What if?

They say that having young kids brings a lot of stress in a marriage, that it brings your personal past and issues out; as you try to do better with the little beings that are now in existence from the love that you had together. What if this is not enough?  

They have been through a lot, and there is love, but what if that is not sufficient? What if she fails him? What if he fails her?

What if she stopped with the ever-raging   “mommy wars”: the constant passive aggressive whispers that come from the background melding together into excessive white noise. “We never did it that way, when we had kids?”, “”, and all the little remarks that they are all guilty of as if they are at all an expert, of how they had parented themselves with no mistakes and with no regrets. What if she just stood her ground and just stopped with the constant passive aggressive games. What is she held their gaze and did not waver?

What if she fails when she goes back to work? What if the time away causes her to lose her place and the chance for promotion.  What if she will never win at the office politic games. What if she never gets a chance because she is not their brand of cool?

What if it does not matter anymore, and she stood tall and for herself and on her own for her own. The need for perfection is in everything. No one can be the perfect worker, mother, wife or even friend but we pretend that we are, what if we just stopped, if we stopped acting. What if she stopped judging herself on the unrealistic and toxic standards that fill every role for her identity, what if she just stopped giving a fuck and instead embraced humility without the need for perfection; to allow herself to grow. What if?

Fractures.

She was so beautiful, I mean she still is, but back then there was a radiance that emanated from her.  Her dusky skin, dark brown eyes, high cheekbones with her strong signature dimples with an ebony mane that was always wavy from the thick braid that she wore the night before.

I was never able to be close to her or even touch her for too long without getting burned.  She loved us in her way ( the best she was able to ), but she was splintered from a time where we could not travel to save her.

I used to yearn for her as a child and be terrified of her at the same time. I spent my days watching for any signs of one of her fractures erupting into a fiery ball at my brother and I….I was never able to get out of the way fast enough to get out of the way. My brother was my protector, and he was good at avoiding her wrath. We would hide and play games,, like soldiers in a bunker, always there for each other.

 Her daily laughter from things we could not see was haunting.  Her laugh would travel through the house like an echo of the illness.  We had few friends growing up and the ones we had stayed for only a short time once our home was exposed.

The thing about growing up with someone with mental illness is it spreads to all in a family.  My dad never had the heart to commit her, she was too precious to him.  She was overcome by fear and paranoia from everything, he felt like it would kill her.  He loved her as no man has ever loved a woman and that love combined with her illness broke my childhood.

Her love was like small rays of light from the sun through a window, but her anger was like an explosion.  I know now in my new years of motherhood what that meant.  How profoundly that affected me and how that will always be part of me.  I know now that I will never get the comfort that I so desperately needed as a young child or the closure as an adult.  Her illness came like crashing tides that she would be swept up in and was unable to get out.  We were all left with her little ripples, but those ripples are just a layer of what I have become.

I still grieve at times, but I do know that the importance of the gestures and actions I make, my children will carry with them.  The ripples will lesson from I to them and from them to their children until there is only calm and a serene place from where she was.