without a cape
Mother-love is all-consuming. You have this person who looks to you as his/her world.
Every need, every hurt, every victory of theirs is somehow felt by you, too.
When your child is sick, you wonder how you can have the strength to deal with things, but you do. When she's happy you feel as if your heart will explode.
The hardest part about motherhood for me is that I feel like I’ve lost part of my identity. I’ve become Mom and not the woman, the me, that begot her. This loss of self can be frustrating, just as sometimes the responsibility of being a Mom is beyond overwhelming—especially if one sits and thinks about the responsibility and dissects it.Once you consider motherhood thoughtfully the weight, the heaviness, sets in.
Add single motherhood into this equation, and now you need a cape to lift the load.
I don’t have a cape.
I hurt and want to curl up on the bed in a fetal position and not emerge for days. I don’t want to nest—I want to cocoon where I can hide from the pain, from the feelings of worthlessness and unattractiveness that torment me incessantly.
Over and over I wonder how this woman was more interesting, worth more of your time than I was.
Didn’t my taking your calls at 3:30 a.m. when you searched for your ex-fiancee’s shoes put me in a special category?
Shouldn’t it have?
Obviously it didn’t, and I don’t know why.
I don’t get my closure, so cocooning is where I want to go…but. But I can’t do that; mothers don’t do that.
Instead I busy myself with some mundane chore. I cry while doing it, and Emily is confused. She pulls Halloween decorations out and hangs crystals on a chandelier that I never got around to hanging just to please me, to make me smile.
The smiles don’t come; I struggle to function on some level.“Go to bed Mom; you’re tired. I can watch TV and MooShu will keep me company.”
I take her suggestion as an imperative and grab my too-quiet cell phone to dial those intimately acquainted with our story.
I am told that I knew that you didn’t want what I wanted from mouths owned by ears tired of my re-hashed story.I'm logical, but it doesn’t mean that I didn’t have hope, that I didn’t fall in love.
I want to scream "I wasn't blind to the reality," but I don't.
See, they didn't hear you whisper the things you whispered. They didn’t see your hand caress my cheek gently when you thought I was sleeping, nor did they feel the lush weight of your calf you placed over mine when I rolled away.
I was there, remember?
I heard the whispers, received the caresses, felt the weight.
It was real, wasn’t it, for a time anyway?
Please tell me it was.
What you didn’t realize is that you weren’t just with Rachel. You were with a mother, a mother who has to function because her daughter needs her. Rachel can fall apart, but the mom--well, she can’t.I just keep swimming, but damn how I wish I had a cape.