Why was Father’s Day so Difficult?
I’m a few weeks late in writing this, although the tardiness is warranted: I’ve been immersed in birthday-related stuff for my daughter. Through a combination of COVID and her age, this year was really the first time we got to have a proper birthday celebration with her friends; I don’t have a ton of extra energy for stuff like this, so it took a few weeks, working at a snail’s pace, to put everything together. So I’ve been busy.
But I wanted to return to something I was grappling with in mid-June when Father’s Day hit, mostly because the emotional reaction was similar to something I experienced last Sept/October: Chelsea and my birthdays are pretty close together, which, in the past made that time of year great for celebrations (we also got married at the end of October, so that whole six-week period of late Sept-Oct had historically been a lot of fun). Predictably, that time of year is now a lot more complicated, as Chelsea passed in the time period between my birthday and our anniversary.
You might think that celebrating Chelsea’s first birthday postmortem would have been hard, particularly because she would have turned 40, but it wasn’t; I spent a lovely evening with friends, reminiscing and celebrating her life. Instead, my birthday, a few weeks later, was the hard one, in yet another confusing twist of grief’s emotional maze. The day felt empty, emotionally flat; I had no interest in celebrating the day, so I just asked my daughter what she wanted to do, turning the day into an excuse to do something fun (shockingly, she wanted to go for ice cream). I’m still not quite sure why the day was so hard, particularly relative to the experience of celebrating Chelsea’s birthday.
Fast forward to this spring/summer, when something similar happened again in that period where Mother’s and Father’s day happen in rapid succession. You might think that Mother’s day would have been the harder holiday, but just like last fall’s experience with birthdays, it wasn’t: E and I had a lovely day, spending a lot of time thinking about Chelsea. But a few weeks later, Father’s Day hit, and it was awful. Similar to my birthday, I had no interest in celebrating, once again turning to my daughter and asking her what she wanted to do (this time, it was cupcakes).
So what is it about these sets of days/occasions that made the experiences the opposite of what one might have expected?
Queue the speculation…
Chelsea’s absence is always around, but it’s often in the background (thankfully, the human mind is adept at compartmentalization with tricky stuff like this, which is probably necessary to function after experiencing trauma). However, certain days/events thrust that absence into the foreground, to the point where I see, hear, and feel the absence in a profound way. E’s first day at preschool was an example of that, as was my first day of work, which happened to be on the same college campus where Chelsea was a professor.
On some levels, it makes perfect sense that the days celebrating my life would ring hollow right now, as I still define my life in terms of the relationship with Chelsea. We met each other during a formative period in our lives, when we were learning how to be professionals, scholars, community members, and parents; we literally grew up together, to the point where the Venn diagram of our relationship occupied most of the space of our individual personalities (to be sure, there were differences, but those differences paled in comparison to the overlap/similarities). We were so alike in so many ways, and it’s still really hard to comprehend the idea of living a life independent of her physical presence; it’s hard to think about making new memories without her being there. So maybe birthdays and father’s days force me to think about what my life means without Chelsea in it, which is tough.
Perhaps this is also an issue of temporal focus; Chelsea’s celebratory days allow me to live in the past, but my celebratory days force me to look forward into the future. As previously mentioned, mother’s day was a lovely excuse for my daughter and I to think about mom, share memories, and enjoy all the lovely moments we had as a family. But father’s day makes me look forward, which is scary. Looking forward reinforces the fact that I’m now a single dad, without a partner to support the difficult work of parenting. And while I’ve got lots of great folks supporting me in that work, it’s not the same as having someone like Chelsea around and I’m forced to grapple with the reality that she’s not coming back.
Yet another example of the odd, seemingly random ways in which grief presents itself.
