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.