A Mother’s Love

A poem showing what it’s like to crave what you can’t have.

Sleepless nights reading pages of a diary written a lifetime ago
when one line sticks out,
one line telling secrets my own body had hidden away from me:
“I don’t speak about mummy even though I miss her”.
That line, a broken key of a box of memories forever lost.
The belief that as a child I was happy to leave, happy to be free,
happy to be safe is shattered by one line
scribbled by the hand of a little girl who wanted her mum.
Her mum who had done terrible things, who had
made her own parents sick and unforgiving to her actions, who had been made to leave her daughters alone as that was the
only way they would be safe.
She lies,
she manipulates,
she cries about a wolf that is trapped in every mirror she passes.
I wonder, how could I miss someone who ruined their own life, and mine, by spreading a poisonous line of falseness through every step?
How could I feel an empty hole in my heart, missing a love that had never existed?
I lay there, my eyes locked onto that page, that line, and I wonder.
Why do I still miss her?
The woman who I only share two good memories with, the woman who refused to look into the mirror, the woman who never seemed to care.
Why do I still crave the love of a mother who has none to give?