Sadness: The Ordinary World

by Linda Cochrane

I close my eyes and I can feel the peace of my earliest memory of joy, as if I’m floating on a cloud in a mostly clear blue sky. I’m with my sister. I don’t know who I would be, or if I would have survived without her. I met Judy when I was five days old, a tiny preemie set down in my sixteen-month-old sister’s crib, against her blonde hair, soft as a baby’s cheek. When I got old enough to move my body at will, they say I liked to roll over, face deep in her hair, my tiny fingers clutching her blue flannel nightgown, where softness and warmth soothed me to sleep. We slept on top of a chilly brown rubber sheet. I liked to rub parts of its slick coolness against my upper lip while sucking my thumb. Having my sister and my thumb so close cushioned the nighttime and nourished my small body with peaceful slumber. Judy was my first lullaby.

It’s quite difficult to recall my first memory of sadness, because sadness was such an ongoing, crushing memory throughout my childhood. I heard the prevailing messages of not being loved, and being a big disappointment to my mother so often that it makes it hard to tell you my earliest memory. Perhaps it was at birth, because she loved to tell me and others the story of how she told the nurses, “Get her away from me. She looks like a drowned rat.” I’m sure I was pure light. She just was unable to see it.

Looking at both memories, I feel so much love and gratitude for my sister, and so much love and compassion for my mother, and whatever her broken parts were. And lastly and surely not least, I feel only love and compassion for my brave self who has come to a place of profound self-love and self-forgiveness.