Sometimes
When I’m concerned about myself
And my shitty shitty thoughts
I look around and see
No one else seems concerned at all
So I must be okay
A-okay
Pulchritudinous Verbosity
Sometimes
When I’m concerned about myself
And my shitty shitty thoughts
I look around and see
No one else seems concerned at all
So I must be okay
A-okay
We sat on the porch that night, inhaling the dense salt air to exhale it again
Listening to the rhythmic crash of the waves past the dune
Graciously serving each other the generous helpings reserved for dearest friends
I could see, almost touch, snippets of words as they danced around our heads
Handing off and handing off and handing off again
A bit too warm, a bit flushed (a bit, or more, tipsy)
Like resting in a plush safe dumpling - don’t mind the sweet, sticky sweat -
I listened as the others wailed and gnashed their teeth over children growing up
I listened from outside myself
From inside myself
From atop my tower of trash dressed in ribbons and Lysol
Nodding along silently, thin lips stretched into my best approximation of smile-bedecked grimace
Me the half- (quarter-) mother
Inside-me’s diaphragm ballooning for the next rasping grating shriek no one will ever hear
I want to feel that too
Is a mother who’s not really a mother even a mother?
Because mothers who aren’t really mothers certainly don’t feel like mothers
They feel like gaping wounds and stones at the same time
The pitying look like a hatchet
And so I bury the gauze and the satchel as best I can - not very well, I know -
Anything to stave off the next inevitable blow
My tears
The pitying look
I stuff it down
My tears
The pitying look
I stuff it down
My tears
The pitying look
The warm hug as my arms dangle at my sides and I close my eyes over a thousand-yard stare
I stuff it down
I stuff it down
I stuff it down
So that when the next sinkhole opens I may not slip into it
I don’t want to do this anymore
I’m not sure I can do this anymore
It’s supposed to be a transformative experience, of sorts
(if others can be believed)
The hot water logically washes away the dirt
Slick frothing bubbles lend an assist
Droplets falling on tile like bursting static
What feeds others’ renewal leaves me frantic and exhausted
Sometimes crying desperately through the torrented rivulets already running down my face
That humid box is where the worst of it comes
Thoughts like arrows, the only time they fly fast and true
New and old and present slamming together as they rush and scurry to find purchase in my floral foam brain
Distractions be damned, those spiteful, single-tasked archers
I’ve yet to find an activity conducive to a calm disposition but
The thunk of my expansive forehead on withered wet stone urges me to find purchase in the next
I often worry that I’m unique
Not peculiarly unique (no pixies or dreams but perhaps a hefty dose of mania)
But that I’m solitary,
Grotesquely Singular
I often worry that I’m not unique
Not in any way that matters
Girding myself in sorrow like everyone else
Convinced the most pointed is reserved for me alone
When it’s the same run-of-the-mill fuckshit everyone hates
Another run-of-the-mill woman watching herself empty bit by bit with shoddy incredulous acceptance while she looks around like a child at the pool ready to show off his most mediocre dive to parents who’ve watched a thousand other mediocre dives
”Watch this!”
Watch as life trickles, then rushes, then trickles away
Each trickle a tsunami to her
Womb like a hard cloying pebble, its silent throes necessarily muffled
I wish I could rest without a glut of tears
But I will only be a dry corpse
It settles like dust into my marrow,
Weightier than you’d expect
Slows my steps until I become an iron giant
Knee creak, drag heavy foot on heavy toe to fling it forward as momentum slaps it back to earth
It’s the very definition of insanity, really, this vapid optimism for the impossible thing, over and over and over,
Only to each month taste the acrid sting of reality
It shouldn’t be a surprise, should it? At this point?
I want nothing more than to free myself of the wretched claws of hope but I don’t know how
I don’t know how
I don’t know how to wriggle from its grasp whole or breathing
Sometimes my overly spicy brain wracks itself for torture
Moments like the prickers which burrowed themselves into summer clothing while I rolled in the sand dunes across the street
A snapshot of you and her
Ring and question
Wedding day with wedding dress,
Subsequent appropriately swollen belly
From this hidden vantage point I watch you plant a sweet kiss on the stretched, striped skin between you and your child
Yours and hers
Yours and hers
Yours and hers
Yours and hers
A languorous, sleepily lit Sunday afternoon, momentary respite from the stunted gray days of late winter
Again and again
Once more into delivery room to hold her clawing bloated hand as she grunts new life into the world
Again and again
A hideous movie replayed and replayed and replayed and replayed by a hideous man with a hideous projector
Just so I Know. So I Remember.
All that I lost before I even knew it was slipping away
All that she had and sold
All that they took and all that you gave
If only I could go back to counting prickers as I freed them from their hiding places
Maybe it could be different this time
Not so worse
Yesterday I watched the earth roll up the sky, clouds and all, like a blanket
Gazed on as dirt ate water and air, gobbled the mess up like spun candy, no more than whirling sweet tufts disappearing into thick mud
I wondered what it wrought.
You told me when we met
You told me
And I believed you then
And I felt the same,
Having been worn away so painfully small
So when you opened me up
And everything in me burst open with new life
And craved new life with you
I was uncomprehending when you stepped off the path we’d forged onto one I never noticed you’d been clearing
And you told me
And my heart closed my ears
And so I set about loving you as hard as my bruised heart felt,
Fervently, frantically, desperately
You’d have no choice but to burst with me
But you told me
And you told me six years ago
And you told me a year ago
And you told me six months ago
And you told me yesterday
And I finally Hear You.
And I’m
Sorry
I
Couldn’t
Hear
Your
Silence
For
What
It
Was
You will never say the Words I Need to Hear
because you’ve said them already
just not to me
i
will
never
be
enough
There are words that I used to say
There are words that I only say now
There are words that I only say inside my head
Those are the words I most wish I could get out
Wrench that crowbar until they fly
But I’m afraid that
After all this time
The pressure has filed them to razors
And I would give my life to save you pain
Marriages: 2
Engagement rings: 1
Children: 2
Pregnancies: 6
Repossessed cars: 2
Credit score: stopped looking
Age of current car: 12 years
Suicide attempts: 1
Suicidal thoughts: Infinity
Age of oldest child: 18
Christmas mornings with children: 6
Christmas mornings with youngest child: 3
Miles to school: 43
Number of trips to school and back: Around 3,300 and counting
Age: 44
Viable eggs left: 0?
People who care about how many eggs I have left: 1
Current abdominal pain level: 6.8 and rising
Number of stepchildren: 5
Number I’ve met: 3
Number of kids THEY’VE squirted out: 10 and counting (ETA: apparently 11 and counting)
Number of kids they know/parent: 5-8?
Life satisfaction level: mid at most
Anger level: 6.8 and rising
Have you ever held something like that in your hand?
A delicate morsel of anything at all
Soft and sweet
A tender puff which leeches protective feelings,
The grounding knowledge that it would never survive on its own,
Poor little thing.
Did you know that, sometimes, moose will get tipsy on fermented apples?
Can you imagine -
An enormous knobby-kneed behemoth,
Crashing pendulously like a sailor,
To-and-fro,
Carving the widest swath as others stumble to safety
I wonder how this pair combines
Wonder at the unexpected convergence and adoption of the other’s most disastrous faults
Coagulated into wretched creature
- Can you see it? -
One can
One wears it as a cape
And is grateful for the mouth-watering scrapings left in its wake
What I thought would be run-of-the-mill pavement turned out to be some sort of vaguely crunchy sludge.
That’s okay. I’m not driving anyway.
I shift my weight to accommodate age- and hardware-addled hips
Crossing and uncrossing my legs,
One gliding up and over, running along the other’s calf in a move that might be provocative in another place, but in this case is simply necessity borne of cramped space
I no longer put my feet on the dash except on very special occasions
(I trust him on the road but no one else, and he’s some sort of cosmic magnet for the most brazen of fuckheads)
The trees pass by but more languidly, and I see that each has put on a snow-day character
Some fat like a mossy robot covered in royal icing
Others flinging their suds to the highway and sky alike in a frenzied rave
I think my favorites are those who pack their adornments as a gloppy Elmer’s glue tiara, diverting attention from a perhaps-more-spare-than-inspires-confidence midsection where trunks gleam around stubby once-were-branches
Backs straightened like the fucking royalty they are
The advancing year feels like road spikes behind and a concrete wall ahead, the spikes too close now to reverse and still salvage the tires (though the fee was paid)
The digit changed but it’s the same things making me feel shitty?
This is the year I concede
Already the emptiness feels like fuzzy cozy fullness
I hunger for nothing but sallow desperation, eating my angst to generate it anew
A fetid phoenix whose rotted wings drip with long-putrid vinegar
With acid
This year
I create a suitable husk for the dusk to come
I’ve seen it in dreams - the dense velvet lampshades consuming light like grinding wheels -
fading, fading to nothing
despite my frantic efforts
I know what seethes in the dark, what holds us hostage (and you without your shackles)
What desperately desires to claim what it almost had (tasted)
My will is deplete
I soak up the infectious sludge
to
Hasten
and leave Nothing behind, not the echo of her cries to remember, to be patient, to have faith
Faith like a ghost ship dressed as the sweetest promises you ever heard, the promises already promised to another and another
And in the end, the scales are balanced, by all accounts
All accounts but one,
That account which blandly smiles until the stories are done, storing up the tears to fill the feather dust in her pillow
The feathers never share secrets
Not even not-secret secrets, the quaking shit-monster demons which drag themselves from room to hoarded room in my bloated, empty shadow
I wrack my brain to conceive of what consequences I have birthed
And come up far from empty. And so
I will sit in the gloaming, in the strangled light cast over the reaping sown in my basest anguish
I would never tell her this, but
Measured accurately, measured objectively,
I think she was right
First, love was the filmy layer to be superimposed over boys
for whom I yearned but never knew
Then, languishing in replacement love,
a stain from benign and anxiously perceived “wild days”
Neither patient nor kind
Not an elaborate loom,
with threads stretching fingers across to grasp and weave into irrevocable fabric,
the warmest, strongest knit
More an inevitable hammer to be wielded for my own good
But now -
Now
Terror seeps from my pores
My stomach a lackluster container for its dense weight
I devour grief
Hoard it to borrow against the wave to come,
In which some version of myself forever tumbles like a rag doll in the crashing, roiling grief
And this is love,
The horror of the innate knowledge of not knowing
The certainty of collapse
The tenuous hold on the most precious and fragile
As we scrape and scramble to hold the delicate bloom just a few moments longer
And the interest always always comes due
In the interest of full disclosure, the title of the song is technically “All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You” but we all know that’s not what the inimitable Ann Wilson actually sang. Nor should she have, obvs.
I should also point out that this is one dope-ass song and Heart is a dope-ass band. With that said, this particular song cracks me up every time I hear it. Even in 1990 when it was released, the lyrics were…. questionable, at best. But in 2023? HARD YIKES but also I have a lot of questions. So, since this blog is just my own li’l loquacious circle-jerk, imma do what I want and give a breakdown of this legit banger that should be more of a cautionary tale than it is, clearly.
Let’s dive on in, shall we?
It was a rainy night
When he came into sight
Standing by the road
No umbrella, no coat
So, here comes Ann, driving in the rain. She spots a dude on the side of the road. Pretty simple, right? But, like… no umbrella OR coat? What is this guy’s deal? I’m sure there’s a lot of the story we’re not getting - but I’d love to know how an adult human ends up on a road at night in the rain with no accoutrements. I’ll tell you for damn sure that I would not be stopping for this psychopath (or, worse, stone-cold moron), not even if it were 1968 when such shenanigans were commonplace.
So I pulled up alongside
And I offered him a ride
He accepted with a smile
So we drove for a while
ANN. GIRL. This is how you get murderdurdurrrred. As someone who has devoured true crime documentaries and podcasts, this CANNOT end well.
I didn’t ask him his name
This lonely boy in the rain
Fate, tell me it’s right, is this love at first sight?
Please don’t make it wrong, just stay for the night
Okay sooooo they didn’t do standard introductions when he got in the car? Also… did she have a towel to put down, or is he just willy-nilly sopping up his rain-butt with her fancy 1990 cloth interior?? Ew. Regardless, I can’t say whether I truly believe in love at first sight, but, Ann. It’s probs not. And why are we now talking about staying for the night? Like, in the car? Anywho, let’s keep goin:
All I wanna do is make love to you
Say you will, you want me too
All I wanna do is make love to you
I’ve got lovin’ arms to hold onto
Well. That escalated quickly. So now Ann’s asking for a ticket to poundtown, which, like… honestly, get it, girl, but I’m still concerned that your standards are really fucking low.
So we found this hotel
It was a place I knew well
We made magic that night
Oh, he did everything right
Bish you know that was a MOTEL, and we know why you know it well. I need to know how many times she’s found a bedraggled roadmuffin in her travels and brought dude back to this place to bang.
He brought the woman out of me
So many times, easily
And in the mornin’ when he woke
All I left him was a note
Hell YES get that orgasm babyyyyy
I’d venture to guess that most guys would LOVE to wake up after sex with a stranger to an empty bed and a note.
I told him I am the flower, you are the seed
We walked in the garden, we planted a tree
Don’t try to find me, please don’t you dare
Just live in my memory, you’ll always be there
HOLD UP bitch WTF. A couple stanzas ago, you were asking if it was love at first sight, knowing full well all you wanted was a damn baby? AND YOU HAVE A DUDE AT HOME ALREADY? Also, can we talk about how on earth she would even know if she’s pregante/pargonate/pragnat literally the next morning? I mean, Moist Road Guy might be infertile, and then you’re just taking alllll kinds of chances with STDs for a big ol’ nothin’. Plus, I didn’t tell people I was pregnant until I was at least 20 weeks along. This chick be telling people THE MOMENT OF IMAGINED CONCEPTION? I call bullshit.
Also: I’m not even going to go into the reproductive assault part of this, because I’m sure he wasn’t exactly raring to throw a condom on, but, like… you can’t just ON PURPOSE GET PREGNANT WITH SOMEONE’S BABY without their permission and then be like thanks byeeeeeeeeeee
ALSO also: Ma’am, if he thinks you’re having his baby I GUARANTEE he is not going to look for you. It’ll be more like It Follows but in reverse, with the babydaddy forever walking away from wherever you are.
Then it happened one day
We came ‘round the same way
You can imagine his surprise
When he saw his own eyes
Yeah, that’s a mindfuck. She did give him fair warning, though. Would be funnier if she meant that someone else had Moist Road Guy (tm)’s actual eyes, but then I guess he wouldn’t be able to see them.
I said, “Please, please understand
I’m in love with another man
And what he couldn’t give me, oh-oh
Was the one little thing that you can”
NOW we get to the truth of the matter. Hubs at home is shooting blanks, so obviously the least unhinged solution is to find a rain-soaked hitchhiker to spray his DNA up in your babymaker. I have SO many questions, though.
Does dude at home know she’s doing this? I feel like he must, because if she knows he’s infertile, HE probably knows he’s infertile, and he’s prolly like “Yeah find you a potential serial killer lol”… but it sure seems like she’s maybe done this a bunch of times since she knows the mo-er, hotel, well.
Why is she assuming that rando guy would be just fine with having his crotch fruit out in the world all willy nilly? I mean, I don’t think 99% of men would care so long as they don’t have to pay support, but there’s gotta be someone who’s freaked out by that?
Not for nothing, and I know it couldn’t exactly work the same way, but what if the genders were reversed? I bet NOW you’re feeling really itchy. I sure am. Yeesh.
I had a bit of an epiphany this morning. While I fully realize these are thoughts which should be discussed with a therapist, I don’t have that option at the moment for myriad reasons and also what is the POINT of having a BLOG if I can’t VOMIT MY STUPID THOUGHTS ONTO IT. Also, no one reads it anyway.
So, it’s pretty clear that many of my life choices have stemmed from insecurity and low self-esteem. Married at 21 to the first guy who showed any interest in me - because obviously it’s meant to be if he can stand me! Better snatch him up! Then I spent ten years making myself smaller and smaller, and STILL never got to whatever size would’ve fit within the confines of the person he found it acceptable for me to be.
For a long time, I blamed him for a lot of the misery in our marriage. But the thing is, I allowed him to treat me that way. The reasons are probably deeply seated in some as-yet-undiscovered childhood trauma, but we show people how to treat us - and I showed him.
In my first “grown-up” (not really, just full-time) job after college, I was coerced? groomed? into a relationship with a man more than twice my age. I felt like I couldn’t say no, but in hindsight, I’m not sure I really tried all that hard. It’s difficult to argue with a fit, 6’2” man who gropes you in the breakroom.
I think what I’ve realized is that I’ve ALWAYS played the victim. Growing up, I always felt like my parents (my mom, especially) preferred my brother, that he was the golden child. In truth, I don’t think that’s accurate; but he was certainly always “easier” than I was. Not emotional like me. So smart he had to take math classes at night because they ran out of math for him at school. Effortless slimness juxtaposed with my teenage fluff. He was also gifted with the coveted family left-handedness and stunning singing voice, both of which passed me over.
I don’t think my parents showed him overt favoritism, thinking back, but I just always KNEW, deep down, that he was better than me by any barometer. And he still is; he has a great job with a great company, still married to his high school sweetheart, living in a beautiful house with their three kids. A nice portfolio which would, I’m sure, preclude any desperate calls to daddy begging for $200 so the lights don’t get turned off.
I felt the scales tip every time my dad gave me a “helpful” diet tip, or my mom chided me for being too emotional, or purposely ignored me when I asked her a question just to blow up if I asked again. I learned to be quiet, after a while. I wasn’t terribly good at it, mind you, but life was easier when I was amenable and silent.
With all that said, I think I FEEL like a victim, and I PLAY the victim, but I’m not, really. I actively put myself in situations in which I can continue to play that role. It was easy in my first marriage. Tougher in my second, but I can still play second fiddle to my husband’s first wife, who once called me “a downgrade in every possible way.” I laughed at that statement initially, but she gave birth to his children and lived the life I crave, so who’s the winner here? Is anyone?
And so, here I am. Leaning into playing the supporting role once again. Happily(?) putting my wants and dreams aside for someone else’s. Waiting, knowing that I’m not really waiting, but just biding time until the choice is completely out of my hands - which, let’s face it, it always was.
The role into which I’ve thrust myself only has one real task: to smooth things over and make as much as possible easier for everyone else, perhaps especially to my own detriment. Make sure that my discomfort makes everyone else comfortable. Ultimately, I’m a pushover. A doormat. On top of that, I’m a poor communicator. Maybe a more apt description is terrified communicator, because I’m perfectly capable of speaking words which say what I mean, but I am incapable of saying them rationally in the moment, so I just… don’t say anything. I don’t say anything until I’m at an absolute breaking point, and/or I’m terribly drunk (or, more likely, some combination of the two), at which point my conversation consists mostly of tears and snot and angst. Which, of course, only seems to result in the other person waiting until I’m done verbally spewing whatever rant I’ve been rolling around in the back of my mouth for weeks, a stricken look upon his face, so that he can shove it onto the back burner again and go back to the status quo. You know, like an adult deals with a frustrating child who won’t stop begging for candy.
I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, really. Maybe I’m just trying to move through this feeling and get to the other side, whatever that might look like. If it exists, and isn’t just the sweet oblivion of failure. Sometimes I’m not sure that I even want to get to the other side. Because that means giving up the one thing I want, and I don’t know what the nail in that coffin is even shutting in. I’m doubtful it contains anything I truly need to shed. It might just contain me.
So, yeah. Just your neighborhood fuck-up over here, fucking it up. Is there really any other way to live?
Leaning in and out in hiccups
Looking,
Waiting,
Focused.
Searching for the perfect split second to leap
I try to catch your eye
Find the rhythm in your easy dimpled smile
but
My hiccups fall out of sync as your eyes dart away, mouth fixed as stone
And oh!
I remember
I remember that you’ve done this many times before,
And how weary your arms must be,
Strong and warm and tired,
And so I lean back
Stilling myself
For You
Devouring the spoiled sweetmeats
Grateful for the preparation
And I wrap the decaying mantle, reluctantly knitted from your relief, around my shrinking shoulders
And shiver away again
Again
Is there a word for forever
The kind of forever you know won’t last,
And maybe you don’t KNOW know
But a niggling something pulls, pulls, pulls from somewhere deep
Like a word you’ve just lost like a balloon to the sun
A word for the waste
A word for threading your hand through your father’s curled arm
A word for walking the crumbling plank without a glance back
A word for loss upon loss
But is there a word for when the reminder hits
The lyric, the poem, the snippet
A word for the long-forgotten scent
A word for the facial expression
A word for the anchor you forget, the anchor you thought you’d discarded long ago, the anchor that drops unceremoniously into the still water and plunges you back into what you left behind, chain thrashing and clanging and dragging,
And you wonder why it couldn’t work,
And why you still pay the price
After writing that title, I’m having pleasant wisps of memories of watching The Last Unicorn on VHS on the tiny t.v. in my college dorm room. Unrelated, to be sure, but slightly comforting, like a side hug.
I’ve been wondering lately if women experience pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing, etc. differently when they know they’re having their last baby. I certainly didn’t know. I spent my young adult life trying desperately NOT to get pregnant as my partner and I learned the hard way that we were spectacularly fertile. You know how birth control is 99.99999999% effective? Apparently I’m the reason for that .000000001% deviation. I’m also prone to miscarriages, which actually worked in my favor when I was whoopsie-pregnant at 18 like an utter idiot.
My partner and I also decided to go the old-fashioned route and not find out the gender of either kid before they were born. My son came first in 2005, and when I was pregnant with his sister, we decided that, if Kathryn had been another boy, we’d consider having a third to try for a girl.
All that to say: I never foresaw a fertility problem down the line, and wasn’t sure whether my second baby would be my last. Truthfully, remembering back, I don’t think I gave it a single thought. My doctor had determined that I had low progesterone, which was likely the cause of my prior miscarriages, and so the pregnancy, while healthy, felt a bit fraught with the weekly doctor appointments to receive injections. I was thrilled to get her to full-term since her brother had been 5 weeks early and had a short stay in the NICU.
Those babies (BABIES! HA!) are now 18 and 15, respectively. Life has changed dramatically since their births, but after over a decade at the current status quo, things are as calm as they can be. Their dad and I co-parent well, and Nathaniel is settling into college life in his freshman year.
Chris and I have struggled with infertility due to what he refers to as his “self-defensive vasectomy” in response to reproductive abuse in his first marriage. Unfortunately, funds which, in hindsight, would have been much more productive going towards IVF, paid for an unsuccessful vasectomy reversal, and here we sit. Super fertile folks, by all accounts, stymied by the overwhelming cost of fertility treatments in a country in which healthcare is part of fucking CAPITALISM (which I realize is a whole other discussion but WHAT THE FUCK America).
I know it’s difficult to feel sympathy for two people with biological children who simply can’t seem to have children together. I get it. I’m also staring down the barrel of 44 and realizing that, at this point and without the motivation of burning desperation on both our parts, it just ain’t happenin. I can accept that - have to accept that - because the alternative is digging a hole and laying in it ‘til I’m dead, and Chris has made it clear that that won’t be an acceptable response.
I know I can’t go back in time - and believe me, I’d change some shit if I did because wouldn’t we all? - but I wish I’d enjoyed my last pregnancy more. Really taken time to enjoy the experience instead of getting slightly annoyed by the hiccups emanating from my womb which threatened to make my bladder give way on road trips.
I wish I’d known how few years I’d get to enjoy waking up with my children on Christmas morning. The last time I got to experience that acute joy was when they were 5 and 2. The Christmases since have been marked by logistics and frenetic rushing, trying to make sure everyone has adequate time with myriad loved ones.
My kids have never come home to me on the bus. Those hazy afternoons spent breathlessly running in the door after school, backpack flying, grabbing a snack, and flopping onto the couch for some down time hasn’t happened in our house since 1998 (which was the last time I would have done it as a teenager when my parents owned it).
I don’t get to walk my kids to school. I never have. I fight at each end of the day against 40-odd miles of shittastic traffic (4 times a day - down and back and down and back) to arrive to work (in the morning) or at home (in the evening) exhausted and nerves jangling.
I realized in conversation with Kathryn a week or so ago in an embarrassing, hot rush of tears that I’ve never felt as if she and Nathaniel were ever really “mine.” I carried them, gave birth to them, and my body fed them, but my time with them has always been borrowed. The fine line between fighting over them and fighting for them felt like an immutable tide.
I look at my husband every day with the rush of love reserved only for him, a love somehow heavy and light at the same time, the type of love I beg my children to wait for, to never settle. My eyes catch his and I drift in the languid autumn colors I could remember the rest of my life if I went blind tomorrow. I wish, I wish, I wish that we could sit on a lazy Saturday morning, him with his tea and me resting a cup of decaf coffee on my expanding belly, pontificating over whose features might appear once we meet the little bundle. I wish I could watch him rock our baby…Sit next to him in an old school auditorium while our elbows brush and our child finds us in the crowd with a wave of excitement and relief.
Those things are not for me. They’re for other people - my parents, my brother, my kids’ father, even Chris - but not for me. Objectively, I know that moms come in many different forms, and the necessity of my brand of mothering is not inherently less than another’s, but I struggle to feel whole in that role.
I wish things were different. I wish I was different. I wish I’d been different.
“I’m never gonna - “ she mumbled as her face crumpled to the floor
Never gonna
But she would,
And she would, not too longer after, walk through golden fields with arms outstretched,
Gently caressing each fraying frond
Face long forgotten.
I navigate what comes after,
Gingerly,
Leaving my rotted, sallow orchard to trudge back through the waving flora,
Cursing its easy, graphic joy
The way back lit not with gold but with the desperate protestations of the dying day
To wearily (greedily) pick up the face
Crumpled face
”Never gonna” face
Smooth it over mine for the journey
Wet with unnoticed tears which ooze out under blue-lined notebook paper, streaking the lines into a blueberry Rorschach
Never
Gonna