What Happened One Weekend
by Judith Broadhurst

An excerpt from
The Woman's Guide to Online Services

“A part of me so wants people to understand the sheer depth of this pain that I am willing to grieve forever to prove it.... When talking to a grieving parent, don't allow yourself to trivialize.”

This story really began months ago, way before the New Year's weekend that I got involved. It has no ending, because it's about real life, and real-life stories don't divide easily into chapters or always come to some satisfying closure.

A lot happened to a woman named Karen between the summer day when she first posted a call for help to the misc.kids newsgroup on the Internet and when she came back and posted another during the holidays. And as a result of what she revealed about her life, many other people's lives were affected too.

Mid-summer message

Most of them — most of us, I should say — have never met face-to-face, yet had we not met in that hypothetical realm of cyberspace, our lives would be a little less rich, even though we would not be aware of that. Instead, what was said has stayed in our minds and in our hearts, and it's a practically perfect example of how life can be online, at its best. Karen's first message, posted publicly in that newsgroup, read [with her name and identifying details changed]:

"I have a rather personal request. My husband is asking for a divorce, and there seems little doubt that this will occur. His main complaint is that we have not been intimate much in the last three years. Without going into great detail, it is true I have not been terribly interested. My response has been that I have been either pregnant or nursing an infant for nearly 3 1/2 years. (All but two months. We have a 2 1/2-year-old, a 1-year-old, and I am now 8 months pregnant.)

"I feel inadequate and I question whether or not I am normal. My husband is a psychiatrist, and he tells me I have a problem that will not go away when I stop nursing and having babies.

"I don't expect to change my husband's mind. After all that has been said, I don't want to. But I would like to understand myself better. Am I making excuses for myself? Or am I normal in not having much of an appetite while nursing or being pregnant? I want to hear from all of you (Moms and Dads), not just those who empathize with me."
— Karen, mommy of Brandon and Geoffrey and "the new baby"

Many people, both men and women, responded. The women talked of how tired they had been while they were pregnant and nursing, and the men told how little they had understood about what their wives were going through during similar times. Others offered different insights:

"Lots of responders mentioned tiredness as their cause of lack of desire," said one. "I experienced the same thing, but I don't think I'd label it as a result of exhaustion. I just didn't want intimacy. Maybe it was because I was giving so much of myself, what little I had left I wanted for me."

Another woman reported: "My husband and I have gone through our share of this. We have three kids. The youngest just started sleeping through the night, and the middle one has been waking up nightly for about 6 months now. It takes a lot of energy to maintain a house and family, let alone get in that quality time. We both work full-time, as well. Getting the sleep is often preferable to me than sex. It hasn't always been this way, and I know it won't stay this way. And it in no way has anything to do with my husband."

Some suggested scheduling date nights, others recommended counseling, so they could try to save their marriage for the sake of the kids. Some took Karen's side, some took her husband's side: "If your marriage is important to you, sex is something you have to commit to making time for. I didn't understand until recently how seriously important the need for sex is for many men to feel that they are loved...."

"Well, the one-year-old and the baby on the way didn't get there by magic," said another. "Quite frankly, I can't imagine a woman in your situation right now having much sexual desire, mainly because you are tired."

One woman suggested that Karen go out of town on business and leave her husband to juggle his job, two kids and the whole household for a week and see how sexy he felt after that, even without being pregnant. She also commented: "The thing is, in addition to the tiredness (which is bad enough), it sounds like there is also some (well-deserved) resentment on your part, which could really get in the way of intimacy of any sort."

Holiday season message

That discussion went on in mid-summer. During the week between Christmas and New Year's, Karen once again left a message in misc.kids, but this time it was more a cry of pure angst than a plea for help, because she knew there was nothing anybody could do to help her change what had happened. The baby that she was still pregnant with when she posted her first message had been born in the fall, and had just died of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).

"I have never known such profound grief," she wrote to the group this time. "My arms are achingly empty. The two weeks since she died have been the hardest weeks of my life.... I have no idea why I'm posting this. Perhaps I am looking for someone who has been through this."

Later, after a few replies to her, she added, quoting some of the responses: "A part of me so wants people to understand the sheer depth of this pain that I am willing to grieve forever to prove it. This ache, this longing goes beyond a 'recent sadness.' It cannot be 'wiped away.' When talking to a grieving parent, don't allow yourself to trivialize. The sweetest people on earth do it all the time.

"Everything is not okay here, and it is not going to be for a very long time. That has to be acknowledged.... The very kindest thing people can do for me is to be willing to listen to me, willing to see my tears, willing to bring it up through the use of her name.... Cry with me. That's all you can do."

And after that

Now, I don't even have children, not anymore at least, so I don't know why I was browsing through messages in a newsgroup about kids around midnight on a December holiday weekend. But I happened upon a reply to Karen's note and read through the other replies to her. It was the ones with the theme of "your baby's probably in a better place" that triggered my reaction.

My only child had also died of SIDS years before, and several responses made me remember how much those kinds of comments had hurt and how angry they made me at the time. So I left a message for Karen. I don't even know what I said, but toward the end of writing it, tears streamed down my cheeks, and it felt good to hit SEND.

It felt good because I'd been able to help another mother whose particular pain and grief I knew well, but writing to her also helped me resolve a bit of what lingered of my own. Over the next couple of weeks, several people, both dads and moms, sent me private e-mail messages saying how much the exchanges had affected them too.

It was one of those women who told me about Karen's message months before — the one about her husband wanting a divorce because she had so little sexual desire, which made her situation even more poignant to all of us. Another wrote me to say that she had lost her first baby to SIDS, and now had a three-month-old baby daughter. She worried about whether Karen would blame the baby for her marital problems or blame her husband for the baby's death (which happens between SIDS parents more often than not), and feel guilty for years either way. And because of what happened to Karen, her own fears about losing her new baby to SIDS, as she had her first one, had resurfaced.

From my own experience, I knoe that her worry wasn't the kind that SIDS parents say outloud to each other, much less to other relatives or friends, because you're almost afraid that saying it might make it true. It becomes an unspeakable fear, yet it's there, eating away at you.

So I like to think that expressing her thoughts to a stranger in e-mail helped this other woman too, and I tried my best to reassure her that everything would be all right. Yet anybody who has ever lost a child in any way never trusts such platitudes again, and we both understood that.

Still, it was like getting and giving a hug.

Thanks and dedication: My heartfelt thanks to "Karen" for letting me publish this. It was far more than just another anecdote for my book. It still means a lot to me, personally, as I write this on the Web many years later. — Judith

Copyright © 1995, Judith Broadhurst. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Chapter 5, “For Parents, About Kids”
The Woman's Guide to Online Services, McGraw-Hill, October 1995

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