Nestlings

by Nat Cassidy

They had the scars (Ana put the knife down) (What were you doing?!) to prove they had made it through the worst years of their lives. But only survivors have scars in the first place.

What do you do when you’ve lost faith in everything? Even your own body?

A garden of resentment was sown that day. Its hideous plants bloomed at irregular, unpredictable intervals. A sprig of hate. A blossom of blame. Entire teeming hedgerows of depression and alienation.

But mothers can handle a lot of sensations at once, can’t they? It’s part of the job: to be torn open and persevere.

How much pain is caused by hiding pain from others? Wait, why the hell am I thinking I’m about to be in pain?! Then, suddenly, the staircase stopped. No more steps.

Adulthood was all about compromises, wasn’t it? You decide what you need, what you want, and shift your priorities around until you find the least bad combination. Each compromise was a link in a chain, and if that chain dragged you down to the bottom of the East River? Well … at least you had Netflix and Spotify to distract you while you sank.

“Be careful you don’t get taken advantage of. One problem with absurdists is they don’t always know when something stops being funny and starts being corrosive.”

Motherhood was breakage, was expansion, was depletion, was fulfillment, was creation, and an endless series of goodbyes. Motherhood was contradiction. That was its beauty. That was its horror. And if it drove you mad trying to square its inconsistencies, well, tough luck, because motherhood cared nothing about what happened inside of you. Motherhood had already taken what it needed from inside of you and had given it to the world. Anything else was up to you and fate. Bashert.

Grief is the space between two states of being: who you were and who you are.

I think Healing begins when you finally recognize there is no moving on. Only moving forward. You don’t actually leave anything behind. You carry it with you. That’s why the process of healing can feel so slow: you’re carrying more weight now.