Retracing footprints...

It's been 11 months since the most profound loss I've ever known came into my life.

How to describe that realization is, at the moment, beyond even my verbose ability.

There isn't an adequate way to reconstruct the pain that is looking at a perfectly formed little baby that was once alive within your core of self. There isn't a way to describe the agony of pushing a baby into the world that should have been allowed to stay within you, safe, warm, protected...and mostly...yes...the most important part is that the little baby should be ALIVE.

There are no words to convey the ripping apart that occurs when you realize that your body has become a tomb...and that it had stayed a tomb for a MONTH even after you thought all had passed. Twins. Twins that I'd dreamed about since I was a child.

Ashes.

Ashes scattered in a once beautifully wooded gully that now is littered with remnants of trees, scattered all over the ground by careless heavy booted men.

I find myself rewinding my life in my mind, reaching back in to the depths of how I came to this very moment. I see the gut wrenching sobs of a 15 year old girl, sitting in a clinic...feeling there were no other options available to her. Someone I didn't know told me I had a choice....and I made that choice. I made the choice to be a mother. I walked forward with a tiny hand in mine, and strove to keep that little bundle safe. I protected him with the fierceness of a mother lion.

Today, 20 years later....he sneers at me with paranoid accusations. Displaced rage in his eyes....Manic...again.

He screams "I AM AN ADULT! YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!!!"

and he is right.

I can't. I sit in my room, reaching for the breathe I so desperately need to cling to. Right now.

I look into the mirror and touch the strands of silver in my hair. My life is a little less than halfway over if statistics have anything to say about it. I have spent much of that half crying. Crying over being abused and neglected. Crying over being violated in more ways than one. Crying over parental mental illness. Crying over being pregnant much, much too early. Crying over being left alone to deal with it on my own. Crying because of desperation, and looming starvation. Crying because my child seemed....harder than was normal. Crying because I worried that the man that loved me would give up because of how hard my child was. Crying because of miscarriage. Crying because of more parental mental illness. Crying because I had to be stronger than I ever wanted to be. Crying because my sweet husband had to be stronger than I ever wanted him to have to be. Crying because of fear. Crying because the children that came from a loving marriage were being hurt and abused by my firstborn son. Crying because none of the "experts" could figure him out. Crying because my firstborn child lay near death with his beautiful face mangled from cruel pavement. Crying because of poverty. Crying because of being pregnant....and Crying because that pregnancy led me to holding a perfect dead baby, while another rotted within me. Crying because I couldn't do ANYTHING about it.

And crying....11 months later....because I've had the thought of "WHY?????"

And crying again...because there is NO answer.

My eldest son's upper lip curls as he belts out insulting accusations with no merit other than that he BELIEVES it to be true. That is enough for him.

He is unable to give me the benefit of the doubt even though he knows his memory is faulty.

His blue eyes turn gray when he looks at me as the oppressive force of chaos in his life, blaming me for his mental illness's clutching grasp.

He lashes out and accuses.....no voice of reason can permeate his faulty cognition's. Lost in the head injury and mental illness that has claimed the child that I chose to keep against the advice of statistics that pointed down a road of impending failure. A teenage mother is viewed as a poor excuse for a mother. No matter how hard she tries, it is never enough in this society. Marked with a scarlet letter for ALL time. More acceptable to have given him away, or ceased his very life spark. Even 20 years later, I see people's eyes shift as they do the math and realize how young I was...and how old he is. Even 20 years later, I see them change their opinion of me, even if for only a second. This isn't paranoia, it's fact. I've been seeing it for 20 years, I know what it looks like.

Judgment.

But I was a really loving mother. An attentive mother. A nurturing mother.

I gave my childhood away and became an adult overnight.

I gave my young beauty away to the enrichment of his life.

Everything was for HIM.

And in my darkest hour....a year of grieving and suffering more acute than I would have dreamed possible....

that little boy takes out the knife of his most volatile accusations of paranoia and
falseness and stabs me as hard as he can...walking away with a swing in his step.

"YOU CAN'T TELL ME ANYTHING! I'M AN ADULT!!!"
and he whispers...."You would have been better off if I'd never been born...."

I pound the words out of my ears.

That CAN'T be true!!!!

I won't believe it.

NO.

I won't allow him to SAY that to me. I won't allow him to flush 20 years of my life down the toilet of wrong turns!

I want to scream that he is wrong...but his ears are closed to me.

I have no power.

My footprints have blown away, and there is no retracing to be had.

There is only now.

and the next step.