Dear Mothers #2

For Writer Who Doesn't Write Any Longer

Dear Mothers,

I am stuck inside of myself. 

I have a story. A story I desperately need to tell. I’ve told my therapist. I’ve told the courts. I’ve half-told my friends and family. Yet there is this dire need inside of me that yearns to tell the whole wide world. Call it closure? I like to call it opening. It feels like it’s the only way out. I expect something magical will happen once I finally speak up. I don’t know what it is, but I know I need to get there.

And I can’t, for the love of my life, find a way to do so. I’ve started and restarted writing it maybe four times. I have written it in my mother tongue and I’ve also written it in English—the blessing and the curse of expats is that you no longer know which language feels more authentic to you.

My days are expired by my kids and work energy. I feel like I run daily marathons, and while my emotions rumble inside of my head all day long, by the time I get to bed, I’m so utterly paralyzed by the extreme drainage that I can’t move forward.

I need to tell my story. I really do. And I don’t know how to make it happen.

Will you help this desperate mother, this high achiever who cannot possibly achieve her one truest urge?

With gratitude,

The writer who doesn’t write any longer

(also great excuse-maker of not writing at 5 a.m.)

(also frightened to ruin my family if I ever tell the truth publicly because dirty dishes are washed inside of this very conservative, old-school, crazy-loving-and-highly-complicated family of mine)

Dear Writer Who Doesn’t Write Any Longer,

I can tell that you are—indeed—a writer, simply by the cadence of this letter. You are a poet, a lover of words, undeniably gifted with language. This is the good news: what’s standing in your way is not a lack of talent.