20. ISELA DREAMS OF OTHER LIVES
ISELA DREAMS OF OTHER LIVES
When you’re a mother, everything gets in your way.
Time is non-linear. It feels like a smear.
Time blurs together in the dull repetition of going to work every single day in order to exist and then coming home to expectations of a nurturer.
You are made to believe that the world is your responsibility.
Every sound or grunt or creak. All of the hunger.
All of the pain. Every scar, every speck of dust, all of the god damn dishes.
Who were you before you were a mother? You have a figment of an idea.
You can’t really say anymore. As a mother, you are rudely interrupted minute after minute, you are bombarded thousands of times because everyone else needs you, everyone expects you to know what to do.
You aren’t really overwhelmed. That’s just being a mom.
You aren’t really hallucinating the ghosts of your past. That’s just motherhood.
You are not yourself. That’s just being a mommy.
Your first sense of freedom was letting go.
You let go of your first born and then the second born.
They went off to who knows where, who cares, you don’t ask.
It felt so good. The silence after. Then, you stopped telling people that you were a mother altogether.
Never again did you utter those words. You were married.
You were working. You were you. Not a mom. Not a womb. Not a predisposed identity.
When you can’t find yourself falling in love with the third little runt you gave birth to, it’s confusing at first, but you go with it.
It’s not that you can’t stand her, it’s more like, she has all the potential you didn’t.
She’s different than you. It's behind her eyes. You won’t break her even though you’ll try.
Maybe you were never meant to be a mother, but here you are.