The snip of a girl who loved and trusted and laughed and played before my brother led me to the slaughter in his room? I remember her, She delighted in everything. Thereafter she delighted in little

Am I the tender sweet sixteen charged with lying about my father coming to my bed? I remember her too. She’d been free of roving hands and ever hopeful there would be no more. And Daddy finally loved me, until he stuck his tongue in my mouth and said he was just showing his love.

Am I the woman who struggled on in spite of the pain ignorant of the lies about me spreading around the family that colored me as a spoiled, cruel, callous person, hurting people at whim?

Am I a wife and mother? Or the woman my ex-husband painted me as, a loose woman, crazy, a woman he just HAD to divorce I was so horrid?

Am I a childless mother, set adrift without boat or oars in a foreign world I could not relate to? Who is a mother without a child? Grief stricken, barren, mindless, soulless, alive and yet too dead to make sense.

I am all of these females, and more. Despite the lies, the rejection, the endless sea of nothingness stretched out before me, I am the me who forged paths, dug fox holes with my bare hands and lived through the dark and horrid days with hands stretched out to hold all the big and little me, together. We are all one and as separate as the petals on a poesy. We are all real and true and faithful to the cause.

I am me. I am all of me, all parts embraced in tender compassion for the me I shunned in shame so long ago.

I am so proud of me.