- My mom had me nine months after my grandmother died — I was a sorrow baby.
- She was 42 and my siblings were all teenagers by the time I was born.
- Now I’m in my 40s and losing my mom to dementia and I get why she had me.
My mother’s own mother had died nine months earlier and, in an attempt to feel something other than her intense grief, my mother accidentally got pregnant with me.
Now I was on deck to enter the world and heal her broken heart. No pressure.
It was mid July and the city of New York was aching for a thunderstorm. My mother told me she sat outside, hot, sticky, and eight months pregnant. She had a nip of cold beer in one hand and a salty pretzel rod in the other. She was 42 years old.
She called me her ‘sorrow baby’
My parents already had four teenage children when they found out I would be making my big debut. Reactions ranged from horrified teen disgust at the thought of sexually active parents, to nervous tears and indignation, to the pumped up excitement of one of my brothers who ironically would end up sharing a birthday with me, just 17 years apart.
The transition from her mother’s death to my life was nearly instantaneous as if my grandmother and I could have high-fived each other as we passed through the veil. I was due on my grandmother’s birthday, but was born a week late. Regardless, my mom forever linked us together, like there was some invisible soul thread we shared. True or not, my mom always made that connection.
The circumstances of my conception also led my maudlin Irish mother to affectionately refer to me as her “sorrow baby” because out of that deep sorrow somehow came joy.
A whole family existed before I joined it
I grew up in a house with six full grown adults. It’s like a complete and total family existed before I hit the scene. This of course technically made me “the baby” of the family on paper, but if you took a closer look, “precocious only child” was a more apt representation.
My siblings and I were very close, but we did not have what you’d call a traditional sibling dynamic. I figured out how to entertain myself (and everyone else in the room). I realized quickly that when I made adults laugh, I got to be part of the crew.
I gained a wild perspective on how to read people and keep them happy which some might call empathy, but I’m pretty sure was my survival mechanism. I got my parents to myself for the most part; which my siblings never let me forget.
They’d teasingly call me the “rich kid” and in a way, I was. My parents had disposable income and more time to spend with me. I’d go on their middle-aged dates with them; leaf-peeping Sunday drives in the Catskills, bandshell concerts to see ultra hip Barbershop Quartets, watching “Murder, She Wrote” in earnest — I was a little old soul in OshKosh-B’gosh overalls.
She said I kept her young
The best times were when mom and I were home alone. She’d put on her old records and we’d sing and dance around the table listening to Elvis, Johnny Cash, and The Clancy Brothers. “You keep me young,” she would say with her easy smile.
We’d get ice cream at Barbara’s Candy World and she’d tease me because she knew I’d order the same thing, Vanilla with rainbow sprinkles. Mom would get a Rocky Road that somehow always ended up all over her and we’d crack up laughing in the same big cackle.
Now I’m the same age my mother was when she had me and while my mom is still alive, we are losing her to dementia. I have never experienced a pain so cruel.
I was always acutely aware of the fact my mom was older than everyone else’s (I was so excited in 2nd grade when she’d won a contest, “oldest mom in the class!”). In that way, I knew I’d lose my mom earlier than my friends would lose theirs, but I thought for this reason, I’d be prepared. Ever the perfectionist, I thought I could get a headstart on grieving by recognizing its inevitability, but I realize now there is nothing that can prepare you for this kind of loss.
The idea of a “sorrow baby” is starting to make a lot of sense, in some iteration anyway; a puppy, a screenplay, a thousand homemade cakes, whatever. I don’t know what it’s like to have a child, but I do know I am feeling that same grief in losing the mother I knew. I understand these feelings need to go somewhere.
I realize it’s not so much that you need that baby to fill you, but that you have so much love you still need to give.
