I Waited Valerie Thomason     © Copyright 2008 by Valerie Thomason

Love is free, but you cannot ask for it. love is blind, but it is choosy. love is hypocrisy, but you cannot chastise it.

 If souls could bleed, mine would have been dead on the floor that day. I was ten years old, not even in the fifth grade yet. I sat outside my grandma's house with my sister, our suitcases packed and ready beside us. We probably looked pathetic sitting there, not daring go inside in case we missed our mother

 She had called for the first time in months the night before, announcing that she would finally be coming back for us, that she was finally able to take care of us. I had been packed since seven thirty in the morning, barely containing my excitement. Still, the morning passed by uneventfully.

" She's not coming, val." my sister said for the fifteenth time. It had been hours since she was supposed to be there, and my sister's logic was only making it worse. " She is coming! why wouldn't she come?" I retorted for the fifteenth time. My sister went inside then, unpacking her bag as if nothing had happened

 It was her fault mom didn't like us, anyways, she was the bad kid. My mom loved me, she wouldn't leave me with my grandparents. I knew she wouldn't. Yet still she didn't come.

I went in at nightfall, only at my grandma's insistence, and waited all night to hear a phone ring and a meaningful apology on the other line. It didn't come. I waited. I waited week after week, knowing she had a good reason. Knowing she would come for us soon and everything would be alright

 The weeks only got harder, turning into months, and quickly turning into years. My grandparents had never filled that hole for me, they were alcoholics, and they rarely spent any sober time at home. I got angrier, more distant, colder. Everything I went through I blamed on my mother's absence

 Soon, too soon really, I was an adult. I had suffered alot since then, alot of things I wouldn't dare tell an audience. Yet I had also recovered alot, and was finally finding the self I had lost. I had almost forgotten the hole in my heart that was my mother.

That's when it came.The phone call I had waited eight years to receive. Her voice was higher pitched then I remember, fake, almost manipulative in its tone. I saw her, I moved in with her even, but she was gone. I struggled to make it work, fought to find some love, but her coldness was a mountain even I couldn't climb. She was lost to me, and she couldn't fill the hole she had created

 It is sad, even to me, but I realized that I did not need a mother. I had people who loved me now, I had won my battles, and I was a strong woman. It was time for me to close the hole on my own

 Valerie thomason lives in nevada with her newlywed husband. She is 18 years old and about to attend college.
 
 

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