Truncated Motherhood | No Points For Style

The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun.
The brightness of our life is gone.
?Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I had a therapist about a year and a half ago who gave me a hard time for maintaining Jacob and Abbie?s bedrooms when they had been gone so long. ?It?s not healthy,? said the therapist. ?You have to accept that this is what has happened in your life. Your kids are gone.?

I knew the instant she said it that she was wrong. In the darkest months and years of our alienation, when those kids and I could barely speak words to each other, those beds were the only invitation I could extend to them. The space I reserved for them in my home was proxy for the love they could not hear me speak. When Abbie came home, after the angst and anger were finished, she told me that she always knew she could come back, knew her bed was there for her, and even when she hated me, knew she was welcome in my family.

Jacob will be 19 in just a few weeks. He hasn?t lived in my house for nearly 5 years (and it may be nearly 6 years but the math is far beyond me now), and tonight, for the first time in 19 years minus 52 days, there is no bed for him here. I boxed up his few things and put them in a closet, took his bed to the donation center, and had his dad come get his drumset. With Abbie, I have experienced a miracle, but if there is a miracle with Jacob, it will be of a different sort.

This truncated motherhood is unnatural. Wrong. Jacob was the brightest part of my life, and in five long, excruciating years, I still have not learned to be content with his absence. I don?t know exactly what kind of pain I would be feeling if Jacob was still my son in all the ways, instead of just in the biological ones, as he moved into his adult life, but I know it would be different. He is mostly a stranger to me now. He is the person who made me a mother, a boy-man I find endlessly and intensely fascinating, but he is not really my family anymore. I won?t give up. I could never give up on knowing my magical, enchanting son, and to other parents suffering the horrors of alienation I always say, as long as our children are alive, there is hope. But what hope I had for a relationship beyond a perfunctory one is very small now.

He hasn?t lived with me in a long time, but tonight, for the first time, he really doesn?t live here anymore. There?s nothing for it except to breathe into the pain and pray that some day, we will all be healed; that eventually, I will lay down my grief and walk away from it, even for a little while.

But for tonight I am on my knees, screaming I love him I love him I love him and begging the universe for just one more chance.

Please.

Source: http://www.nopointsforstyle.com/2012/10/truncated-motherhood.html

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