take care of you first, mama.

Photo by Tim Grundtner on Pexels.com

Mama, you are lightning:

tearing through it all at high velocity

but burning out just as fast.

It doesn’t have to be this way, it shouldn’t be this way, the churning and burning, the admiration for a woman who can break herself into a thousand pieces and remain silent.

You move backwards so you can keep an eye on it all, but there’s no one to stop you falling into the well, and it’s dark down there, so very dark, and then who is there at the top to pull you out? The hands of your children aren’t big or strong enough, and they shouldn’t be the ones. Yet there it is, the unsharpened truth of it, that sometimes we have to sharpen our nails and claw our own way out of the thick.

But you don’t have to get dirt under your fingernails to be a good mother. Sometimes you can look to the well before you fall in, sometimes you have to, or everything behind you falls apart.