Longing to stay there

I’ve heard the phrase that when you have children, your heart walks around outside your body. How their defeats, their struggles, their pain are felt as keenly as your own. Sometimes more keenly, as all you want to do is be able to protect them from life’s struggles. Life’s pains.

We seem to have been through a lot in the last few weeks. There has been much pain and many tears. Like the saying, I think I have shed as many as Poss.

She is crying for a lost friendship and a life that has altered, shifted beyond her recognition. She wants her life to revert to the way it was, the way it has always been, or at least for the past three years. Her biggest supporter, her interpreter is no longer there. She wants it all back. She truly doesn’t understand why it’s gone. Where it’s gone.

I am crying for a daughter that feels an aloneness I have never experienced, I hope to never experience. I am crying from fear, scared she won’t find her place, her tribe. Desperately sad for the things she has missed out on, and the things she will miss out on in the future. Worried our smiley happy girl, the one who laughed readily and loved with abandon won’t come back. Scared she will listen to these things being said to her and it will alter the fragile perception she has of herself.

I lie awake long into the night, and end up shifting her into our bed, just so I can hold her while she sleeps.

Listening to her breath, longing to stay there, safe and protected.