Mother's Dance of Pain

C.S. Mack Author

I stand, the wall bracing me, as I looking across the room to where we would sit together curled up on the couch watching dreamy television shows together. I can almost smell your just washed hair; the powdery aroma reminds me of you as a babe. Your footsie pajamas cover you entirely creating a warm blanket of flannel against my skin. The hazy sensations bring me to the place when you were a baby boy holding tight to me, enfolded in the absolute love and security of my arms as I rocked you to sleep. This is a thing, an intangible, long lost from my clear visions, as I look at the empty screen of black on the wall across from me.

In the center of the throw rug a new, but old, vision is conjured from times before. I can see both of your hands in mine as we spin in dizzying circles laughing at our silly steps while Sinatra sings us into a giggling dance. You are with me. I am with you. The happy dance lasts for a long time. It is blissful fun as we laugh with glee at the ridiculous sounds we sing together that aren’t quite the right words. Somehow, through the shadowy years, we lost the music and our dance outgrew us when your hands outgrew mine.

There is a vision of tiny wheelbarrows full of balls and toys on the other side of the room. Yes, the bounty of Christmas is heaped high inside of the shiny red troughs. The smiles on your cherub faces are real, and speak truth about the love and caring that existed in this room. I’m pulled towards the rain beyond the windowpane as I hear phantom giggles echo off a wall outside. Beyond the glass, childish wheelbarrows rest on a mound of dirt where you once built forts. Their once brightly red painted metal bodies sit like rusted relics of what once was a place where children’s laughter danced upon the breezes in late afternoon play. Only a howling wind of sadness blows through the trees these days.

I look right and see you in front of the fireplace lounging happily with the big sweet black dog that we all love dearly. Your face is content in the dancing firelight, a reflection of peacefulness and serenity that can only come from those who are loved and truly happy. You lounge comfortably as I observe that you’ve changed, maybe too much. The fire illuminates your features in flickering tones of black and white, oh, how the boyishness has faded from your face! All has been altered, all has moved away from simpler days under the harsh cast of time. Only the pall of loneliness now persists, days upon days, in front of dying embers

Tears land on my lap as I scribe mixed and vanishing memories of you. The room that held so much joy is now a place of singular solitude, sadness, and sorrow. I come here to remember the good, the happy, and the love, but only find ruinous hurt and pain. I have been plainly abandoned and purposely lost. I think of mothers who have lost their children and I soulfully ache for them, but selfishly, I measure my pain against theirs and find my own to be profoundly unending and forever regenerated. Their children left unwillingly, griping to their mothers in their last moments of horrid loss!

My dancers, you did not leave in a swift sweep of a reaper’s scythe. No. Yours was by choice. With every day that passes, I grasp at a chance to see or be with you, but I am rejected, apparently forever relegated to clutching onto memories that wither so quickly with the passing of time. I reach for the ethereal images, now mere apparitions, as they turn to vapor hurriedly drifting away from my leprous touch. I can only shudder in pain as your lives move on. Memories of the dance haphazardly sway into and then away from my tortured and suffering mind. I am forced to dance forward upon a desolate stage.