(Originally published on Motherless Mom, June 8, 2020)
Several years ago, my oldest was two years old and I was very pregnant with kid #2. Well, pregnant enough that I felt huge and restricted but not huge enough that the light at the end of the tunnel was near, so probably around 5 months or so along.
My husband and I took the two-year old to an amusement park/water park in the Midwest to meet up with my dad, sister, and her future husband. I was so frickin’ excited! Not only was I excited to be taking my water-loving toddler to a water park, but I was thrilled that she would get to spend a little time with my dad and sister. My husband is in the military, so we move every couple of years. At the time, we were only living about 5 hours away from my family, but rarely saw them. We traveled up to visit them a couple of times a year, but our firstborn had been a baby that HATED her car seat. That meant that she would literally scream until she passed out. A five-hour car trip was NOT fun for those first couple of years. My dad and sister(s) came down a couple of times, but they were busy with their own lives and visits to us were not their priority.
This trip, though. Not only would I get to see my dad and younger sister whom I missed terribly, but we would be reuniting at a water park! Water parks were our jam growing up. That was a mainstay of our Illinois summers, the trips to water parks. I couldn’t frickin’ wait to introduce my daughter to a water park with my dad and sister!
We met at the entrance and excitedly made our way through. We got changed, stashed the diaper bag in a locker, all that good stuff. Then it became apparent that maybe the day was not going to go the way I had imagined it would. My dad, sister, and her fiancé had already been chatting on the drive over about which rides they wanted to go on, so they had a plan. I was very pregnant with a toddler and couldn’t go on any of those, so it looked like we wouldn’t be together as much as I’d thought. Okay. Disappointing, but okay. My husband came with me to the toddler area but after about twenty minutes of standing with us in the ankle-deep water, I told him to go ahead and catch up with the rest of the family. He did.
Still, everything was okay. My toddler was every bit the water baby that I had always been and she splashed and played to her hearts content! There were a couple of toddler areas and we made our way around each place, letting her play under sprinklers with the other little ones.
Around lunch time my family made their way back over to me, telling me all about the awesome water rides they had been on. My sister and her fiancé ended up grabbing something quick and heading back out but my dad stuck around a little bit longer, holding his first grandchild for a while. At this point, I desperately needed a little time in the shade—and so did my toddler—so we hung out a bit longer and rehydrated, but my dad and husband took back off to ride more rides.
I was really starting to feel upset. Not only was I feeling left out and lonely, but my main hurt was that while here I was, reveling in the moment as my toddler discovered all the fun and excitement of a water park, my family seemed to be completely disinterested in sharing that with her. They didn’t share my pride and happiness as she mastered the “big kid” slides and flew down them fearlessly, despite most of the other kids being preschool age and up. My hurt was a little bit for me, but so much more for her.
Towards the end of the day, my family did all make it back over to us. They watched as my sweet toddler rode a few times down the slide and smiled and laughed and got a little taste of the joy that I—and she—had been feeling. By this time, I was swallowing all of my feelings but there were a lot of them there, burning and bubbling up inside of me—sadness, loneliness, rejection (for me *and* my baby), alienation from my family, just So. Many. Feelings. I couldn’t believe that my dad and sister didn’t want to see and spend time with my toddler. This was probably one of the worst experiences of familial pain and separation I’ve ever had as an adult, the experience of family choosing something else over my child. It would’ve been different if they saw her more than a couple of times a year, but they didn’t. This was a rare opportunity to see her, for her to see them, but she was being fucking robbed of it. Robbed of it.
I now recognize that a lot of these feelings were also about me, too. How sad I was that my dad and sister didn’t want or need to see me more either, when I so desperately wanted a little taste of home after being away and separated for so long. I was thick in the midst of postpartum depression/anxiety/OCD/rage from my first and the pregnancy hormones of my second had escalated all of it. My mom was dead and I didn’t have the luxury of her presence and love during my postpartum hell, and I wanted my daddy, dammit.
We changed and exited the water park, with the plan being to ride a couple of non-water rides and then find a place for dinner. I was so full of my emotions that I could barely speak. My mind and heart were furiously boiling cesspools of toxic thoughts and emotions and I was on full-automation-mode, but no one seemed to even fucking notice. This further enraged me. I was still the one pushing the fucking stroller. I was still the one interacting with my toddler. No one else seemed to give a fuck that she was over-tired, exhausted, and crying every time the family she never saw took off out of her sight to go ride another fucking ride. (In my husband’s defense, he was trying. But I was way the fuck past his intervention attempts having any value. My rage wasn’t pointed at him).
My family was smiling, laughing, chatting back and forth about what happened on this ride, or that ride, or whatever the fuck ride. They were now discussing which restaurant we might go to, and someone turned to ask my opinion. Well…..
“WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN THAT YOU WANT TO KNOW WHICH FUCKING RESTAURANT I WANT TO GO TO???? YOU HAVEN’T GIVEN A SHIT ABOUT ME OR MY DAUGHTER ALL FUCKING DAY. WE CAME HERE TO SEE YOU!!!! TO SEE YOU, BUT WE HAVEN’T SEEN YOU ALL FUCKING DAY! YOU’VE IGNORED HER AND I HAVE NO IDEA HOW THE FUCK THAT’S EVEN POSSIBLE BUT YOU HAVE AND YOU DID AND I’M ABSOLUTELY FUCKING DONE HERE. YOU ALL CAN GO FUCK YOURSELVES!!!!”
Yes. I rage-screamed that at my father, my sister, and her fiancé in the middle of a family-centered amusement park and then I spun around with the stroller and began marching away. During my tirade, my husband’s face had quickly lost all color and he muttered an attempted apology on my behalf about pregnancy emotions or something and quickly jogged after us.
My rage carried me out of the park, but once we made it out to the parking lot, I was spent. The tears came out hot and furious. My husband put our daughter in her car seat and loaded up our car as I sobbed uncontrollably in the front seat, my heart shattered.
There were years of repressed emotional baggage behind a lot of my feelings from that day, but the one that continues to stick out to me was how much I grieved the loss of my family for my own kids. My mother was dead, she would never know my children. The rest of my family were so busy with their work and relationships in those days that my daughter wasn’t as much of a priority for them as I imagined and hoped she would be. I still struggle with these feelings, because I have two amazingly clever, interesting, and beautiful daughters, and they rarely get much interest from my side of the family. Their paternal grandmother texts, calls, Facetimes, and visits often, despite living on the other side of the country and having her own health issues she must tend to. She has visited us at every military base my husband has been stationed at. She has graciously and generously hosted us when we go out to visit her, making time for us. When we would go to visit my side of the family, we would struggle to get a few hours of direct contact in between their work schedules and personal routines. This destroys me, but it is what it is. There is no better way to say it than that.
Despite my big feelings that day, I obviously mishandled them. I had no right to rage-scream at my father, my sister, and her fiancé. Her poor fiancé. I remember the look on his face was one of complete bewilderment. To his credit, he stayed the course despite my craziness! He married my sister in 2017 and they are a match made in heaven. What a brave soul, seeing such chaotic rage coming out of our family and still choosing to join it!
He is great, though. So is my sister, and so is my dad. I know they all love my children. I know they love me. Maybe they don’t express that in the ways that I imagine love *should* be expressed, but I’ve learned over the years that my expectations of love have been skewed in all kinds of ways throughout my life. I still have to actively work to understand this when my knee-jerk reaction is to fall back into old patterns, but work at it, I fucking do.
I’m still mortified by my behavior on that day. I am sad for my family that they had to experience me like that and I am always working to prevent that kind of violent eruption from reoccurring. I can’t place the blame on pregnancy, postpartum mood disorders, or exhaustion. It was a direct result of my inability or unwillingness to handle my own emotional baggage.My family baggage had been stuffed to the brim for years and years and years before that, but on that day it finally busted open. I keep this humiliating memory dear to my heart because it remains one of my major motivations to work through my emotions in family relationships. I can’t control other people’s actions, but I have to and must control my own. I am solely responsible for the rage-filled chaos of that day six years ago, and I don’t ever want a repeat. That was enough Raging Against the Family Machine for me to last a lifetime.