Finding Forty

My body aches.

My mind won’t stop.

Everything I feel feels too loud, too much, too fast.

I snap. I shut down. I come back in guilt.

I want to hold my son and also run from the weight of being needed.

Motherhood feels natural to me—

but it’s still heavy.

And it’s heavier when I remember

that my mother said she loved me

but made me feel impossible to love.

She left her mother behind.

Said she was toxic.

Broken. Cold.

And now I’ve done the same to her.

And I don’t know if that makes me brave

or just the next link in the chain.

I swore I’d be different.

I am different.

But here I am—cutting ties just like she did.

Calling it protection.

Calling it peace.

Calling it survival.

And still—

my son looks at me like I’m safety.

Like I’m everything.

He doesn’t know the questions that live inside me.

The fear that maybe I’m still echoing her in ways I can’t see.

Am I healing?

Or just surviving quieter?

I hold him close and whisper love like it’s oxygen.

Because I never want him to wonder.

I never want him to ache like I did.

But sometimes, in the dark—

the echo returns:

What if I am the storm I swore to protect him from?

Let the pain stop with me.

Let the love carry him farther than I was ever carried.