Me and My Babies

I always loved this picture of me and my infant daughters, and everyone else would say, “Mary, you look terrible in this pic!  You must have been so tired!”  I don’t care, I still love it.  My girls will be 35 years old at the end of this week.  35.

I have been reflecting more and more about the passage of time.  My dreams have all been disturbing in the last 2 weeks.  I have little children. I don’t have my house. I live in a hovel.  I don’t have a washer and dryer.  I have a husband.  I wake up with gratitude that I don’t have a husband.

My girls are going out of town with my older granddaughters this weekend.  I had invited myself, and then quickly uninvited myself.  It is time for them.  They have struggled through the addiction and recovery of one of them.  They have struggled through the one raising the other’s children.  It goes on and on.  And now they are making great strides.  I need to butt out of this process.

I will wait a week and then take them out for our traditional ethiopian dinner.  We have been doing this since they have been in their early 20s.  Now there is an Ethiopian restaurant in the trendy art district.  There is a huge event there on some weekends, and we will be there for this.  It is such fun to visit the galleries, intermixed with the tattoo parlors, and restaurants ranging from the old dives to the newfangled trendy.  There are street musicians, and a quantity of really wonderful food trucks.   We have such fun.

I never forget to be grateful that we can still be together and laugh.  We get so silly we laugh until we cry.  We deeply love one another and we all know that.

From whence we came, this is nothing short of a miracle.  I am a mother who lost custody of her children in early sobriety.  I violated a restraining order to stay in touch with them.  I had to fight to keep myself in their lives.  And now if you saw us, you would never guess of any of this.

Thank you God.