To my Husband on Mother’s Day,

July 17, 2020

Buffalo, NY

Next to something happening to my girls, my biggest fear was losing you. To Death– I thought that would be the culprit that would part you from me. I never wanted anything to happen to my family, to the very heart of me.

But I had a secret fear too. One that seemed both preposterous and deeply rooted in possibility at the same time. I feared that one day I would leave my children, as my mother left me. A lifetime of abandonment burrowed into me, a seed that grew to shadow every relationship, a poison that left me feeling ever ‘not quite good enough’ for anyone. Lacking a mother’s love when I needed it most and only feeling the blade of rejection when I reached to find the comfort of its memory, I always knew as an adult how I was affected by her leaving. I never found the answers as to how a mother could do what she did, and that wound never closed.

I could never do something like that. That’s what I told myself, just like I told myself that there was something very wrong in her that she could. It was not usual, she was a fluke. Whatever was in her to make her turn away from her own children, it was not in me. I wanted to be a mother so very much. 

I read somewhere that losing your parent young makes you want to have a family of your own even more, to give your story a better end maybe, or to right a cruel wrong; to heal by giving your own children what was taken from you and see the echo of your own childhood in their eyes– but the one that should have been instead of the one that was. Then there could be healing.

There was a healing here.

When each of our children was born, there was an unspoken fear that my heart wouldn’t work right and I wouldn’t feel the bond that I suspect my mother hadn’t felt with me. But there it was. Not immediately overwhelming, but like a butterfly fresh from its cocoon whose wings are flat and small until they expand and lift out into something beautiful.

It was like that with you too. I was not only cautious, but beaten down and worn through. Then that love lifted me out and up, growing even stronger when you became my daughter’s father. My husband. When we became a family. That is when the soaring happened. Some of my greatest joys were watching you with our children. I had never looked ahead gladly at my life, but when I saw the future with you and our children, I was whole. No matter what might come our way, there was the assurance that we were together; we would create comforting routines and traditions that nothing could touch and there was peace there. I was made whole.

 And then you left. 

You left me. 

You left our family. 

This morning I looked at Lily sleeping next to me. I had been awake for nearly two hours, but since she had gone to sleep without me, I wanted to be there when she woke up. I thought of how she would snuggle into me sweetly as she almost always does in the mornings, and I wanted that connection because I was feeling so empty thinking about the future, even thinking one day ahead.

And then she woke up and smiled and snuggled in. I kissed her forehead and I told her I loved her, and felt flat. The love was there, but it did not fill me as it had before. Then came the feeling in my stomach, that prickly hollow feeling of emptiness and loss and anxiety. Anxiety because I do not know that that love will ever fill my heart again. It is muted, it is what I feared feeling when our babies were first put into my arms.

I am caught in an unraveling tapestry of what my life was now that you are not here. Now that there is no more family. You did not just neatly cut yourself away, it is a rough tear, and the peace and comfort and safety for our daughters and for myself  has come undone. Everything now is falling through that tear you made. Everything.

You have stolen so much from me. You have stolen so much of me.

I race to think of what I could do to stop it from completely coming apart. I try gathering the strands in my fingers to try and make it stop. To fix it. There has to be something I can do to fix it, this cannot just be the way it is now. The drop in my stomach goes deeper and spreads out. You tore yourself away, and how do I replace you? Our arms once wrapped around our children, touching each other and forming a safe circle. That was all I needed and there were times in my life I thought it wasn’t ever going to happen before I fell into you.

I know I need to replace you. I know that I cannot.

Sure I could fold myself into some other man. Maybe. Someone who would have us, the girls and I,  someone who would want a woman bound to raising another man’s children, someone who would have to accept that those children were always going to be the priority, someone who would want to love and be there for those children in the way that you have chosen not to be. There may be that man, but I would wonder about his motives. And you knew. 

You knew. You knew you were trapping me. Keeping me from truly trusting anyone again. All that’s left is settling. I can settle, or be alone among the tatters of our life. The hollow of it.

And this, this must be what my mother felt. Trapped. Unfulfilled. Alone. My whole life I’ve asked why, and now I have to know that this, this is it. 

This is it.