Living Things

I escaped my wedding (with my husband) as soon as humanly possible. The food was eaten, the cake was cut, there was a dance, awkward and swaying with too many eyes on me. 

My parents frothed back and forth at each other across the great expanse of their mutual hatred. 

Guests swayed in the tug of war that resulted from the rippling currents of their anger. 

I grabbed my husband’s hand and I walked out into the sunshine, I told him it was time to go, and his smile was at once relieved and excited, tired and tense. 

We got out of there before the sun was low in the late June sky. I had wanted a winter wedding. You don’t always get what you want. 

Driving away I could only sigh heavily, so glad to be left alone it hurt. 

I would spend the next year and a half desperately trying to capture that freeing feeling of being left alone, while simultaneously trying to remain the dutiful daughter to parents too inward focused to realize their abuse. 

Living Things came out the year of my first baby’s birth. I was pregnant beyond all sanity. 

To say I was round is a savage understatement. It was impossible to forget there was another person sharing the real estate of my skin. My parents performed a miracle and seemed incapable of remembering, and soon the pressure of being their ideal daughter began to take a toll not just on me, but on the person I was so excited to meet growing within the confines of my body. 

There were a lot of things to make me upset, hormones, body aches, fears about my ability to mother a human being needing my best, realizing my parents needed to forever more come last in the growing line of people in my heart.  

Somehow the little being inside of me was the key to setting me free, to see what I needed was to be whole for them. 

Take me down to the river bend
Take me down to the fighting end
Wash the poison from off my skin
Show me how to be whole again 

The day my husband told me that Linkin Park was playing near our home I was overly heated, red in the face from the early summer sun, excited when he brought me Living Things to listen to as soon as I was off work. 

When he told me it was in September I felt myself start to tear up. We sat in the coolness of our apartment, me uncomfortable and emotional because I realized that I could not entertain the idea of going to see my favorite band at 8 months pregnant. 

I was going to miss them. 

I cried. Chocolate was had. 
I listened to Living Things and mourned my missed concert. 
It was one of many things i would willingly, painfully sacrifice for my children. 
The whole mothering thing came pretty naturally to me- overall. 

I had after all made a decision. I was going to live something different than what I had learned.