Instagram tells me, 15 years. The cycle has broken. And this is true. 15 years ago, 2009, I found mystelf pregnant with my youngest in my early 40’s and married to a man I feared. Not awe-some fear. I was afraid he’d kill me
or worse, destroy my last bit of hope.
I fled that marriage with my three sons and little else, including hope.
I don’t know why I believed I would make it. Perhaps because I fought for something bigger than me. Perhaps because I broke the cycle. Unlike my mother, I protected my sons and left my abusive marriage.
The last 15 years have been fueled with teeth, claws, and climb
and at one point, my body broke apart:
Left shoulder
Left hip
Lungs
Ovaries
Uterus
Neck
and I spent years under the knife, rehabilitating myself as quickly as possible, gobbling grades in place of knowledge to finish a semester,
then a degree
and another.
If you reflect with me, what you’ll witness is a storm.
They once called these furies.
Debris swirling and me, grabbing whatever I could salvage, creating a home on second-hand wares instead of items curated with love.
This morning outside, the snow is no longer a sheet, a canvas, but is trampled through and pissed upon, the shapes of Newfoundlands in varying positions carved out, like snow angels, where the pups nestled in what they knew to love—
earth,
winter,
tree and sky.
Inside, the home I’ve built is busy, my youngest, now 15, studies on line while my oldest edits his book. The pups, worn from their early morning romp are still, wet, and resting near my feet.
My body has re-broken these last two months:
Left shoulder
Left knee
Lungs
I’ve no uterus or ovaries, but now I’ve a new lump on my thoracic
Neck
and I know she—this body—cracked open in order for a slow heal this ‘round. The way you heal determines the quality of your future self.
Before, I healed too fast.
No.
Not true.
Before, I failed to heal. I band-aided and limped through, ignoring my body—this body—and today, I sit with her in gentle stretch, tell her, Thank you, and later, I’ll look for clean snow, someplace to hold her—my body. I’ll lay her down, face sky and wind and star and slowly, ever so slowly, flap my wings, spread and close my thighs, build a snow angel.
About the Writer
Rebecca Evans writes the difficult, the heart-full, the guidebooks for survivors. Her poems and essays have appeared in Narratively, The Rumpus, Hypertext Magazine, War, Literature & the Arts, The Limberlost Review, and more. She’s the author of Tangled by Blood and a forthcoming collection, Safe Handling (Moon Tide Press, 2024). She shares space with four Newfoundlands and her sons in a tiny town in Idaho and does her best writing beneath her stairway in a hidden cove.