August 5, 2019

There are baby pictures on the wall 

Of a house made for a family

One lives here now

Held together with so much love, globs of toothpaste

and shoes everywhere

fighting over the dishes and hugging in the kitchen all the time

A fifteen year old boy slips quietly in the shadows 

through the night when we're asleep

No one to ask him questions

No one to have to give an answer to

Polite, distant, disinterested and distracted

in the way 15 year old boys are

No one calls me Mom

It's likely no one ever will

I've moved on from pity 

to acceptance

Of low egg counts and hormones bottomed out

rendering it nearly impossible

I did this to myself 

I say to my soon to be husband

(can i really be a person who will have a husband?)

It was my fault for not doing it earlier

For not figuring it out sooner

For not being a different person before

He doesn't understand

Can't understand the hormones of womanhood and the

constant need to nurture that spills out

even when there is no one to nurture

I'm 38.  

Has anyone ever been so old?

my family members have all been stagnant ages

my mother, father, aunts, uncles, steady constant

through all my stages

all the world's a stage and I was the only one with a part

Now I see the toll of time 

and i can't believe i am here

Wishing for the clock to have turned back around

knowing too, nothing would change even if it did

I am who i am and I was what I was

I was a 25 year old with crippling anxiety 

I was a 28 year old who was unstable

A 30 year old who self medicated

A 32 year old who found her way back

A 36 year old who fell in love 

Who went to therapy

Who got her shit together

A 37 year old with a ring on her finger

And now i am 38

With baby pictures on my wall

pictures that i didn't take

of children I didn't make

dreaming of babies floating to the bottom of the water

and me, swimming down after them

trying to see their faces 

so I could just know what they would have looked like

before i wake up

to hug in the kitchen

and live a life that i never dreamed could be mine

with a ring on my finger

and him

always him