The Pyre of Motherhood
I am smothered in grief
Like a piece of meat whose pure essence is being drowned by an inescapable sauce
both delicious in its decadence...
richness...
empty calories
while clogging all the important parts that allow life to flow
"Why does no one tell you?" I ask...
"They try but we aren't able to listen, to hear, to imagine the pain..." a wise woman declares reminding me of my own blindness, arrogance, humanity
We do our work
We sing our songs
We make our lives
We build our truths and our tribes...or not
All the while standing in the middle of the fire - we are always setting ourselves on fire to keep others warm and no one notices...least of all us...until we are burned up, nothing left, and when our warmth has burnt out - we are no longer useful - their anger sets in, "Why have you failed us?"
And all the warmth that has been given - at great cost - for all these millenia - is forgotten with swift and aggressive simplicity...no one ever asking if the fire had caused us pain
We never asked ourselves so why would they even consider this
Surely - they tell themselves - if we had been in pain we would have doused the fire and turned to healing our wounds with the same care and attention we give to theirs...right?
but it is not true...we did not know we were burning ourselves up...we never thought to ask...and when we may have begun to consider it, the pain of not meeting their expectations...the ones we had so carefully created...was too big to bear
So we remained smouldering...doing what we understood the job to be:
To be good and right and respected we must be self-less, low maintenance, lovely, hollowed out, needless, vessels - containing multitudes - yet claiming only scraps of space - left over chicken nuggets of space, and waiting quietly until we are needed.
Is it trite to ask, what if it could be different? Everything feels like bullshit at the moment. I need help making sense of it. I also need witnesses to the hurt. I don't want you to fix it. I just want you to see me.
