Understanding the Divine Secrets.

“There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.” – Rebecca Wells

There was never any doubt in my mind that I would be a mother. It was simply something that would come at the appropriate time as plotted out on the master schedule, and I had no intention of staying at home. My mother had done it and I turned out just fine. And, in all frankness, I didn’t see any evidence to point to staying at home as the appropriate course of action for me to take. That isn’t to imply that staying at home isn’t the wrong path.  

It just wasn’t mine.

I chased down two degrees and a new life in a new country, when I wasn’t looking, a man chased down me. Together we raced toward future dreams and the little boy and the little girl, in that order, that completed our orderly plan we had set out for ourselves.

When Sandra Bullock pried open Pandora’s Box and let her mother’s secret frailties loose, I couldn’t fathom anything less unfathomable than a mother driven to madness. She had a husband, beautiful children and a comfortable home. And love. Yet somehow it all unraveled.

When death rudely interrupted life I understood.

Women hold within them divine secrets, like secret lovers never to be spoken of we struggle to hide our failures and fears. We build walls around ourselves and walls around the ones we love until there are walls within walls within walls within walls. Centuries of struggle for equality have taught us that weakness is not a virtue and yet it is the very softness that we fight to contain that makes us the nurturers we are desired and desire to be.

Single motherhood, and single fatherhood for that matter, are difficult paths to walk. But widowed-with-young-children is something altogether different. Something I was entirely unprepared for and which has tested every resolve, every strength, every weakness.

There are moments that will never be erased, either for them or for me.

That morning plays back like a black and white reel, silent and disjointed. Days later my children would tell a friend that the sounds that left me were unlike anything they had heard before. To this day, there is no sound in my memory, but there is a lingering fear amongst us all when my voice rises in anger and frustration and fear.

The truth of history may show that I demonstrated a certain amount of strength and resilience. But what if the history they remember will be the moments when everything inside me unravels?