After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

Children think we make them, but we don’t. They exist somewhere else, before us, before time. They come into the world and make us. They make us by breaking us first.

It wasn’t just the loss of a thing that was a burden but the loss even of desiring it. We should at least get to keep our desire, I thought.

I couldn’t regret my children, but I also couldn’t be free from them, from the way they had opened me up, left me exposed.

“Maybe we don’t always make our fate, but we decide how to meet our fate,”

Each mother is different except in the ways she is broken, right to the marrow; even the softest parts can crumble.

Hope would never come knocking on your door. You had to claw your way toward it, rip it out of the cracks of your loss where it poked out like some weed, and cling to it.