The Weight of Being Rewritten

There is a kind of sadness that does not shout.
It does not rage.
It does not accuse.
It does not demand.

It simply sits.

Heavy.
Persistent.
Unmovable.

That is where I am.

My son said I have been dead to him for seven years -- since the day I left his father.

Dead.

I raised him with my own hands. I taught him before school ever did. I stayed through years that broke me because I believed staying meant stability. I carried the quiet, unseen labor of motherhood -- the kind that shapes human beings long before the world sees their achievements.

And now I am spoken of as if I vanished the day I chose to survive.

He told my mother that she is an enabler of my abusive behavior.

Abusive.

I need to say this clearly -- I am not an abusive mother.

I did not manipulate my children.
I did not isolate them.
I did not control them through fear.
I did not weaponize my pain.

I waited until my daughter was a young adult before I opened up about the hurt in my marriage. We spoke as women speak -- about life, about disappointment, about truth. I never asked her to fix me. I never asked her to choose sides. I never asked her to carry what was not hers.

If anything I shared ever felt heavy to her, I would grieve that deeply. But heaviness is not the same as abuse. Honesty is not the same as harm.

And my mother supporting her daughter is not the same as enabling cruelty.

Still -- the sadness remains.

Sad that therapy language now defines our family.
Sad that words like abuse and enabler hover over my name.
Sad that my explanations are labeled harm.
Sad that my son describes his father as a very good father while I am rewritten as the source of fracture.

I left a marriage that hurt me. I did not leave my children.

But in their story, those two things have merged.

Time has not healed this sadness. It has layered it.

Each morning I wake and feel the absence before I even open my eyes. Each night I carry unanswered questions to sleep. Writing is the only place the weight rests for a moment. It is the only space where I am allowed to exist without interruption.

I do not believe my children are evil.
I do not believe I am blameless either.

I believe we are all standing in different corners of the same fractured story.

Maybe my pain felt heavier to them than I realized.
Maybe therapy has given language to feelings they never had before.
Maybe distance has hardened interpretations.

But none of that makes me an abuser.

I am a mother who loved honestly.
I am a mother who left harm.
I am a mother who stayed until she could not stay anymore.

The sadness of being called dead.
The sadness of not being heard.
The sadness of loving children who are alive but unreachable.

There are no rituals for this kind of grief.

So I pray.
I write.
I sit with the heaviness.

I am still a mother.

Even if I am misunderstood.
Even if I am misnamed.
Even if I am silent in their lives for now.

Sadness does not make me guilty.

It makes me human.