Mother and Son
TW for suicide and motherhood. Authors Note: I have no plans to die.
The thought creeps into my mind, asking, why has nobody asked you if you are doing okay? Though I do get this question impersonally a lot, there is only one person in the world whom I believe asks me and wishes to have a true answer. If only he could be home with me to ask me how my day went, maybe the images of my limp body hanging from the ceiling fan would cease.
When he's not home, the hate inside of me festers, I despise him for being something to make me go on living when it would be easier to die. He is so beautiful, I, so unworthy. My son loves deeply and truly because why would he lie? This love confuses my shame. Feel your heart beat against your ribs, touch there, to understand. Some may feel the drum of the human condition, others believe they are without a heart and cannot feel a single thump. My son is every thump against my chest, something I never knew I could feel, each time it beats a memory of him pumps through my veins and life is able to flow within.
You know, every time I look at a sprawling tree against a clear blue sky, I think about my placenta and how I had failed to keep my son's tree of life living long enough to be born. When the placenta was presented to me on a silver platter it looked like charred steak. The flesh, the life was long gone, nurses confirmed for me what I knew, my son was living within the death inside of me, it was my fault, I am ashamed. My thoughts whirl to this day, that I have somehow damned him by the muck within me.
This early failure curated how I see motherhood, an offering of not one life, but a force of two.
There is so much beauty in your honesty.