Laying claim

I was afraid that when the drinks were gone, the words would be, too.

As though it took 90 proof to make them course from me, as though the inhibitions were too great a burden to bear while also trying to share…tequila is great for inhibitions, but that was so long ago.

I’ve long since dried out and yet the words flow now, dark and stained with years of blood from my lips, biting them back.

Years of losing who I was to shitty diapers and stacks of dishes and piles of laundry, sucked in like the vacuum took those words up, too, dumped into the trash with the emptying of the rest. I tried not to miss them. I tried to live for the moments of tenderness for my children, the most precious gift of time. I stifled the words, probably to my own detriment, and now I sit here rusty and unsure, willing the meaning to come across. Dying to be heard. Understood.

Yet I’m standing here, typing in between “mommy can I”’s and “Mom can you pull these legos apart” and “I’m thirsty/need a snack/wipe my butt” and I’m just trying to lay claim to the part of me that no one owns, the part that’s still here hidden deep and down, so far down.

It feels so good to write something, anything. To dust off this language and go for it again, inhibitions be damned, I still stand. I stand in determination and fear, afraid of what will come out but too afraid to keep the words in any longer, the metallic taste of blood in my mouth so familiar from all these years.

Where have I been?

I’ve been a mother. A wife. A homemaker. A baker. A business partner caught in a year long lawsuit. An exterminator a gardener a housekeeper and anything else that was safe and secure and necessary. I’ve been doing the work, and it is good work, but there is always more, and always less time. I got lost somewhere.

Right now I should be sweeping. I should clean some bathrooms. I should mop my floor. But these words pour forth and I cannot stop them even if I wanted to. It’s as though the dam broke, and the blood is spilling out. Sweeping be damned.

The words feel reckless and I don’t know why, but I will force them to come forth. I will force myself to keep going, pushing, gathering the courage to speak these truths that bubble to the surface after so much biting them back.

I’m tired of tasting blood.

*-V.