The Haunting
A mother’s grief
There‘s this grief in my heart and it feels endless.
I am grateful for it.
Grief is a portal.
And still, there are some things I would rather just-not-feel.
I’m human after all.
I want to rush to the bottom, but mostly it feels bottomless.
I look at older pictures of myself and I become filled with sadness.
Today my daughter is 5 years and 9 months. And 5 years ago I posted a pic of me holding her.
9 months in, 9 months out.
9 months in, 5 years and 9 months out.
I look at her face and my heart breaks even more open.
The older she gets the more grief I feel.
She has his smile.
She has his back and his arms.
I can see his face in hers.
And she’s beautiful.
“I am going to be feeling this for the rest of my life,” I say to myself.
That was the cost. This is my responsibility.
To feel this grief for the rest of my life seemed like a good price to pay compared to staying where I was.
I Got Knocked Up By a Man I Barely Knew.
This was the cost I was willing to pay to find my path here.
It doesn’t make it hurt any less.
I’m going slow here.
Slow like the last layer of honey that’s at the bottom of a huge bottle.
Waiting for just a few drops to sweeten your tea or to lather on your french toast.
Standing there, even as your arms shake from the weight of the bottle.
Waiting for it to move downwards.
Will it drip down from the middle?
Will it gather into one steady drop?
Will it all roll to the edge and slowly drip down the side?
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
My bread is getting cold.
My tea is losing its heat.
Hurry up. I don’t have all day.
C’mon c’mon!
I can rush all I want.
It still won’t make it go down any faster.
Will this even be enough honey?
I’m waiting all this time, will it even be enough?
Will I want more?
I can feel my ingratitude and misery here.
I don’t want maple syrup.
I don’t want sugar.
I don’t want agave.
I want that honey.
Will the bees even produce anymore?
Will we run out of honey in our world?
Will all the flowers wither and will all the bees die?
No.
Bring it back.
Bring it back.
In the supermarket, they have many bottles of honey.
There is more honey.
This is just the honey you have in front of you.
THIS honey is a medicinal elixir.
I know that it takes a while.
It takes as much time as it does when you’re self-pleasuring and you don’t reach for the climax.
When you stroke and stroke to what feels like an
endless, delicious, torturous ride.
Feeling all the sensations, the no-sensations, the numbness, the tingling, the glass shards,the gooey outpouring of sweet goodness,
and you relax your body and let Her have it without reaching or trying.
When you can feel yourself arriving there and you breathe and let it widen instead.
Then, when your body decides to go over
All
on
her
own.
That, too, is just as slow as the honey that is dripping.
Heart quenching.
Gushy.
The kind that makes you cry.
I’m sorry. I know how uncomfortable it can be.
Irrational fears just wanting a voice and get in the way, making it less pleasurable than it needs to be.
I will name you and release you with the wind.
To my friend who broke my heart, I love you and I’m afraid of being close to you because you’ve hurt me, more than once.
I fell for your game.
I love you and I don’t want to make you wrong for having your experience, but I’m afraid that my heart does make you wrong because it feels you’ve been sneaky.
That you’ve just out of nowhere completely disconnected from me without any consideration of how it would make me feel.
I’m afraid if I am close to you, you will smile at me and make a joke and I will immediately drop all my guards and melt back into old unhealthy patterns.
I’m afraid that when I signed the contract of being a mother,
I also signed the contract of feeling the grief of doing it alone and without her father. Forever.
I’m afraid my teeth will fall out.
I chipped my tooth a month ago with my water bottle and it enhanced this fear.
Weird, but the fear haunts me.
My TMJ issues, the pain I feel in my mouth area on the daily. My teeth also click and I have a nervous habit of clicking them with my knuckle and tongue.
A habit of grinding my teeth when stressed or asleep.
I ask about it and dentists assure me that my teeth are in there tight. Meanwhile, I can still feel them click.
Haunting me.
It reminds me of the quote in the bible that says,
“The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.”
They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Surely this grief feels like my own personal hell.
These are the sounds.
Hell.
I look at skeletons of people who have died and sometimes they have their teeth still there, and I’m afraid that my skeleton will not have any teeth because they will all fall out along with my jaw. Or that my TMJ will get so bad that I won’t be able to speak or open my mouth.
Or worse, that a man won’t love me.
It’s a fear of aging, of being here for an eternity.
That I’ll become old, that I’ll be here till the end of time.
Still here waiting.
Waiting to feel the bottom of this bottomless pit of grief.
Waiting for this goddamn honey to drip all the way down.
All
the
way
down.
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