A Moment of Remembering what Liberation Feels Like
At 15 you were the moon & stars— An image so bright, I could hardly look at you.
Darkness dissipated & I learned that life would be good, filled with struggle, a good struggle, the kind that, together, we would take on to the finish — & struggle we did.
The loss of three, those we desperately wanted to carry on our name & the love we found. Moments of beauty turned into years of bliss, smiles from deep within— & even in moments of extreme challenge, with the loss of the only one who, besides me, could love you deeply, we somehow made it through.
Along the way, my desire for knowledge, truth, movement made you uncomfortable, unsettled, unsure that I wasn’t trying to interrupt what we had created, carved out just for ourselves. I intended to preserve that part of our lives, protect it;
My heart’s desire was to expand it... More for me. Meant more for you. Then something shifted.
Moments of intimacy, if I am honest, became work; a means to an end. A service to cure your anxiety.
A way to serve, be compliant & remember that my body was an offering. In your temple, it lost meaning for me.
And when the other losses came year
. . .after year . . .after year
you told me, Well it wasn’t a real baby anyway & I realized that I didn’t know you anymore.
But the women in my life saved me.
They gave me hope that even if I could not bear a child, I was a woman to be
respected loved, cared for believed in.
I had purpose beyond motherhood & wifehood. & this quest I began.
The beginning of my liberation meant the end of our journey.
Yes, I came to understand that you were, in fact, part of my journey but not my destination.
For a decade, I sat in the silence of wanting more. I moved forward with dreams & goals meaning I moved away from the world in which you lived & protected.
But somehow, we still slipped back into each other’s orbits; coming together only to fall apart.
& then she came into existence. My reaction surprised me.
My tears were not those of joy, but of anticipation for perhaps
another loss
another affirmation of my lack of womanness
my inability to provide the ultimate offering to the universe.
& then she:
Arrived. Survived.
Blossomed.
We thought we had reached the PromiseLand. She would take us back to that original moment of innocence when a kiss was enough to make my heart pound louder than a symphony of ten African drums.
With all of her beauty came challenges, shifting sands; my need for grace & your need for forgiveness for being jealous of your child, mad at me for deeply loving what we both had longed for, for so very long.
These things are never intentional. We are only, & always human. & at times that is ugly ragged around the edges pitiful.
But I thought that if I loved you more, showed you my Super womaness degrees earned diapers changed dinners made that it would save us. But saving was a stop that we had passed long ago in places that even the Kama Sutra could not bring us back to.
Others had entered your spirit taken your attention filled you with the belief that your purpose was not to be an attentive poppa, but someone who should seek the simplicity of life—
Recapturing moments before our baby arrived, living the illusion that we only had each other to care for in complete bliss.
But I was always the servant apology maker worker slave,
the one who held it up & together.
But there was now a rip in my cape; the giving of life had both strengthened & weakened me. By the time I discovered where you had been spending your mind & time, I had nothing left within me to help preserve the façade that this would all be okay after a good night’s sleep.
& so, I left.
Not physically, like the first time before I returned, but my heart took a vacation from the space my body occupied; sending me postcards years later, refusing to return home.
Then I swayed. & I knew that the protection I had under God — Christ — The Spirit had been compromised. I sought joy in another place that only filled me with guilt. But here we were, trying to travel three roads, separate ones of our own, & a single one where we were to be the parents we thought we had believed we had wished we had.
Having moments of success but mostly moments of disappointment at our lack of perfection even though it appeared to others that we were indeed the perfect couple.
The day I saw the email was one that knocked the wind out of me.
And your reaction your breakdown my breaking through left what would be the mark of our future. One where we could not be together unless trust could be re-established.
But soon, your anxiety would complicate all that we knew & challenge my existence as wife, mother, woman.
One who had her own desires & tried to find a way to balance it all.
The beam broke. The balance lost.
& we entered the next stage, a transition into the unknowing.
Drunkenness from broken dreams & alcohol corrupted the journey. Verbal violence & moments of pre- domestic madness captured in the twilight zone; moments that helped me to realize that I must break free. That my freedom was inextricably linked to your need to keep me caged into the role that I had played for over two decades. To be free, I had to seek liberation of my soul & this is what I have been doing in the four years that I have been physically gone from the space that we shared.
I was in debt, but I am free. I was alone, but I am free. I needed help, but I am now free enough to know. I ripped the tattered cape from my neck—
It fell from my body; my armor that had kept me both strong & weak, preserving & disintegrating me at the same time.
L O V E
I have come to the realization that no man on earth will ever be able to comprehend the depths of love I have to offer. For I am a stranger to myself when it comes to this. My love flows like water, reaching levels deep beyond the surface. My love expands contracts opens again in the presence & shape of the lover before me— Meeting & exceeding what he offers proudly as his all. My love, wild & open, shy & wanting, spills over, tripping over my tongue, racing ahead of my heart & causing me to lose touch with myself. But it is myself that I most want to be with sit with allow to breathe.
No labels, without words.
What does I love you really mean anyway? These three words can never truly express what happens to my mind-body soul when my eyes & spirit connect with another traveler along the journey— A traveler, who, like me, is in search for something deeper ethereal undefined.
The truth is, I haven’t a clue what love is. But I now know I have the courage to not speak these three words again for they betray me & my very essence. They go against what I know to be true: words cannot define Love, words limit what Love can be. Love is what I wish to evolve into, what I imagine one day I can become.
