I feel torn apart - confused, angry, betrayed - all at once. Perhaps it is grief that has seeped into my veins like poison, corrupting my thoughts, twisting them into self-hatred. It forces me to question not just my choices, but my very worth as a mother. How could I, who fought, who endured, who gave every ounce of myself, now stand here feeling so utterly… discarded?
The strings I once believed were unbreakable - stronger than steel, woven with love, trust, sacrifice - have unraveled before my eyes. That sacred bond I poured my soul into, the bond between mother and son, one I thought could withstand time, distance, even life's cruelties, has proven more fragile than glass. And with its shattering comes a silence more deafening than any cry.
I remember every sleepless night, pacing with a fevered child in my arms. Every sacrifice of comfort, of dreams, so that he could have better ones. The relentless focus on his schooling, his education, his future - my heartbeat aligning with his progress.
Watching him step into independence, waiting with bated breath as he shaped his life, hoping, praying, that at the end of it all he would remember me - not as a burden, but as the reason he stood where he stood.
And yet, here I am. Forgotten. Cast aside. My existence - his very reason for existence - reduced to a shadow in the corner of his life. How? Why? Where did I falter? Did I fail him somehow? Was my love not fierce enough, my care not sufficient, my lessons not strong enough to make him the kind of man who would still turn back, look at me, and say, "I owe you everything"?
But then, like a cruel epiphany, the truth pierces me: expectation. That wretched, clinging parasite of the human heart. That cursed hunger to be acknowledged, repaid, remembered.
No matter how strong we believe we are, no matter how selfless we pretend to be, expectation worms its way in, feeding on the very love we thought was unconditional. And when it isn't met - when silence replaces gratitude - it devours us alive.
Is this the flaw of motherhood, or the flaw of being human? To give endlessly, to burn ourselves into ashes for someone else's light, and then ache when the warmth we once provided no longer circles back to us? I don't know anymore. All I know is that the ache is real, and it gnaws at me like a wound that refuses to heal.