Where I am…

Hello, and happy Friday. (also, happy February, finally!) It’s that time, once again, where I join the cool kids and write inspired by the Five Minute Friday prompt, linking up over at the FMF site.

Let’s dive right in, then… (Full disclosure, My dog Elenor’s squeaky toy is providing my writing music so no telling what we’ll get…)

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Drafty old home, snow blown landscape on the outside, pear scented and filled with photos on the inside. This house I live in looks like mine, it sometimes feels like mine, but other times it feels like one more facade to pretend this life is a life that it is not.

For years I was told, well before the inauthenticity of social media was on trend, that my life was a projection of playing house. Not a real mom. Not a real marriage. Not a real ____________. Playing house- pretend. It did not feel like that then, deep in the trenches of adoptive parenting, broken hearts and trying to bleed my best into everything, only to fail miserably time and again, ending up bled dry.

Today though, surrounded by photos of moments I both remember and do not, silence filling these “empty nest” walls far more than sound- I feel like the accusations were more right and I was just the fool who was last to see it. Attempting to work through an issue I have been so overwhelmed with regarding my motherhood, one of my kids assured me that my kids don’t have to be a part of my life to keep me a mother, and if I were to die they would surely come to my funeral.

Two months later I am still not sure how to take those words, but I can honestly say the only validated the fear that it was nothing more than a role I overcommitted to, and now the show has run its course. Finito, curtain closed.

This is where I am at. It is brutal and unwelcoming, like the icy snow winds outside of this home. A life’s pursuit of motherhood feels like a forced journey that collectively those involved feel I should not have taken, but I did and now I am lost.

Where does that leave me? I don’t know.

But truthfully speaking, plain and simple, this is where I am.

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