M

Hello M my sweet,

Your aunt says maybe I should acknowledge you. I wonder what that means.

It has taken me more than ten years to come to terms with your presence in my life. I think I have, although the fundamental purpose of you has yet to become clear to me.

I know that you have been the most difficult test of my mettle. It makes me wonder why I was put to that test. Whether I have yet to undergo another one - an epic battle of battles that will either undo me or see me barely surviving.

Sometimes, I feel you are a validation of everything I know about me. My strength, my weakness, my tendency to throw myself headlong into whatever catches my fancy at the moment.

Surely you were not there just to help ease my separation from him. That would be too small a purpose for someone as central as you are to my life.

Mother says now that she thinks I should have been a parent. Should have been as if it is already no longer a possibility. I suppose, it is. Or she presumes it is because it is my will. And I suppose she wouldn't be wrong on that count. Because there is nothing really, stopping me from being one if I so chose.

What did I dream for myself that has not come true? I used to wonder a little about having a husband and maybe a little less about having a child. I wasn't a teenager who could even tell you how many children she wanted to have. Maybe it is my self-centered nature. My dreams were always about me. Becoming a rock star or someone famous.

That has changed with little regret.

I realise now I have regressed, back into the chambers of my childhood when I dreamt alone and played alone, content with my own company, too busy with my own thoughts to bother with other people, other playmates. There are few who tickle my interest enough for me to reach out. I make friends with difficulty now. Acquaintances easily, but friends, no.

Friendship is such a messy thing. Full of obligations and layers of intrigue that complicate life. So much so that often the rewards are very easily forgotten.

Family, is a different thing. In fact, I have found in my older age, that family is an easy environment in which to make a friend. Maybe the very premise of it is the reason. When you start off a relationship on the premise of forever after, friendship develops with fewer presumptions and more ground rules. It provides parameters of trust on which you tread more carefully.

I am beginning to wonder whether the only places I can absolutely be myself is here and with the dog.