her kids were all grown up—she’d cared and cooked and cleaned and cajoled and consoled and done the best she humanly/womanly/motherly could until night sweat wept through her pores, until her body screamed with chronic pain, and her soul begged for rapture out of this hellhole.
her kids mourned her existence as much as they might have her death when faced with a house that wasn’t a home anymore, when their father’s shell crumpled into a non-being of denial—incapable of adulting, or paying rent, bills, let alone work—when the one kid who’d planned to study stopped and joined the one who’d started working, when both panicked and barely floated through the mayhem and heartbreak boiling into a melting pot of non-family but full-on responsibilities.
everybody shook their heads and tut-tutted and agreed she had always been trouble or a narcissist or too much of a goody-two-shoes, how they’d seen the signs when she’d greeted them with a nod or too-bright a smile at the bakery, or too-sweet a wave in the street, or too-funny a joke at the park where she’d walked the dog she’d never wanted and collected its shit while forcing down the gag rising in her throat and holding back her tears to avoid over-watering the yellowing leaves of her misery.
everybody talked about those poor kids left behind—what kind of mother could… a father… yes… but a mother?—yet ignored the pain incrusted on those poor kids’ foreheads, the sorrow lines covering their childhood dimples, because it wasn’t everybody’s problem, just good gossip that made everybody’s life seem brighter and happier somehow, and it was not everybody’s fault if those poor kids were on their own with no mother and a ghost of a father, or if they were left with no youth, no life, no money—like toddlers thrown into a pond to learn to swim while everybody watched and clapped as they drowned.
no one wondered what could make a woman who always asked about their kids/cat/dog/mother and helped her elderly neighbours—a mother who loved her family more than herself, and never forgave herself for picking up her kids late once—leave those poor kids behind, when she’d worked so hard to make a home where she had to beg to rest for a minute when she came back from work, a minute without anyone asking where their socks/shoes/underpants/keys/mobile/brain were or whether she’d done a laundry, without anyone asking ‘what’s for dinner’ and complaining about her answer, anyone changing the channel as soon as she’d settled to watch her favourite show, or chewing complaints so loud it triggered her misophonia.
no one cared how those poor kids were doing as they were thrust into adulthood and responsibilities they didn’t expect or understand and couldn’t afford, when their only remaining parent disintegrated into an armchair that swallowed his sweat and life force and took on his shape, while the kitchen echoed with long gone laughter and maternal love and a whisper of leftover conversations, but only perspiring bitterness remained in the living room.
she let go of a life that overwhelmed her just like it had her mother on her 18th birthday—and she’d turned out just fine, hadn’t she? So would her kids.
But her kids drowned in her silence, as she had in their noise.
