“This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

CW: Infant loss, parent estrangement, grief, self-pity

The holidays are hard for a lot of people. I recognize that I don’t have the patent on that. I also recognize that not everyone feels the need to state that fact, almost as an apology for daring to have their own bad feelings about the holiday season, but I have been trained by determined child therapists to always remember that the feelings of others are bigger, deeper, more real than what I experience and therefore I should always acknowledge those (neurotypical) feelings first so as not to make everything about myself.

That’s a huge theme in this story.

This year, I’m dreading Christmas at my Grandma Z’s house. I’ve dreaded Christmas (and almost every single holiday that requires family togetherness) ever since my mother shacked up with my future stepfather two months after my high school graduation–three desperate, pick-me months after she met the man and reshaped her entire personality and worldview to fit his. I am the classic failed baby trap, the one that backfired on the woman who set it. Freed from her Jenny-shaped shackles by the arrival of my adulthood, my mother set about building the life that she always longed for, the one in which she had a husband to care for her and legitimate children. Almost overnight, I went from believing I had a mother who loved me, that we were sold only as a pair, that she would always have my back.

In her eyes, it seemed, I was the only thing still standing in the way of her do-over, something that became abundantly clear as the years went on and I was slowly but surely phased out through devious moves like “accidentally” forgetting to tell me that the entire family was meeting for my grandparents’ 50th-anniversary group photo. The photo is still on display at my grandmother’s house. There are all my aunts and uncles, my cousins, their spouses and children, and of course, my mother and stepfather, Donna and Gary, with my little half-siblings. Notably absent are me, my husband, and our son. I was devasted and angry, but determined not to make it “all about myself,” as my tiresome emotional outbursts often did.

Recently, I absolved Donna of her duty to keep pretending that she’s my mother. It’s not much of a difference, to be honest; ever since she moved in with Gary, even just a phone call with her was intensely one-sided. Most of her responses were, “mm-hm,” and “oh?” in a bored, almost annoyed tone. How dare I break the bubble of the pristine, Bible-correct family life she’d wanted for so long with a call about something good that had happened to me or, even worse, because something had reminded me of some joke between just the two of us? With the advent of cellphones, things improved, a little. She would call me from the car–only the car, never from home–and tell me about what was happening at work. Eventually, she would ask something about me or the kids, but without fail, the call would drop or Gary would be trying to reach her on the other line or she would pull into the driveway. Once in that driveway, her obligation was to her new life only, and she was finished with me.

Ultimately, our phone conversations became less frequent. In recent years, our contact was limited to seeing each other at Christmas and possibly getting a phone call on my birthday as she, you guessed it, drove home from work. Occasionally, I would see her Facebook posts as they devolved into QAnon conspiracy madness. Like everything else she believes in, I knew they weren’t her original thoughts but the thoughts Gary and their church wanted her to think. After all, she’d gone from picking up guys in bars on Friday night and leaving me with a babysitter until morning to hardcore Evangelical Christianity that dictated outing a trans woman at her church and participating in the shunning of a single teen mom (despite having been one herself). I’d already given up on ever having the close, loving relationship with my mom that I’d mistakenly believed we’d had when I was a child, so trying to change her mind when her political views became more like symptoms of long-term lead exposure wasn’t something I had the time, energy, or, frankly, the responsibility for.

If you ask members of my family why I put my foot down and made it clear to my mother that we are estranged, that I don’t want contact from her, that her number has been blocked from my phone, they would say, “Oh, you know Jenny. Crazy liberal.” Or simply, “politics, she’ll get over it.” And they’re right, it was a political post that caused me to finally unload on her (a post in which Donna lamented the denial of her “religious exemption” to the vaccine and announced that she was poised to lose the career to which I’d often taken a backseat throughout my childhood). What they won’t tell you is that they’ve sat by for the past twenty or so years watching my mother discard me without a single word to comfort me or to acknowledge openly that Donna’s abandonment might have had a lasting impact on me.

And the worst example of this involved the death of my little brother, Samuel.

It’s hard for me to type his name because I don’t feel like I’m allowed to. I’ve never felt like I was allowed to mourn him, to feel grief, to even tell people “my brother died” for a number of factors. Chiefly, the fact that I was told, very sternly, by Gary, that my brother’s existence and death had “nothing to do with you.”

At Donna and Gary’s wedding, I gave a (non-alcoholic, good, Christian) toast in which I mentioned my new stepbrother and stepsister and shared that I had always wanted a sibling. It was true; all my cousins had brothers or sisters growing up and I’d go to their houses, consumed with envy at how lively everything was, how they had people to talk to and play with and even fight with. I was the child of a single mom who worked nights, so I spent a lot of time by myself. Though I had just turned twenty when Donna announced she was pregnant for the second time, that childish hope sparked back up in me. Sure, my little brother or sister had missed the window for being my playmate or thunderstorm comfort buddy. There would be no epic fights over toys or who changed the unwritten rules of a complicated game of pretend, but I would finally have a sibling.

Even though the baby wasn’t born yet, Christmas was coming up and I wanted to get Donna and Gary something to celebrate the arrival of the baby, whom we already knew would be assigned male from the sonogram printout I’d framed and hung up in my apartment. Every time I’d look at it, I’d think about how in twenty years, my brother would come to visit me and I’d point to the wall of photos I’d have curated over the years and say, “look, I still have your first baby picture.”

I’d just bought the present the night Gary called me.

“Baby’s dead.”

That’s how he broke the news to me.

“Baby’s dead.”

I have children. I know the grief he must have been feeling. At the same time, I’d like to think that even in my darkest hour, I would find a less callous way of stating it.

My crying audibly annoyed him. “Don’t come down here,” he warned me. “This doesn’t have anything to do with you. You’ll just upset everyone and your mom doesn’t need that.”

Shame overwhelmed me. By crying at the news, I was making my brother’s death about me. I was already upsetting everyone and nobody wanted to see me because they had already predicted the erratic, selfish, overdramatic, focus-stealing behavior I was exhibiting from the moment I heard, “Baby’s dead.”

I said, “Tell mom I love her?”

Gary said, “Yup.” Maybe he did tell her I said that. Maybe he didn’t, because he didn’t want to upset her.

I didn’t speak to my mom on the phone that night. I don’t think anybody in my family bothered to call me. And that’s okay. Because I wasn’t the woman delivering a stillborn baby at the hospital. Every tear I shed made me feel more and more guilty, like my emotions were victimizing Donna even though I stayed in my apartment just fifteen minutes away from the hospital.

The next day, I spoke to my grandmother. She’d gone to the hospital. She and my grandfather had both held my brother in their arms. They saw what his face looked like. They said he was perfect.

They said my stepsister was there.

Her presence wasn’t upsetting. She got to hold my brother. I was furiously jealous. I’ve never really been able to like my stepsister as a result. It’s not her fault but it is what it is.

But at that moment, my irrational jealousy made me even more ashamed of my own grief. How dare I presume I should be included. How dare I have tears or feelings at all. No one said these things, but the message of “This doesn’t have anything to do with you,” had been crystal clear over the phone. And here I was, barging in, trying to be a part of something that I wasn’t included in.

“I just want to know what he looked like!” I sobbed.

“They took pictures,” My grandma assured me. “You’ll get to see him.”

The morning of the funeral, I was in a panic. I was running late. Something in me, some stupid thing in me, had convinced me that if I just got to the funeral early, if I just got there on time, if I got there before he went into the ground, maybe they would open his casket and I could see him. Maybe, after all the hope and the entire lifetime of longing, I would at least get to see what he looked like.

But I knew that it wouldn’t happen. I just needed that hope to get me there when I wasn’t sure my presence was even wanted. I didn’t ask them to open the casket, obviously, but it was hard to walk away from the graveside knowing that my chance was gone, that I was as close to my brother as I would ever be, and still I would never see his face.

A few weeks later, after the holidays, I mentioned to Donna that I knew there were photos. I asked if I could see them.

“No.”

I thought I heard wrong.

“Do you think I can’t handle it or something?” I asked because surely that’s what was going on. She was my mother, after all. She was trying to protect me.

“No. We just don’t want you to see them.”

“Does he look bad or–”

“He looks perfect. You’re just never going to see them.”

I went home that night and looked on the internet for photos of pre-term stillborns. This was the early days of the internet, before beautiful memorial photos. All I got were the photos I’d already seen from a million and one anti-abortion protests. It didn’t make me feel better or make my grief easier. All I could think about was that my brother was dead and gone, that my stepsister was worthy of seeing him and holding him, that nothing about his death or any part of my mom’s new life had “anything to do with” me.

To this day, I’ve never asked about the photos again. I don’t want to make it all about me. I don’t want to upset everyone. But there are times I want to drop to my knees and beg and offer them anything I have for just a two-second glimpse. Just so I can know what he looked like. I just want to know what my brother looked like.

Twenty-one years on, I still have uncontrollable crying jags when I remember all of this. It comes up more often than you’d think. And still, even here, on my blog, in my own space that I’ve created and carved out for myself, I’m embarrassed to share this story. I’m embarrassed to make it all about myself, to not respect the decisions Donna made in her very private grief and to hang all this dirty laundry out. I’m ashamed that I still cry about it because crying and emotions, particularly my crying and my emotion, “upsets everyone” and this “doesn’t have anything to do with” me. It feels selfish to share this part of my life because over two decades ago a woman who was already done with me had a stillborn baby and it had nothing to do with me.

It doesn’t matter that it was my brother. I was twenty, not six. I was grown up. I didn’t have to be included. I fully understand that I don’t have a right to be upset about something that happened to someone else and that I’m making it all about me, all over again. I understand this and I accept this but that doesn’t make it hurt less. It just compounds the shame over the grief I have no business feeling.

I have siblings now, as I mentioned above. I didn’t see them much when they were kids because I assumed that they, like the rest of Donna’s life, didn’t have anything to do with me. Now that they’re nearing adulthood, I like to think that I know them a little better and that they’re aware that I, absolutely, have to do with them. I don’t ever want them to think that I stayed away because I didn’t care or don’t love them. But there are no walls covered in pictures. No reminders of them around the house. Because I’ve never been sure that their existence was supposed to include me. And if I got too attached and something happened to them, my grief would be dramatic, overblown, silly, a performance to get attention.

I wouldn’t survive that again. One can only take so much self-hatred over things other people seem to be allowed to freely express.

This Christmas, I will go to my grandmother’s house. I will see Samuel’s stocking hung up with the collection of other “dead grandbaby” stockings that make up a macabre display intended to keep them in our memories. But this will be the first time that I don’t have to pretend that I’m a part of my mother’s new family.

She and her husband don’t have anything to do with me. I wish I would have gotten the hint twenty years ago.