For This Child  

I run until I can no longer hear the nagging or screaming. I run until I can no longer feel the vibrations of door slamming or wall climbing. I run until I can no longer see the phone lighting up with another call from school, another call that reinforces my failures as a mother.

The weather is apropos. My thoughts, mirroring the rain, come pouring out. They thunder, they flash. They leave my brain a puddle of mud. How did I end up here?

A streak of lightning transports me to another time not so long ago. I’d been walking in the rain then, too. Running. Running from the diagnosis that I just couldn’t face, from a world that was so foreign to me. I just couldn’t.

“Hashem, why me?” I’d sobbed. “You know I have it in me. You know I’d make a great mother… devoted to my children, pleasant, patient. Why did you have to take this dream away from me? Why?”