It feels so strange to not have control. My life is compartmentalized into these neat boxes, and everything is labelled. When I go to bed I fear that I am going to wake up in the morning and have forgotten what I am supposed to eat for breakfast, what I should be packing for lunch at work. So I leave notes on the whiteboard, and alarms in my phone. Everything is so planned, my life has been orchestrated into the perfect box of smaller boxes.
But the emptiness I have felt without you since the moment he told me that he essentially had lost you is just so powerful. I thought that you were being cared for by him, but staying with them. On a visit to him, on the way to you – I found out that was not the truth. That it was not up to him about visits, but it was up to them. We lost you. There would be no fighting for you, it was just so. It would have been like fighting a hurricane while on foot. No lawyers, no social services, no social workers. Just people, and a small child.
It consumes me. It drives me to be a better person. It destroys me – but at the same time the thought of you had helped me blossom into a flower that I could never fully explain the sight or the smell of.
I often go back and try to find pieces of you around the digital world. I feel connected to you, I feel like I have been let in. I feel nourished and then I don’t. I thought I had all the answers, but this is the furthest thing from the truth. You are your own person. I am glad that you have such a beautiful life with such big feelings. But my brain gets confused.
I want to wake up one day and have no more pain about this. But that pain just reminds me that I did the bravest thing a mother could do. I let my child go because I could not give her the life she deserved.
So maybe this loss of control, was actually the only thing I could control in my life back then. To do the right thing for her.
Becoming Brave 