Please listen: I am not writing any of this in order for you to commiserate with any woe I have felt in the past present or perhaps even twenty-four years from now. I am simply calling myself into experience and inviting you along into that experience.
I can still smell the malty flavor of the budweister brewery as I remember early morning when twenty-four years ago I woke up and knew something wasn't right.
I didn't know that day ould change my perspective on life and leave me never the same again.
I had a friend and co-worker named Michelle back then. When I told her I would never be the same she shooshed me, saying, "Don't say that!"
Interesting how truth plays into the old way of thinking and behaving.
"Don't speak. Don't unruffle anyone else's perspective. Be quiet."
Twenty-four years later I still write of her on her birthday.
I've given up on not speaking and am open to both unruffling and being unruffled.
I remember sitting in a circle with other moms in similar situations. We were mothers stripped of motherhood. There was a Mom named Sandy who became a Mom after years of hoping only to have a stillbirth, like I did. She had her little girl when she was in her early forties. She would be in her mid sixties now.
I used to see her every now and then. I remember once we bumped into each other in a department store in a nearby mall. The store has since gone out of business and the mall sits, unappreciated with all its anchor stores finding the same fate. The mall is more empty than full.
I haven't seen Sandy since I got pregnant with Katherine who is now twenty-two years old. I wonder sometimes how she is doing, what became of her, how her life turned out.
I think Sandy then saw me as one of the Moms whose motherhood wasn't stripped away anymore.
This isn't entirely true, though.
I have never known the romantic aspect of a completely smooth pregnancy or a pregnancy without the whispers in the back of the head. I have never known a pregnancy as a fullness, I've known it more as a time to avoid the eventual emptiness of last year's waiting.
Ripples of silence from those moments live on in disappointments and the under currents of misunderstandings. I imagine this will more than likely inhabit my life indefinitely. I have become comforable with thaose ripples..
I don't celebrate them, but I don't stand at the metaphorical door to block their entrance.
Please listen: I am not writing any of this in order for you to commiserate with any woe I have felt in the past present or perhaps even twenty-four years from now. I am simply calling myself into experience and inviting you along into that experience.
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Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at a First Friday soon, when it is warmer than it was in December!, in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
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