruelty.  All of my fears about cancer and my kids are around issues of abandonment, and how they will be without me, not how I will be without them.  When people talk about how “brave” and “strong” I am, I try and be gracious with their sentiments, but I know that my “strength” is nothing compared to what you and Jeremy must have struggled through in your dark moments. 

I wrote Angela back, disavowing her of the false notion that we, as parents of a child with cancer, demonstrated more strength than a young mother living with cancer.  Nope.  Apples and oranges, my friends.  We lived in very different subdivisions of Cancerville and trying to compare the strengths and hardships of those in different zip codes would come to no good.

At the time Angela wrote those words, we all had reason to be hopeful. The next year, Angela would die in August and Donna would follow in October.  She left a husband and two young daughters behind.  With cancer, so much can change so quickly.

Angela has stayed with me all these years.  Her words gave me precious insight into the reality of a fellow mother living with the fear of abandoning her young children through death.  At the time, having just been through the trauma of Donna’s stem cell transplant, they felt like a kick to the gut.

When you parent a child with cancer, it’s common to wish that cancer on yourself, to relieve your vulnerable child from the pain and suffering you wish you could take on yourself.  Angela helped me understand the flip side of that mother-child cancer coin.  Beth has done the same.

I think about these four kiddos who will grow up without their mother.  No Beth or Angela there to finish the job they started.  Mom is a photo in a frame, a memory, a promise that never quite came to pass.  Mom is tears and sadness and a perpetual hole.  Mom is words from a loving Dad.  Mom is the hope that there was enough time to have provided a solid foundation.  Mom is an obituary. Mom is a grave marker or an urn on a shelf.

Oy.

I lost my own Mom when I was 35.  I was still too young and miss her every day.  My heart breaks for two little girls I never met whose Mom worried about abandoning them.  Today they are eight years older, both teens.  My heart is breaking for a brother and a sister whose Mom, a force of nature with a heart of equal parts steel and gold, will not get to influence them on the regular as they grow up.

Cancer sucks, folks.  Big love to all of you who lost a mother to this beast.

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Late Night Comedians Get Serious About Gun Violence and Our Cowardly Congress

As America wound down after another day of trying to recover from the current worst mass shooting in modern American history (I see you, Wounded Knee), late night comedians and hosts had something to say about it.  Well, except Jimmy Fallon.  Pffft.

late-hosts

The message was universal and clear — we need greater gun control laws to combat worsening gun violence, which has become devastatingly normalized in America, but our elected officials, and let’s be honest here, the Republicans in the House and Senate reliant on financial contributions from the NRA, are too cowardly to do anything about it, regardless of what their constituents want.

The vast majority of Americans agree, as evidenced by polls and research. The Pew Research Center polled both gun owning and non-gun owning Americans in March and April of this year.  This is what they found:  89% of Americans endorse a ban on allowing people with a diagnosed mental illness from gun ownership.  84% of Americans are in favor of background checks for gun sales at gun shows and between two private parties.  83% of Americans support banning individuals that appear on the no-fly or watch lists from purchasing guns.  71% of Americans support creating a federal database tracking gun sales.  68% of Americans favor banning the sale of assault-style weapons.  And 65% of Americans are against the sale of high capacity magazines.

So why the disconnect?  How are these mass shootings allowed to continue?  Why do Americans keep voting in elected officials that cower to the gun lobby?  How is it even possible that just this week, Congress may vote on several measures that will roll back current gun legislation, including legalizing silencers and the sale of armor piercing bullets, via the SHARE Act, legislation the NRA supports.   What is it about America that we are unable to address something every other developed nation in the world has addressed with great effectiveness?

Something is amiss when our late night comedians demonstrate more humanity, decency, and courage than the men and women we elect to represent us.  We are told by the White House and Fox News that now is not the time to discuss such matters.  We are told that politicizing tragedy is shameful.  We are told that bad people will always find a way to circumvent the laws.  Fuck.  That.  Noise.

Watch these monologues (primary sources, yo), call your representatives, and demand better.

Trevor Noah:

Jimmy Kimmel:

Stephen Colbert:

Conan O’Brien:

Seth Myers:

James Corden:

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Las Vegas Shooting: “Mama, Don’t Look At the News.”

I awoke this morning to the sound of my husband’s key on the other side of our front door, locking it before making his way to the airport.  He is traveling to Las Vegas before the crack of dawn for a business trip.  My first thought was, “Oh, I missed him.  I didn’t even say goodbye.”  It was 5:30 and I was awake, so I did what I do most mornings and checked Facebook.

The first thing I saw was the news that a mass shooting had occurred on the Las Vegas strip while we slept.  There were reports of over 20 fatalities and over 100 injured.  Within minutes, before I could even connect with my husband, those figures jumped to over 50 killed and over 200 shot or injured.  I was worried for my husband and family and friends who call Vegas home.

We are so, so broken, America.  And I am so, so tired of our inability as a nation to fix it.

My little guy woke up just a few minutes later, running into our room and asking after his Daddy.  Shortly after that, my big guy woke up, making his way to our room, too.  The last thing I wanted my boys to learn was that the city where there Daddy was headed just experienced the worst mass shooting in history.  Nope.  No radio, TV, or Facebook for me until those boys were dropped off at school.

And then, out of the blue, my older son said to me in the car, “Mama, the news makes you mad, so I think the best thing for you to do is don’t look at the news.”  We talked about that.  I confirmed that, yes, he was right, most days the news does make me mad.  Then we talked about the importance of staying informed and not ignoring bad or sad or difficult or challenging news.

news

We agreed that the best thing would be to strike a balance between being informed and not feeling so overwhelmed with the poor state of America right now, and how it is going to hell in a hand basket, and that our POTUS is a pathological narcissist, and that our governing party is hell bent on erasing any progress that America’s first black president made, and that people care more about political sparring on social media than they do the lives of people of color, and that the seeming vast majority of white people are utterly incapable of acknowledging racism and the role they play in it, and that World War III may very well start on Twitter, and that angry white men with guns and hate in their heart are killing at an alarming rate, and that the NRA who bought and paid for so many politicians still wants more guns and more ammo in the hands of more Americans, and how the wealthiest of Americans seem perfectly content to let everything play out as long as they get a tax cut protecting their billions.  

Okay.  Not really.  Not that last italicized part.  That part is just me letting off some much needed steam because I am worried and fearful and angry and don’t know how we, as a nation, work our way out of this mess.  Especially in the vacuum of leadership we currently have.

My son knows me well.  He sees me struggling every day.  I try, as his mother and protector, to keep it from him, but I do struggle in maintaining that balance of being an informed and engaged and, yes, woke citizen and becoming overwhelmed with the muck of it all.  I work hard to be cheerful and kind and pleasant and grateful, but it is hard and it feels like it is getting harder every day.  The amount of hate and ugly we live with is reaching epic proportions.

As a kid, I used to think it was so cool to say that I was “a child of the 60s.” Born in October 1969, I got to exercise the naive claim of being birthed in a decade I associated with “flower power” and “love not war” and giving peace a chance.  Sigh.  I had not a single clue about the riots of Stone Wall or the blood that spilled in the name of civil rights or how damaging or traumatic it was for Americans to live through the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy.

America has perpetually lived in a state of messy evolution and transition, I know, but there are eras and periods that are more known for this than others.  The Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, Reconstruction, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Era.  Each of these times had unique challenges that featured America at its worst.

I believe fully and confidently that the Trump Era, these times we are clawing our way through right now, will join those other eras in history books as a time America struggled deeply.  Following that in the news and media is not something I will ever be able to turn away from or ignore.

It should be no surprise to you, dear reader, that I have always been a bit of a news junkie.  I used to plead with my parents to stay up late to watch the 10PM news, and we all gathered around the TV on Sunday nights to watch 60 Minutes as a family.  Consuming news and current events is just a part of my nature.  I’ve always had blue eyes, fair skin, rotten teeth, and followed the news, often to my detriment.

Today is a hard, hard day to be an American.  It is a hard, hard day to parent children in America.

My son is telling me something when he observes that the news of the day makes me angry.  He wants me to be less angry, my mood less tied to what is happening in our country.  As his mom, it is my job to listen to him and honor his experiences, his concerns.  To reassure him that he is safe and cared for and protected, at the very least from my angry moods.  I can do that.  What will be harder will be to remain that engaged, informed, woke citizen that he also needs his mom to be, without being overcome by anger and fatigue and feeling overwhelmed.  That’s gonna be a hell of a lot harder.