snowed in on my mother’s birthday

Healing as if it’s a linear process
broken
healing
healed
Growth as if it’s the product of willpower
(healing as a blindfolded cat unleashed, tearing everything)
Don’t you feel better by now? But the problem is the ‘you’ you mean is gone. In pain I became no one. I put down my responsibilities, my dreams, everything except right now. So now ‘you’ should feel better but I lost the “I” in me.
I am finally free
I have a shot at a happy life
I can start fresh
I am terrified
Who am I without my mother? “Mother” as the ongoing battle. Mother as the entity in my genetic line standing between me and the beyond who I never knew was there until she disappeared and now it’s just me and the infinite. Me no longer against her but
against the world,
against my own best time
and now without the excuse of “mother’ as to what that wound is that hobbled me, am I going to make my life what it could be?
Me, a child again, scared and alone.
Me, also my own mother, kneeling in front of my little girl, holding her hands, brushing the tears, nearby when she is scared, but not fixing it because it isn’t broken.
This is life.
hard
painful
scary
Life as a process unfolding, challenges arising and falling away, some defeated, some faded without fanfare, mountains that shoot forth from the earth to guide us back on to our path.
Now in each step there is faith. A plan canceled and I end up right where I need to be. I miss the deadline and the reason makes itself apparent later. A gaping blank space and I kneel on the banks to twirl my finger in the watery colors or sit still, waiting for an image to appear.
Faith is all the difference. Life is the same, a mystery, but at each turn I know it’s all for me.
Yes, a loss.
Yes, another.
Yes, what looks like an opportunity missed and despite my ego’s cries I say “thank you, god.”
To trust beyond knowing.
To feel held beyond circumstances.
To feel love that exists beyond a person or any actions.