What It Is

This.  This is what it is.  This is what it is to be a single mom.  What it is to have a child with extra needs and challenges.  What it is to be divorced but still entwined with a master covert narcissist.  This is what it is.  It is to be estranged from my eldest son, for whom I share motherhood with a stranger, who is now preparing his own path to parenthood though the timing not ideal.  This life is fraught with sleepless nights, medical appointments, insurance denials, court hearings, mediation, therapies, durable medical equipment, acronyms only understood by walking our path, lonely nights of Netflix, and Pepsi to heal my soul...oh so much Pepsi.  It's compiled of sweet hand squeezes in the night, of Body Sox and compression vests, of educating the educators and advocating for advocacy.  It's watching the eyes of my innocent daughter when the Mean Girls are at the park; mourning the moment they realize her differences but she does not.  It's saying "goodbye" but I'm not ready yet, leaving a bedtime voice-mail in place of a story; it's hearing through the phone about her first lost tooth, and conjuring up tales of Santa's detour to drop presents at two houses.  This life of mine, of ours, does not sparkle like diamonds.  The moments of welcome silence are predictably followed by feelings of loss and emptiness-of something's missing.  Thoughts of our future, once dreamt about with limitless promise, now tell pictures of good enough and tiresome struggle for inclusion.  This-yesterday, today, tomorrow; this is what it is to be alive inside of me.  This life is a luxury of learning patience, compassion, empathy, acceptance, perseverance, true unconditional love at it's fullest.  This is the life I was chosen for.  This path has been worn by mothers before me; single mothers, partnered mothers, weary mothers, mothers who've known grief and loss and trauma, mothers who have learned the definition of love as one could only learn through mothering the broken.  I have mothered the broken.  I am mothering the broken.  I am the broken.  My mother is broken.  My marriage was broken.  My spirit was broken.  I'll leave you to ponder the plausibility that the brokenness is in fact the medicine that heals the broken.  All my love, until next time.