Title is a reference to Sadness as a Gift by Adrianne Lenker.
I saw the movie Because of Winn Dixie in second grade, the night my friend and I had a sleepover with our American Girl Dolls.
This was around the same time that my beloved guinea pig, Maisy, died on what should’ve been the best day of the year: the day of the Spanish fiesta at school. In an Oscar-winning performance, my mom brought my fiesta contribution and celebrated with our class as if everything was just swell. When I got home later that afternoon, she brought me downstairs to show me that Maisy had died.
I remember screaming in her arms while she said a prayer for my beloved little friend, my little sister looking on.
Then we went upstairs and sat down to Doritos and chocolate milkshakes, which for the first time in my life, didn’t taste like heaven on earth.
Thus formed my most core memory from second grade, with Winn Dixie being a close runner up. During the movie, I remember looking blurrily into my friend’s teary eyes while Opal and her dad desperately searched for runaway Winn Dixie in a thunderstorm. I choked down additional tears of frustration when Gloria Dump admonished, “Opal, you can’t hold on to something that wants to go. You can only love what you got while you got it.” Even at that very early age, I believe I understood that Gloria was right.
My sister gifted me a small pack of candies early in my pregnancy. They have ginger in them and are meant to soothe nausea.
They remind me of Winn Dixie as well, because they look to me like the Littmus lozenge candies Miss Franny Block gives Opal and her new friends. The lozenges are said to elicit not only sweetness, but sorrow as well – candy that tastes sad.
What I have found in being pregnant is that in addition to the new pangs of hunger, pangs in my abdomen, and pangs in my back, I have also experienced pangs of sadness. Little poignant butterflies in my stomach that feel a bit like homesickness. Lozenge-sized moments of sadness.
It takes me back to college, when even the shortest and most mundane conversation with my parents was enough to send me into a teary fit. I recall my dad offering to make the 2 mile drive from their house to my dorm to bring me something, and I turned him down over text because I knew it would make me too happy, and therefore also too sad, to see him.
This was true as well when I moved to New Jersey after school. For at least a month or so, I woke up with that pit in my stomach that made me simultaneously long for home and desperately avoid thinking about it.
Then one day, I resolved that it was ok to feel homesick, and it got better for me after that.
I would never wish difficult or confusing feelings on someone else, or suggest that they are God’s lesson to someone; However, though there are times when all I can do is hope for feelings to pass, I am starting to consider some of my moments of sadness as a gift.
This gift is like a good friend, who holds up a mirror, or a magnifying glass, so that I see what I already know deep inside. Just like melancholy stories illuminate the heavy beauty of the world, just like the Littmus lozenges showed Opal and her friends what longings they still carried, just like homesickness shows you how much you love something or someone, my new feelings of sadness help me tell the truth to myself: bringing new, beautiful life in the world also means bringing times of pain and sorrow.
As I excitedly wonder what the baby will look like, what interests he’ll have, which of the board books will be his favorite, where he’ll go to school, I also think about when he will experience loss for the first time. What will disappoint him? What will he be pathologically afraid of? What things about him will I struggle to accept? And when will he need me to pray with him, not because it’s routine, but because the worst thing ever happened to him on what should’ve been the best day ever?
Sadness has been one of those emotions that I tend to keep like a secret and feel by myself.
I can’t be the only one who prefers Phoebe Bridgers through the privacy of my earbuds, or takes the opportunity of a night alone to watch a sad movie, or feels the urge to flee a crowded room when the tears start to come.
In my withdrawing now, I tend to assume that becoming a parent who helps her child navigate sorrow and grief is a personalistic task. While Opal runs around giving friends her Litmus Lozenges, while people angrily weep about unjust legal systems and protest war together in the streets and elsewhere, and while my congregation bonds over beautiful, mournful sonatas in worship, I am still telling myself that it is somehow it is my individual job to help a new creature process all of the pain that is mixed into our lives. How could I possibly do this by myself when I am still so confused by it most of the time?
When interviewed (link here) about writing the book Because of Winn Dixie, Kate DiCamillo shared that it was homesickness that made her want to. When asked about the movie adaptation, she said,
“I sat there and just cried like a baby…It’s astonishing…You’re in your little room, your little apartment, making things up, and then 5 years later it’s there in everyone’s minds.”
At the very least, I am learning to unwrap my own sadness, not because it makes things less confusing or difficult, but because in the sharing, I find that I am mysteriously connected with other people – those I love, and those I will never meet.
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