When once you were the child, and they the adults...
When once they held all the power and all the possibility...
When once they set the foundation, and willfully impeded healthy growth...
When you spent a lifetime trying to earn what should have been freely given...
When you finally, finally broke away before they could break you completely…and break the ones who came after as well...
When you are:
- setting boundaries
- holding boundaries
- recovering
- reparenting
- healing
- low-contact
- no-contact
…and the clock runs out…
There is no:
- family coming together to support the whole
- community support
- home-coming
- sympathy calls and cards and hugs
- family and neighbors and framily showing up with soup and soft eyes and listening ears and warm hand
- blankets wrapped around you before arms pull you closer and push warm mugs into your hands
- There is no rota of people:
- checking on you…checking on your family…
- making sure your kids ate today and that the t.v. volume is cranked up loud enough to drown out the sound of you sobbing in the shower
- helping you choose the right attire or the right words
- making plans for the days to come when the light is visible again
When the anticipatory ending sets off a decades-buried release…
When your factual existence was that of baby…child…teenager…, but your lived reality was that of a broken appliance...
When you were to have been an empty vessel into which they could pour themselves…a blank slate onto which they could imprint their imagined superiority…a fun-house mirror of sorts to reflect back a light in that dark…
When they said “life is precious” but didn’t mean yours…
When you were a purchase…a bargain basement, clearance-tagged purchase of discounted goods…not what was really desired, but an accessible, lower-quality dupe that just might be “workable”...to complete the set…
When the very reality of your flesh and substance…when your very skin…was “less than ideal”...
When it wasn’t a childhood, but a performance…a regulated automation of service…a fulfillment of anticipatory needs meant both to distract and delight the varied audiences, and shore up admiration…
When you arrived as damaged goods…having already “changed hands” countless times in a fosterhood of attachment and abandonment…
When you finally stopped, and now the eleventh hour is ticking its last…
And grief catches up to you anyway…
Grief for what was never…
Grief for what will never…
When you are alone…
Grief, too…is lonely.
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