When the World Was Pink

I have been told countless times that my daughter is almost exactly like me. We have the same expressions, the same interests, the same speech patterns. We have the same hair, the same laugh, the same chin, the same nose. We have the same love language (touch), the same temper (intense). She has my OCD and the same obsession with pink. We can both talk nonstop.

I see parts of her that aren't me, though. She is fearless. She is sure on her feet. She takes to swimming and running and all other physical activities like a natural.

My whole life is about her.

--

It is almost impossible to think of myself apart from being a mother; and yet it is this aspect—this non-mother-ness—that weighs heavily on me. As the annulment process reaches the next stage, reading all sorts of summaries of reports and testimonies, I realize that before that, I couldn't think of myself apart from being a wife.

For what am I—now—if you strip away my being a mother, a wife?

I am lonely. I am afraid. I am tired. I am confused.

I would like to have someone take care of me, ask me about my day, massage my head, my shoulders. I would like someone to tell me that my laughter lifts his/her spirits. That my laughter matters.

I would like someone to notice how my laughter has been hollow of late. How my eyes are sad. How he/she listens to me weep at night and stays up late to tell the ghosts to go away. To leave me alone.

I want to hear, "I love that you take care of me. But here, let me take care of you."

Just don't tell me you love me. I disbelieve it now if it doesn't come from my family and best friends.

--

I'm just tired. And in a few days, it will have been a year since.

And in that year, I will have been alone by choice. Too afraid and disgusted and walled-in.

--

Sometimes, my condition makes me doubt my own memories of happiness. I doubt if those happiness-es were real or just a by-product of my mania.

I do remember one moment when I was neither wife nor mother.

I was driving home from one of my classes in the dead of winter. The roads were miraculously clear and the snow was still. It was moments after dusk and the world around me was pink. The sky, the snow, the air—everything was pink. And the world was quiet and still. I opened my windows and drove home in silence. I didn't notice my tears and how they had all but frozen on my cheeks. I don't even remember why I cried. All I knew was that, at that moment, I was happy.

--

I go back to bed and nurse the abdominal pain that—contrary to what everyone said—didn't go away after I gave birth. (This PMS, unlike most of my relationships, though, is constant, reliable.) I close my eyes as this inchoate migraine has turned me photosensitive again. And my child love languages me calm. For now, I am only mother, for it is the one thing that makes sense to me. She whispers, "I love you," and for a moment, I forget how long it has been since I last heard that as a form of a lie.