moth-er

by forestgumption

Life is like that. Life is like this. Replay the same old video, see it differently each time. I don’t know if I’m on death’s doorstep or what but my days are filled with fresh feelings from long ago. Like I’m reliving the most painful parts of my past but softened a bit with the distance of time, and yet all the more painful because all I can do is watch. I grieve every single day. Sometimes I feel like a dead woman walking or sitting or whatever. The minute I became pregnant, I didn’t realize I was signing a contract that stated that my life’s foremost priority would be to make sure my kid had a full life. Rich and deep and pungent. As I struggle with this fact and I struggle to accept that every decision I make from here on out is weighted on the other end by a small and beautiful little girl’s life and happiness, I feel that pressure that I once wrote about – the slight friction that brings sudden death to a moth. I die every single day. Slight friction. Sudden death. That’s what being a mother has been like. The times I’m allowed to fly have been wonderful, but of course, my kid is the light now. No matter what I want, I’m built to fly towards her. I’ll die trying to be around this light, while this light will glow and grow of its own accord now, hopefully long after I’m dead and gone.

Maybe this pressure is building in ways that force me to turn inwards and backwards. Downwards. To the roots of me, to the cross section of my trunk – let’s see where the growth rings indicate good times, or the years that were scarce. I can’t remember a single fucking thing I want to. My brain did that to itself as to not pull focus from the task at hand. The all encompassing monumental and super important task of being nicer to my daughter than I’ve ever been to myself. Best to ‘forget’ the past ‘bad’ because there’s a lot of newly discovered ‘bad/hard/impossible’ that will need to become normal and routine. I am glitching. I am seeing things and feeling things that I thought I’d properly digested and shit out. But apparently I did the classic band-aid treatment on some cavernous hurts and just kept trotting along.

How do I do this? Process the past, let it go, accept that I’m always going to have this slight impediment, that the pain when it rains will always remind me of the fall, accept that I’ll never climb to my full potential because I’m scarred from one careless mistake. How do I do all that without dropping the ball on my family. Is it ok to pass this on? Every slipped curse word, every stress-induced sore throat. Every justifiable outburst on my end getting lost in translation on the way to my daughter’s and partner’s ears. What do I do and how do I do it?? I’m so tired. I’m so sad. I know it won’t always feel like this, the human race would perish if guardians all succumbed to their weakest moments. I know I’m getting stronger, physically and mentally in ways that are new to me. But damn, this shit is hard. All I can do is write about it, draw about it, cut my hair off about it, and cry about it.

Music sounds really good in these moments though, you know? I’m not a complete pessimist.

g.g.