This Country Called Home

There is a baby inside me always crying out for her mother. There is a mother who walked away from birth without her baby. Without me. There is a me that returned home with a different tongue that tried to learn its roots. There are roots that will never come back. There’s a me that insists on surviving despite the immensity of her loss. There’s a country called home who opens her arms and wonders how to hold me. There’s a me who hates to be held. And there’s a baby in me who wants nothing more than embrace.

In this country called home there's a family tethered to me. By blood if not by their memory. Certainly not by my recollection. Trust, I’ve attempted to call. But most days the silence of the abyss answers.

Genesis is a trigger warning that always shakes me to my core.

I can’t stop writing about ghosts I don’t know. I can’t help but think maybe I was abandoned because I wasn't worthy and no one came back for me because I didn’t cry correctly. Perhaps that is why I became a writer– to demand a witness.

Does anyone out there listening to these fossils of my suffering want to take a turn shouldering this pain? Anyone?

No?

God, I guess I’ll take it. All of it.
The abundance of beauty too. This life is not bereft of either.

Is this what healing is? Taking all that we are, where we’ve come from, what’s been done to us, and what we’ve done and learning to call ourselves whole in our pursuit of living well? Perhaps healing is the mess in the middle of our wide, wide, selves. Is reconciling our past as we carry it to the future. Maybe healing is just the balm of forgiveness. A billion times over in a million different ways.

Good God this good grief and this good good grace.
I’ve been practicing the art of surrender. The ritualistic tango of holding on and letting go.

Let me stay strong enough to love through it all. Let me stay afraid enough to understand the gravity of breath. Let me be brave enough to see I get to make choices– life doesn’t just happen to me but I am interacting in the fray.

In this country called home I am asked where I belong and who I come from.
All I can say, all I know is
here.

It’s not enough but it’s all I have.