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I’d learned early on that coloring inside the lines earned you praise and respect.
Their words might inspire in the moment, but they usually had nothing useful to offer when the real world imploded all around you.
We cannot compare our grief or even our happiness with anyone else’s. We all have our own road to travel, okay?”
Habits can either save you or kill you.
I had a bad habit of shutting people out when I didn’t feel like baring my soul—or being judged about what my soul would expose about me.
You may have a successful job and a beautiful home and many people who respect you. That doesn’t mean you have the right to treat your mother the way you treated her. She is still your mother and deserves more than you will ever know. So think of that the next time you disrespect her
It was strange how two people could have so many different memories about the past.
I was never going to give up my career or my independence. In other words, I was never going to be the kind of wife my mother had been.
The emotional and physical pain I’d endured during my two-year journey with struggling to conceive came roaring back. The surgery, the fertility drug injections, the daily ultrasounds, and two rounds of in vitro fertilization had nearly broken me. And some days, like today, my mind failed to protect me from the visceral memories of one of the most traumatic times of my life.
For the first time in a long time, seeing my mom was exactly what I had needed. So he called and lied and said I’d had an ovarian cyst rupture and was in a lot of pain. She was at my bedside within two hours with an entire arsenal of herbs, teas, medications, and a big tube of Vitacilina: her go-to cure-all for every physical ailment out there. She stayed with me while Jason went to the office, nursing me back to health with her homemade albóndigas soup and comforting presence. My mom left sometime later that night after Jason came home and I’d finally fallen asleep. She’d called to check on
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Because it would be my bad luck that I’d get in an accident or murdered, and that’s how my mother would find out I had lied to her.
“He wanted a divorce because the woman he’d been sleeping with was pregnant, and he wanted to go be with her and their baby,” I began. “He told me he was leaving that night. He packed a bag, told me he’d call me to discuss things later, and then walked out of our home. I think he must have realized that he forgot his cell phone when he was about a mile away and stupidly tried to make a U-turn in the middle of the street. The main street to our house is narrow and curvy. Police said he must have lost control of his car, went off the road, and hit a tree. He died on impact.” The darkness I’d
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I was more devastated that he was going to have a baby without me.
Had I been with Benny for so long that I’d forgotten how to be someone other than his wife? And why did it scare me to find out?
And before I could talk myself out of it, I clicked the link and registered for my first ever creative writing class.
❤️
Even still, I stayed.
Sometimes we have to do things we’ve never done in order to grow. Because when you stop growing, you die.”
He told me that the day before he left for college, all his left shoes had disappeared. She shipped them to his dorm a few weeks later.
“You let him have an affair all those years?”
fuck you, wtf?????
And one man offered to set me up with his son.
“I’ve cried enough today. If you hug me, I don’t think I will ever stop.”
long. I was done blaming others, though. This was the only life I had, and it was about time I took ownership of it.
Because you can’t tell a story about mothers and daughters without reflecting on the women in your own life and the lessons they’ve handed down from generation to generation.
