Member-only story
I Searched for Love in Some Desperate Places Before I Found It in Myself
My life would get a whole lot worse before it could ever be better
I should have been wrapped in love. I should have been wrapped in the tenderness of a mother’s arms and in the security of a safe home.
Instead, I was wrapped in loneliness. In feeling lost. So lost. An outcast. An outsider. A misfit.
Invisible.
Invisible except to my loneliness. It would always be there. For decades, no matter how many roommates or marriages or children I had, it was my constant companion, my trusted friend. Familiar. I could count on it.
My mother often said she wished I would “Go away!” She said she wanted to get rid of me — my deepest, little-girl, subconscious fear, having already been ripped from the arms of my teenaged birth mother some weeks after I was born, and then taken from at least one foster mother before landing in an icy, hostile — abusive — environment.
I would spend much of my life searching for “home.” Searching for the love, stability and warmth I craved as that tiny little soul. Searching for something … missing something … but how would I ever find it when I had no idea what it was?
