snufkin @kroelkip - Tumblr Blog

oldfarmhousefallfeatures

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@swaddle 🐮🩷

Just sitting here thinking to myself, it's only been 75 years since it became normal for parents not to bury their own children. It's only been about 3 generations since we mourned a quarter of our children. It's been a tiny sliver of a slice of the history of humanity since surviving your first 10 years was a coin flip

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and I can't even imagine it. I cannot comprehend what it was like for 99.99% of history. How did they survive burying half of their children? I fully expect my own children to outlive me; it will be considered a rare, unexpected tragedy if they don't. How was this much misery normal for that much of history?

kittyknowsthings

So there's that famous quote that while we have a word for orphans, and widows and widowers, there isn't a word for parents who have lost a child because that particular horror is just so unfathomable and unspeakable and no language in the world ever came up with a word for it. and this post randomly reminded me of that quote and then I just realized how many layers of bullshit that is. I first thought it was about the rarity - if 50 percent of all children died for that long, especially before the advent of reliable birth control, the word for a parent who had at some point lost a child was statistically likely just parent.

But practically, I think the reason there isn't a separate term is because while the experience certainly had personal relevance, it had little enough relevance on the societal level it didn't need a shorthand. If you were widowed, you were unmarried but had previously been married, this was very relevant to your place in society. What that looked like in practice differed, across time and places, but it usually meant *something*. And if you were orphaned, especially young, this was very relevant to your life situation in that it made you very very vulnerable. If you happened to have lost a child, you mourned them, buried them, and then went on raising your other hopefully still living children.