Grief is Love
Dealing with grief in Feminist Advice Friday, a new private Facebook group, winding down the pandemic as a mother, Check Your Privilege podcast, and more
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
In this newsletter…
Introduction and how my week has gone
A new private Facebook group!
Call for #FeministAdviceFriday updates
Feminist Advice Friday: Dealing With Grief
Helpful reading
What I’m working on
This month, my husband has been in a federal trial. It’s the first time we’ve really gone out into the world since the beginning of the pandemic. He’s been gone a lot, in press conferences, and in small courtooms with lots of people. I’ve been nervous about spreading infections to our baby. It’s a good thing, because he ended up winning $1.5 million dollars for a wrongly arrested Black trans woman. I’m proud of him.
But I’m also reminded how, even in an egalitarian relationship, it’s easier for dads to re-enter the world than moms. A new Harris Poll finds that women and people of color are more likely to want to continue teleworking. And no wonder, given the high rates of discrimination and harassment that are an ongoing epidemic in American workplaces.
It’s also so much easier to be a parent—even when there’s a screaming baby in the background and a toddler climbing your desk. Our re-entry into the public world has reminded me just how different the expectations are for men and women. My husband’s colleagues take for granted that of course he will be willing and able to work long hours, to show up for a press conference on short notice, to set everything aside for his work. He is, after all, a man. And in the collective understanding of the world, men are not encumbered by marriages or children because there are women at home to do that work.
The things we take for granted—the things we don’t have to talk about, or negotiate, or question—tell us who we have become as a society. And in this society, we take for granted that women will always be encumbered, and men should never be.
A New Private Facebook Group!
After many requests to do so, I have created a private Facebook group for fans and followers. This is a place to discuss feminism and motherhood, share your own experiences, ask for advice, talk to me about my work, and more.
To gain access to the group, you must become a paid Substack subscriber for $5/month. This fee helps support my work, and frees up my time to moderate the group and continue creating exceptional content. The fee also helps keep trolls out.
After you become a paid subscriber, you can join the group.
If you would like to become a group member, but finances are a barrier to your membership, please email me: zawn.villines@gmail.com and I can offer an exception to the membership payment requirement.
Call for Updates!
Call for #feministadvicefriday updates!
If you've written to Feminist Advice Friday in the last year, I'd love to hear your update. Did you take the advice? Try something else? What happened? All updates are welcome. We can learn from others' experiences, even if the experience is just, "I wasn't able to do anything about it, and nothing changed."
I am also interested in updates from people who did not write to Feminist Advice Friday, but who took any specific action to rectify inequality in their household. What did you do? Did it work?
Comments on this post are of course welcome, but you can update anonymously by contacting me in any of the following ways:
-DMing my Facebook Page
-Emailing me at zawn.villines@gmail.com
-Using my web form, which allows you not to share your real name: https://www.zawn.net/contact
I will share the updates, anonymously with names and identifying information removed, in an upcoming post.
Feminist Advice Friday
A reader writes…
I know from your posts that you know grief. I’m writing because I don’t know what else to do after my mother just died. I’m so sad. Just so sad. How do you cope? How do I cope? What do I do? Please help.
My answer:
I’m so sorry for your loss.
When someone dies, it can feel like there’s a hole somewhere in the body that you can neither find nor fill. That hole is the body’s way of acknowledging the magnitude of loss. It feels awful, I know. But I encourage you to sit with it. Run to it, not away from it.
Grief is important. Because love is important.
I’ve held hands with my family at funerals for people who died too young too many times to count. There’s been a lot of trauma in my family, a lot of inherited suffering. I thought these experiences made me thoughtful about grief, offered me some understanding of how the process worked. But nothing could have prepared me for the year of sorrow when I said goodbye to my daughter and my mother in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. There were times I thought my grief would swallow me alive. I don’t feel the same.
I’m also remarkably the same. It’s amazing how normal you can be in the midst of grief. How easily one vacillates between existential despair and happily playing with the cats and the toddler.
So yes, I do know grief. And what grief has taught me is that it is an unpredictable intruder that none of us can really know, regardless of how many times it breaks into our happy unsuspecting lives, points menacingly at us, and proclaims, “Your turn.”
Every grief, like every relationship, is different. The notion that there is a right way to grieve, a linear trajectory that moves us from the devastation of loss to a more hopeful future where that loss no longer destroys us, is harmful.
Friend, I can hear your pain. There is no salve that will cure it. Because grief, however awful it feels, must be felt.
That’s because grief is love.
I think if you think of it that way, your grief will begin to feel less like a burden you carry, and more like an offering to honor the person you loved and lost. We must allow grief to change us. We must allow it to be itself.
Grief is love’s last offering.
If we are live long enough, it awaits us at the end of every relationship. Everyone we know will one day die. We can look at this as a tragedy, or we can acknowledge it as a reminder of how precious life truly is. We can view grief as a burden, or as a sort of last act that honors a relationship.
There is no working through grief. It is not a process or a journey to the other side. We integrate the loss into our lives, into ourselves. It becomes part of the patchwork of experiences that make us who we are.
Don’t fight that by trying to rush or fight through grief.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman says that our final death is when the last person speaks our name. We live on in memories, in the effects we have on the people we love and on the larger world. By grieving your mother, by speaking her name, you keep her alive.
It’s lonely and painful, but it’s pain with a purpose. It transforms you from the person you were before the loss to the slightly wiser person you have the opportunity to be now. If you let it, grief can make you more compassionate, more empathetic. It can awaken you to the suffering that unites us all, connecting you to the sad-looking stranger on the street and the cashier who just doesn’t have time for your shit today.
Grief makes us more human. And in so doing, it makes us more alive.
You loved your mother. Your grief tells you that.
I’m so sorry for your loss.
I publish #feministadvicefriday every Friday(ish) here and on Facebook. You can submit your own question to zawn.villines@gmail.com, by messaging my Facebook page, or anonymously by using my site’s contact form.
Helpful Reading
This week I discovered the Check Your Privilege podcast. I love it because it talks about ableism and other highly pervasive forms of oppression that often take a backseat in social justice circles.
I also highly recommend you read Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States.
If you’re celebrating Black History Month with your kids (and you should be, *especially* if you are white), check out these free coloring pages and other resources from Mamademics. While you’re there, you may just want to hang out for a while, because everything she offers is exceptional.
What I’m Working On
Next week, I’ll be sharing a piece about how the exact same parenting tasks are radically different depending on your gender. This week, I can’t stop thinking and writing about mom guilt as a tool to shame and oppress women.