Her, She... Who to Me?
And there she was. She sat by the
tree and stared at me as I walked closer squeezing my brother’s arm tighter and
tighter whispering in his ear the promise he made with me, “Remember Rob,
you’re here for me.” And there she was. Her eyes were red from the tears she
wiped away with the tissues in her hand. Her legs were crossed and her purse
lay on her lap. She got up to embrace me and asked “Can I hug you?” I jerked
back like a boxer and squeezed my brother tighter, I said “No.” And there she
was.
For seventeen years, I have never
spoken to, heard from, known, or seen “Her”. She had always been a figment of
my imagination. Someone I thought about while my two brothers experienced a guy’s
day with my father and my two sisters would go out with my godmother and I was left at home with my grandparents. I thought about her when I became
a woman and was too afraid to share it with the females in my life. I thought
about her at night, before I fell asleep, at school, when all the other kids
would talk about their families, in the bathroom, every time I escaped there to
just clear my head, at the park, when the other kids would hold their mother’s
hand and smile. When I was younger, naive and believed she looked like the lady
on the television show with a sock puppet who had short, red, curly hair, lived
in a nice house and would spoil me…that’s when I thought of her. This woman was
constantly in my thoughts, but the day I met her, surprisingly, I had nothing
to say.
It wasn’t because I was shocked, or
shy; it was legit because there wasn’t a bone in my body that cared to
communicate with her. There was nothing that was going to make me care. My
heart went cold and my ears steamed up. I wanted to punch her, but I couldn’t
even move. Part of me wanted to run in the opposite direction and not even hear
her voice, but the other half had me glued to the sidewalk. There I was,
standing in front of my birth mother. The lady, who I felt, was the root of all
my emotional/anger/trusting issues. The lady whose love for drugs was bigger
than the love a parent should have for their 3 babies, and caused her to put us
up for adoption. It was because of her that I felt unworthy of anyone’s love
and cried myself to sleep all the time. Finally, she was sitting directly in front
of me, an arm’s length away, and I had nothing to say. For the first time, I
wasn’t crying; she was and I could care less...
