Sparkatale

I am not a mother.

And yet I am.

I have raised a life in the thinnest figment of motherhood as my true mother worked and my pictured father went along with it to give us a life.

Us as in the image of my sister clinging to my jean seams as her eyes were filled with the destroyed scenes, of our family stitched together by sacrifices she could and can not fathom and that her guardians and myself chose to ignore so that our perfection, and our ideal life could remain for even a breathe more.

But what life is there when the eldest is rejected,

Pushed aside and allowed to raise her sister and forget her own hobbies in place of her sister’s;

What life is there when brown eyes see nothing but what sacrifices she must give for her green eyed daughter who was not born from her womb but the same womb as herself?

What life is there for the green eyed girl who weeps now for the mother she didn’t realize was hers, is gone and she is lost.

We talk almost every night, my sister and I because I know that her sleep is tormented by the image of a missing mother; a sister who was more but less all at the same time.

I know she is haunted when her friends own siblings –true sibling and not the mockery of a mother and sister I am to her –turn up at family gatherings and to kissed scraped knees on the school yard,

But I do not.

I have a life, one I have wanted for as long as I care to remember, one stripped from me for my own sake and the sake and sanity of my parents, I took this stand and took it for myself charging ahead with blinder but realization.

Realization that what I was going was going to cut at my ankles and slash my tendons to leave me vulnerable and immobile once I landed;

I am haunted now because of it; like my sister was but is forgetting, moving on as I am not, lost in the fantasy of responsibility and purpose I had as a surrogate where I was needed to kiss scraped knees and calm tearful tantrums and when sleep did not come easy I was a surrogate.

And now I am not. Never was, but am not.

Family dynamics are changing where ages are spread like diseases in young mother, and the young fathers who stay and leave- 

This bears mothers with virgin wombs and fathers with chaste lips and how is this a life for any of the siblings who grew up but were left in a naive world where they are parents yet cannot fathom the relationships of one.

I am not a mother, and yet, this pain in my chest at the thought of her tears leaves me in a cycle of post-yet never-natal depression.