A Year to Blossom

A Year to Blossom – Fiction

Sitting on a dented gray folding chair, holding a thick white folder, I look around at my apartment with its cheap aluminum blinds bent in every odd direction, a couch taken from a dumpster with so many holes I've covered it in a sheet to make it look nice... nicer, and a table so full of scratches you could make pictures out of them. I look at my hands covered in little circular scars, still pink and raw. I hear the soft snores of a child who hasn't slept so soundly in months because of fear.

All of it is mine, from the blinds, to the sofa, to the child. It says so on various documents of leases, receipts, birth certificates, and custody papers. But none of it feels like mine. This life, these things, that child. I feel like an imposter, like this is someone else's life, and at any moment the real mom, the real woman is going to come through that door and send me back to where I came from. That I'll have to go back to that house filled with pain and the screams of my child. Or maybe that man will find us and hurt us again. I look at the door again, assuring myself that it was locked both deadbolt and latch.

My nose begins to tingle, and tears drip down my cheeks. Some of them fall onto the folder in my hands. The folder full of job listings and applications my therapist suggested I look through. Jobs she thinks would benefit me and help me to grow. I put the folder on the table and pull my legs to my chest.

I never wanted this... this life. I never wanted to be a single mom who lived on the aid of the government to get by, and going to therapy twice a week just to have the strength to keep living. "Think of your boy," my therapist told me, "he needs you more than anyone right now." She had said a number of things before, trying to convince me not to end my life, but that's the only thing that stuck. All I ever wanted was to get married, have a family, and live happily ever after, but I guess I was too hasty. My chest hurts remembering the last few years.

It started well, as most cases like mine do. Afterall, no one intentionally begins a relationship to get hurt (Words from my therapist). There were signs from the beginning, but I was too Naïve to know what they meant. He was reasonably attractive, romantic, and wanted me; no one had ever wanted me like that before. He told me he wanted me, body and soul, told me I was beautiful, especially when I finally said yes to his desires. Once I was finally his though, things began to devolve. "At least your pretty," he would tell me when I did something he thought dumb or mindless.

We fought many times, angry screaming fights about our issues, but I was always the villain, the one making him angry, the one always starting the fights. I considered leaving him many times, either by running away, dumping him, or by ending my life. I even tried once.

But then I got pregnant. Everything changed. I had been raised to think that every child deserves to be raised by two parents, even if one wasn't the best. So I stayed with him. It wasn't until after Dylan was born that the physical abuse began. He would push me around whenever he was frustrated at Dylan's crying, telling me to stop the crying. When I resisted and told him to stop, he pushed me harder. From that, he learned he was stronger, and began forcing me in other, more painful ways.

Things got worse and worse, three years of pain and fear. Until three months ago. Three months ago, he was potty-training Dylan, but Dylan didn't understand, and so in frustration, he hit our son. I could stand to be abused, I could take the cigarette burns, the broken bottles, the drunken beatings, the forced intimacy, but I could not stand to see him treat Dylan that way. IN that moment I grabbed the keys, grabbed Dylan, and left barefoot in the rain with him yelling to me to come back. I drove to the police station, the only place I knew to go, and asked for help.

People always talk about how the police are corrupt and cruel, but when they saw me and Dylan, drenched in rain, barefoot, and bruises on my arms, they helped. Not one of them accused me of deserving the abuse. 

I hear rustling from the other room and look up. "Mommy?" Dylan peaks his head out from behind the bedroom door, "Okay?" He looks at me with more concern than an almost three-year-old ought to know.

I put my legs down and open my arms, "Come here baby." He comes and I plop him in my lap, wrapping myself around him. "Yeah, mommy's okay."

"Okay," he whispers. It's one of the only words he knows, and it pains me to know it. His speech therapist says it's common with children who've experienced trauma to have speech delays. Apparently seeing one parent being abused can cause a child trauma. Had I known, I might have left sooner. Dylan takes my face in his hands, and presses our foreheads together, his way of saying "I love you," because he can't form the words.

We stay like that for a little while before his eyes begin to droop and he falls asleep in my arms. My beautiful little boy, the one reason I have to live. Because she's right (my therapist), I'm all he's got, and it's better for him to have one broken parent who loves him and tries, than to live with strangers he's never known.

Holding Dylan's sleeping body with one arm, I open the folder for the first time. People make new year's resolutions all of the time, and mine is a few weeks late, but I resolve to make this a better year. A year with hope, with love, and without fear. A year to blossom. I don't use any fancy notebooks to scribble a half-hearted plea, but I write it down and cement the idea by filling out the job applications one at a time. My job experience is minimal, and my skills even less, but I fill them out anyways, hoping for the best.

After filling out all twelve, I take Dylan to my room and curl up in bed. He's the most precious thing in the world to me, something to live for.