lethe birdmad forgetfulness 010125 ... amy in your past, birdmad, you've been pluto or that metalworker. persephone or aphrodite is also available to you, if you strive to forget the enemies within you. war sucks! 030418 ... corvo pazzo they come only as brief vistors, and then they go on. 030418 ... ovenbird There is a hole in my life story at least two years wide. For a long time I didn’t even know it was there. Years after the missing time I pulled my life out of the closet to find it moth eaten. In the two years following the birth of my son I have almost no memories. People will say, “do you remember when…” and I have to say, “No.” Nothing will jog my memory. It’s like I wasn’t even there. I wouldn’t mind losing parties and concerts and conversations, but I grieve the loss of those years with my infant son. All I remember is trauma. I remember the sleepless nights, my suicidal ideation, my rage, my despair, my desire to run away and never come back. Every beautiful memory has been stolen. I don’t remember holding him or rocking him or singing to him. I don’t remember peaceful walks or looking into his brand new eyes and falling in love. I know that those things happened. They must have. But I don’t remember. I remember lying on his bedroom floor sobbing because I hadn’t slept more than three hours in a row in over a year but I don’t remember his first smile. Yesterday I discovered that my journals have a matching hole. I wrote almost nothing between 2012 and 2014. I wrote a letter to my son shortly before he was born and then nothing for nine months. Entries after that are negligible. My brain erased my life and prevented me from leaving any trace of it to find later. I will never really know who I was in those years, or what I was thinking as I grappled with the most painful transformation of my life. I’ll never be able to piece together what my days looked like or how I grew into my role as a mother. It’s strange to say, but I grieve the fact that I will never have the chance to be nostalgic for those early days because there aren’t enough memories to fuel nostalgia. I want to be able to look back and say, “I miss those nights of holding his tiny body in my arms and knowing that we belonged to each other.” But I can’t miss what isn’t there. There is one thing I know, even with no memories to support the knowledge: I loved my son. I loved him so completely that I wasn’t sure I would survive. And though there were days when I wanted to die, I chose to live because I wanted to give him a mother to take him to Kindergarten and go to his school band concerts and watch him walk down the aisle at graduation. I chose to live and maybe that tells me everything I need to know about the mother I was in the beginning and the one I continue to become. I choose to live every day, because that is what love demands of me, and I will pay its price until the sky takes back my borrowed breath and there are no memories left at all. 250920 what's it to you? who go blather from