Would You Like A Grief Cookie?

On love as containment, holding ourselves the way we always wanted to be held, and making something with our grief.

The day my toddler decides to cap off a morning of tantrums by staging an elaborate revolt against raspberries is the day I know for sure she is just like me. 

I follow the trail of sticky, red footprints through the kitchen, my mouth open in horror, until I finally lay eyes on my two-year-old. She stands with her fists clenched tight at her sides, seedy red goop seeping out from between her fingers and onto the carpet. 

Her strawberry-blonde hair curls wildly around her face, and she sticks her chin up in the air, daring me to stay where I am. Her hazel eyes hold a stubborn ferocity. She does not look away. I am struck by the sheer force of emotion that can take over this child’s body, but then, I am not surprised. 

She is my child, after all. 

Later, while my husband and I scrub at the raspberry stains, crimson fading into pink, I will curl up in a blanket and tell him what I have known since the beginning: how my daughter and I are both made up of the same fire and fervor.

I will tell him that, despite my frustration, I desperately want to mother her through these moments in the way she needs—to help her feel held, secure, safe. 

Even as I say this to him, I will remember what it was to be the child with clenched fists, my own chin in the air, daring.

I will wrap the blanket tighter around my shoulders. I will hold myself the way I always wanted to be held. 

The next evening, I pay eighty-four dollars for a woman to teach me how to hold space for my deeply-feeling child.¹ 

My husband and I sit side-by-side on our worn basement sofa and click on the first video course. 

When the woman’s face appears on the screen, I feel as though she is looking right at me, as though I could reach forward and touch her hand. 

Deeply feeling children, the woman is saying, are a bit more porous to the world. They often feel shame alongside their vulnerability. They tend to push and pull at the very same time. In their most intense moments, these children need someone to gather up their unraveling edges, someone to reassure them they are not too much, someone to bear witness to the scariest parts of themselves and not walk away. 

I grip my pen, my hand hovering over my notebook, but I do not write a single word. It is only when my husband pauses the video that I realize I’ve been crying.

“This was me,” I tell him, swiping at my cheeks with the backs of my hands. “She is describing me as a kid.”

I tell him how, when I was young, this ache remained nameless and vague, like a joint throbbing whenever the weather turned cold. But this woman has handed me words—smooth stones to hold in the palm of my hand, a heft that cannot be ignored. 

I do with these stones what my daughter does with hers. I line them up on the windowsill where they can catch the light. 

First one. Then two. 

Then three. 

For nearly ten years, I slept with a foot pillow. 

By this, I do not mean a pillow for my feet. I mean a hand-sewn pillow in the shape of a foot, which was—for some bizarre reason—a rite of passage for students in Mrs. Kress’s sixth-grade home economics class. 

A tall woman in her early sixties with graying hair and a lifetime of wisdom to impart, Mrs. Kress handed down what she considered only the most essential skills for adulthood:

How to make an omelet. 

How to administer first aid.

How to change a baby’s diaper. 

How to sew a pillow in the shape of a foot. 

I remember feeling like a real grown-up as I pinned the edges of fleece and fed the fabric slowly under the sewing machine’s needle. 

I remember feeling so ready.

What I did not know was how you can sew and sew and sew and still not understand how to knit together all the pieces of yourself with the same thread. 

What I did not know was how you can cook and cook and cook and still not understand how to nourish your body with hope. 

What I did not know was how you can do everything—check off every box—and still not be ready for the world in all its horror and beauty. 

I was not ready. 

I still am not ready.

Things I wish I had learned in middle school instead of how to sew a foot pillow:

How to let myself trust—how to offer my palm, soft and open, to a hard and bitter world. 

How to let the ache of grief move from my throat to my ribcage and out to my fingers. How to look in the mirror and say the words slowly: the ache means you’re alive. 

How to hold joy when it comes, a gemstone in my pocket—how to thumb its edges and commit its shape to memory. 

How terrible things will happen, and still, I will go home to my children and tuck the peanut butter and jelly sandwich into the lunchbox. I will read Goodnight Moon to my toddler. I will brush my daughter’s hair. I will sing.

How I will grow up and never quite feel grown-up—how this is a well-kept secret adults hold close to their chests. 

And here is another: 

Even grown-ups want to feel held.

Even grown-ups want someone to stay. 

I stumble through the front door a few minutes before midnight after an evening that has stolen all the air from my lungs. I feel fragile and thin, translucent—like the tissue paper snowflake my five-year-old has hung in the window. 

Here is another thing I never learned in middle school: How easy it is to spend your whole life drawing the lines and hemming in the people you love, and forget to do the same for yourself. 

My husband stands a few feet away in his slippers, hair disheveled, eyes full of some raw emotion I am not yet ready to feel.

I deflect with humor, because humor is palatable.

“Come onnn," I am saying with a smile that is completely unsuitable for the moment. “I’m fine. I am sooo good in a chaotic moment. My body knows exactly what to do with this. Trust me. I am 50% water, 50% adrenaline right now.”

I am laughing when I shouldn’t be. I am trying to assume a casual stance with my body to show that I am indeed, fine, but my hands give me away. They shake so violently, I cannot untie my shoes. My husband stoops down to loosen the laces for me.

It is difficult to explain to someone who did not grow up with the lurch of intermittent chaos, how adrenaline can feel like one of the only ways you come back into your body. How you are primed for it. How it pours through your veins like a high you’ve had before—the most alive you will ever feel. The most terrified you will ever be. 

“I’m going to stay here in case you need me,” says my husband as I strip off my sweaty clothes and step into the shower. I see the shadowy outline of his form, an embodied question mark hovering outside the shower door.” 

“Okay. But I’m fine.”² 

I turn the water to scalding and hold my face directly under the stream.

I am numb. Nothing can touch me. 

I am fine. 

The first time I practice the containment strategy from the parenting course, my daughter is far past the tantrum’s point of no return. She flails uncontrollably on the floor, crying and screaming. 

I leave my oldest with a bin of Magnatiles and reassure her before picking up my daughter, carrying her to her room, shutting the door, and sitting cross-legged against her bookshelf. 

“I love you, and I’m going to stay here with you,” I tell her. 

Breathe in. Breathe out. 

She launches her tiny body at me, making herself large and loud. I block her arms with my outstretched hands. 

“I won’t let you hit me.” 

Breathe in. Breathe out. 

I watch her flail her way across the expanse of her bedroom carpet. When she demands I go away, her chin in the air, I remind her I am staying. I tell her I am not scared of her big, loud feelings. 

Slowly, over twenty minutes, her volume decreases. She wanders her room aimlessly, occasionally letting out a residual wail. Every few minutes, she looks back at me.

“I’m still here,” I say. 

Breathe in. Breathe out. 

When she finally falls into my lap, her hair matted and sweaty against her forehead, I feel like I’ve just run a marathon—nauseous, fatigued, proud. 

There will be time for skill-building later, but right now, I am giving my daughter what she needs—what I always needed. Someone unafraid of the scariest parts of her. Someone who will gather together all her unraveling edges and show her she is not too much.

Someone who will stay. 

Grief, left unacknowledged, will do whatever it takes to get your attention. 

It happens to me on a Friday. The children are singing along to a Disney movie in the basement while I pick a fight with my husband over something I do not care about.   

With every passing minute of our tedious bickering, I can feel the weight of everything I’ve been trying to ignore press harder and harder until it sends spidery cracks cascading through my resolve. 

When it all feels like too much—when I feel like too much—I shut myself in my bedroom and sob. Huge, gulpy, guttural sounds I did not know I could make fill the room. 

I am rolling through ocean waves of grief and grief and grief, caught in the undertow, crashing, my mouth full of sand. 

I am burying my face in the bedspread, knees pressed into the hardwood floor like I am praying, but I’m not praying. 

Unless this, too, is its own kind of prayer. 

Unless grief, finally felt, is its own kind of invocation. 

In third grade, the school librarian gathered my class onto the corner rug and read Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco. 

In the story, a young girl is frightened by the black clouds enveloping her grandmother’s farmhouse. As the claps of thunder boom around her, her grandmother takes her hand and leads her into the kitchen to bake a cake. 

I remember holding my breath as the librarian read. I remember wanting to hold the words under my tongue for safekeeping. 

Years later, the poet Ocean Vuong wrote about how he, too, was changed by Polacco’s story.

“I was unmoored by this act, its precarious yet bold refusal of common sense…To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger.”³

What is it like to hold yourself with tenderness when everything is falling apart?

What is it like to feel your grief and make something with it? To forget about the storm for a moment? 

To put the sugar in your mouth? 

When my husband steps into the bedroom, I am still on my knees. 

I beg him to get out, get out, get out. 

I feel swallowed whole by my grief, and I worry it will swallow him, too—both of us Jonah in the belly of the whale.

I am putting my hands out in front of me. I am sticking my chin up in the air, daring him to stay where he is. 

Don’t touch me I’m fine get out leave me alone. 

He hesitates in the doorway for the briefest moment before striding across the room and scooping my body against his. 

I spend five futile seconds trying to twist out of his arms before finally giving in, before finally letting myself feel what it is to be held together. 

“I’m here,” he says as I sob into his neck, a river of tears rolling down the collar of his shirt. 

I cry because I am sad and lost and exhausted. 

And I cry because I am relieved. 

Someone stayed. Finally. 

Someone stayed. 

The next day, I bake chocolate chip cookies. 

I made these same cookies when our neighbor was dying, and I make them again today because this is what I want to do with my grief. I want to make something with it. 

My husband walks into the kitchen. 

“Would you like a grief cookie?” I ask him. 

He grins before taking one, hot from the pan. 

I think of the girl and her grandmother, of making something beautiful in the eye of the storm. 

Every time my grief tries to swallow me whole, I want to remember what it is to make something sweet.

I want to remember what it is to feed myself something besides despair. 

For weeks, I have been telling my therapist stories of holding space for the people I love. 

Containment, I say. 

Showing up, I say. 

See how I hold all of this in my arms, I say. 

She is quiet for a long time. She asks me to consider what it might feel like to show up for myself. 

Her words echo in my mind on the drive home, and that night as I’m falling asleep, and every day for the next week.

Later, I will drive aimlessly and pull into an empty playground parking lot. I will put the van in park and press my forehead against the cold steering wheel. I will give myself space to feel grief on my own terms. 

I will close my eyes. I will breathe in. I will breathe out. 

I will tell myself what I tell my children. 

I love you, and I’m going to stay with you, I will say. 

I’m here.

I’m still here. 

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Photo by A S on Unsplash

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1. Dr. Becky Kennedy’s Deeply Feeling Kids Workshop. Follow Dr. Becky here.

2. I’m Not Fine And That’s a Totally Reasonable Response — a favorite clip from the 2021 drama C’mon C’mon starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gaby Hoffmann, and Woody Norman.

3. From Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous