I am hungry.

I have never felt this empty, this hollowed out, this vulnerable — not that I can remember.  Perhaps I have always felt protected by the love of a man, or the interest of a man.  The attention in some way, shape, or form.  Even if everything else was going wrong in my life, I knew that I was partnered, loved, or at the very least, desired, and that meant something to me.  It was a form of shelter.  

Now all of that is gone and I am exposed to the elements.  I am in this weird holding pattern where I aspire to love myself, to be my own shelter, but that feels like a very abstract idea.  Sometimes I remember Louise Hay and look at myself in the mirror and force myself to say, “I love you” to my reflection, but there is little to no feeling present beneath the words.  It’s as if I don’t exist if someone doesn’t love me in a romantic way. 

I feel invisible, like an observer in my own life these days.  Today I took Sami to the playground and he refused to go on the small choo-choo train.  I asked him over and over again if he wanted to ride the choo-choo and I was either ignored or met with an emphatically negative response.  So I had to accept his decision.  Certainly I am not going to force a choo choo train ride on my son!  But I had been looking forward to it. 

That’s OK.  We found other stuff to do instead.  We climbed on the equipment and I helped him up ladders that were still just a little too widely-spaced for his little legs.  I caught him at the bottom of slides, and we pretended to serve and eat a meal of mulch in one of the fake plastic train cars.  I chased him down steep inclines, feeling the wood chips give softly under my feet.  At some point in the day I took him for a haircut, his second.  Now he looks like a very mature little man.  It was a cool mama and Sami kind of day.

Yet there was this sense of going through the motions of things.  I was not present, I know.  I get so tired of seeing nuclear families everywhere I look.  If it were up to me I’d avoid playgrounds for quite a while, especially on the weekends when the fathers are out in force.  But it’s not about me.  It’s about Sami.  And, even if I tried to orchestrate such a thing, it will be just a tad difficult for me to completely avoid fathers.  Sami’s school starts this week and the dads will be there, too.  Fathers abound and I must face it.  I must deal with my hunger.  It’s ok to be hungry.  I won’t starve, and I won’t die.  It’s just hunger.

Today I briefly wondered if I am depressed.  I am not so into diagnostic sounding labels, so I think I will say that I am just sad.  I am grieving.  I might be broken but wow!  There is so much light streaming in through these cracks.