Spinning

I'm spinning in so many directions.

I started rattling off a variety of financial details to Jeanine this morning. She looked me and said this can wait.

No, this is what I can deal with right now. It is about stuff, numbers, things. Concrete items I can move around, consider in my hands. I want to do this, it makes sense, and it makes me feel grounded. Sure.

No, Sara. It can wait.

I’m not going to feel grounded or secure. I have hope and loss colliding inside me. My mother, her rules are gone. How will I be now? What will change without her real voice on the end of a phone line or at the head of the table? I am hopeful I will find a new way to breathe. I have so many words inside a big, sharply edged box locked in my chest, impenetrable in a body that was not.

I have no one to protect anymore from what I lived through. All the screams, the horror stashed away inside the box can be set free.

I am afraid. I am still the little girl who desperately clung to my mother’s legs in the kitchen, wanting to hold on for safety. She was the only real safety in my house. She could be cruel with her words, occasionally slap me but never physically shamed me. Wrapped around her leg was the only time my body was impenetrable.

Now it’s gone. Ashes in an urn, tucked away next to someone else’s ashes in another urn.

The kitchen floor is gone.

No more numbers. No more spinning.

My mother is dead.