dborys

Every year when Mother’s Day rolls around, I face it with mixed feelings. It brings back memories of a little boy cupping my cheek in his hand lovingly, and another little boy crying in my arms when the children at school laughed at him. But it also brings back memories of loss, and makes me question choices that I made which impacted those two wonderful children and the men they would become.

At the risk of embarrassing my sons who I lost and then found again, I’ve decided to post a link to an essay I wrote about our history together. I hope they’ll forgive me and maybe even be able to understand me a little better after reading it.

Click here to read the whole story.

“I’ve decided the boys would be better off with me.” I heard my ex-husband’s words, but could not quite comprehend. “I’m not bringing them back.”

That’s all I remember of the phone conversation with my now ex-husband, that and the animal-like sound that rose from a dark hole inside me when I finally hung up. The pain laid me out prostrate on the floor. I wanted to die.

This wailing remained constant in my ears from August of 1986 until January 1988, audible to no one but myself and my God. Even now I sometimes hear it in my dreams. A wild woman raged inside me, a gut-level, primitive instinct that wanted to tear its way through the jungle: a maniacal mother armed with an AK47 blazing bullets as she destroyed everything in her path.

But I did not want my children to come to me over the torn and bloody remnants of my rage.

via Fighting Fire Without Fire.

Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too many to mention. Not the lyrics to My Way. In fact, the opposite. Regrets so often rule my past, my present, my future. A summation of my life, an excuse to glue my ass to the recliner in front of the television, a roadblock to progress.

I let the love of my life go years ago. He’d been gentle, loving, so opposite of the abusive spouse I’d had to leave. I like to think that I had no control over it. He fell in love with someone else. If I can’t have him, I remember bargaining with God, bring me someone just as great, but with a bonus. Make him a writer or an artist.

And there came my artist, the potter, the activist, the vegan. It had seemed so “meant to be.” He’d walked across Russia to promote peace, lived and worked at a homeless shelter in Atlanta, had found something worth noting in this small town girl whose past held nothing more interesting than a tumultuous divorce and a history of breast cancer. It would be easy enough to blame this new person for my giving up on the one I really wanted.

Except I have evidence of who is really to blame. Drafts of a letter I wrote to my love, telling him how happy I was to no longer feel so love sick over him. Would I have fewer regrets if I didn’t have these old letters and journal entries to remind me of what I’ve done and how I felt in the past? Old letters written when I was young and reckless. Journaling my thoughts and feelings and actions.

How do I not regret things done or undone? It’s too late to change anything. And really there are no guarantees that anything would turn out any differently if I could. I had my love, I had my artist. And now I have me.