Toni Morrison

I DVR reruns of the Oprah show.  It's not that I'm a huge fan, but I like to have something saved to watch while we're nursing, and I HATE watching commercials. 

Anyways the episode I was watching this morning was filmed last year, and was a recap of 'important moments' on the show.  They had Toni Morrison on as a guest.

"Does your face light up when your child enters the room?"  was a question she asked.  I want my face to always light up when I see Livia, so she knows how truly happy I am to be her mom.  It's just, I know that real life is harder than that, and more complicated.  Just last night I was worn out, tired, and found myself irritated with an innocent 3 month old because she just would not go to sleep.  It took us over an hour of nursing, rocking, laying down, trying the crib, the guest bed, the swing.  Finally she slept, and so did I.  Everything looks better this morning.    So I appreciated that reminder to keep the big picture in mind in those hard parenting moments.

Then, Oprah mentioned that she (Toni) had lost her adult son last year (I guess in 2010 because this was shown last year).  And Toni, who was 80 years old at the time, and in all of her wisdom, replied that she fully expects to be sad for the rest of her life, and she is happy about that.  I really connected to that.   Not sad in the sense of unhappy and not able to function, but to find that richness in sorrow, to carry my grief with my for the rest of my life. 

And I looked it up and found this article with the following, which I also liked.

Home is bright and sharp and brutally real. When she sits at her desk, Morrison says, everything else disappears. "I feel totally curious and alive and in control. And almost… magnificent, when I write." The book is dedicated to her son, Slade, who died 18 months ago and in the face of whose death she found herself wordless. She could not work. She could barely speak and didn't want to hear comforting words from others.
"What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something."
She tried to read a few books by writers about the death of their children but they annoyed her in the same way the comforters did. "Books that have been written about the death of a child, but are all about the author. And people who were trying to soothe me, were trying to soothe me. I never heard anything about him. They say it's about the living, it's not, it's about the dead."
She doesn't want "closure", she says. "It's such an American thing. I want what I got." Morrison gathers herself up. "Memory. And work. And" – she starts to laugh – "some more ibuprofen."•