ALONE AGAIN
In the day time
he worked at a gas station fixing cars and pumping gas
but in the evenings
he got cleaned up and left my mom
home alone
so he could go out dancing with other women.
How good he
was at hurting
both of us
by not being there.
I don’t know what the final straw was
for her, the ice cubes or the angel food cake,
(not my stories to tell)
but one day while I was still growing in her belly
she said enough
and moved out, back to the safe cocoon of her parents home
across the street from his mother’s house.
I wonder if he ever came to see his mother
and maybe glanced across the street
where his soon-to-be ex-wife lived,
with me still growing in her belly, waiting to be born
and thought about coming to see her,
trying to fix what was broken between them.
Probably not.
@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
All Rights Reserved
I guess that is something you will always wonder. Something we can never know. That is what goes on in the mind of anyone. My guess would be that maybe he thought about you since he knew you existed but denied himself the pleasure of getting to know you.
There is also a lot we don’t know in all of this so maybe there may have been compelling reasons not to come. I am not trying to make excuses. We have to know all the circumstances before making such assumptions, or maybe I have been working in the courts too long.
All I can say as someone said to me once about my boys when I said he did not see them much and that was. “It is or in this case was his loss”
– Anne McKenna
Who knows what he thought about me but his hurt to my mom was pretty deliberate.
tanita says 🙂
Interesting arc in the poems; as the end of the project looms, the tone becomes less wistful, less hopeful, and much starker and sadly realistic.
Family Poems
Lovely. This poem makes me hurt which means it’s good!
How wonderful you’ve met your “new” family. I’m finally catching up with your blog and coming out from under the contest. Good to be here again.