The sun ignites the sky 
 for days on end
Birds begging her to hide 
 with their silence 

The sounds of summer 
 stifled by fire 
The sound of my voice 
 stifled by desire 

Blood, hot like the sun 
 when willows won't bend
And the words in my head 
 scream with violence

...The Sounds of Silence

by Deannalynn Arzola 

The Bond

The Bond

Here’s the thing about motherhood that nobody ever really tells anyone; carrying a baby inside your belly for nine months, let’s just say you already fell in love with the creature, when the creature comes out of you, you can’t even believe that you just created life. You look at that baby and you see yourself in her and you see all of the pain that you had before go away because looking at her face you’re filled with the kind of hope you’ve never had before . You almost don’t want them to cut that umbilical cord because being attached to your daughter or your son is the most amazing thing you’ve ever felt and I remember when they cut my umbilical  cord I could feel the separation, I could feel the pain of breaking a bond that’s been there so inherently inside of me. And I will tell you the same thing that I have told my friends and family for 31 years, it doesn’t matter how old she gets, I am bonded to her internally because I carried her inside of me and I watched in the mirror as she slipped out of me, and I’ll tell you, as I’ve said before, when you have a daughter you spend your life teaching her how to grow up, become a wife, and leave you. I knew from the very beginning that my daughter was never really mine, that I was grooming her for her husband and her children and I hate her because she’s horrible to me and as I write this, I cry because even 31 1/2 years later from the day she was born, that bond is still there. 

My grandmother was adopted and her adoptive mother hated her because my grandmother was born to my great-grandfather‘s mistress. I feel like the mistress never let my grandma go . There was a pull for 85 years or whenever my grandmother’s biological mother passed away but even after that she probably took that bond into the ether with her because that’s how strong it is for a mother and that’s why I hate adoption. I’m sorry to all the people that are adopted and all the people who wish to adopt; you say it’s a beautiful thing, “I want to child and I couldn’t have one and I’m so blessed and thankful to the biological mother for giving her baby to me”. Let me tell you, a mother never gives her baby away. She may place that baby in another woman’s arms but she doesn’t stop loving that baby. The same things that existed for me (carrying my daughter, cutting the umbilical cord), they exist for all biological mothers and if you think that the bond is broken between a mother and her child just because she chooses to adopt out her kid, you’re wrong. I know mothers who suffer to this day because they miss their children, I see it on TV and I see it in real life and I know my beloved went looking for his biological mother, when he found her, he was disappointed, but that’s not even the point, the point is the bond between him and his mother still exists ,even though he has the most amazing adoptive parents you could ever know. They raised him up well, they graduated him from high school and college and he still has a wonderful relationship with them 35 years after being adopted but at twenty-something, he went looking for her and I guarantee there is not one day that woman has not thought about him so, beloved, if you’re reading this, she loves you and that’s what’s so complicated about your relationship with her. That bond never goes away. I know this because my mother died when I was nine, and I still have a relationship with her. I do! I talk to her, I pray to her, I still have a bond with my mother 43 years post suicide. And then my grandma raised me after that and I saw how it affected her, being adopted, there was a lie in my family and that my grandmother and her parents were involved in a fiery car crash in Flour Bluff, Texas and parents died in it and she was adopted by my great-granddaddy Reed  and his wife, but when my grandma was 80 or so, she told me the real story and the way that she talked about the mistress was with attachment of some sort after all those years. I feel like the mistress cursed her and my family and all the kids that she would have because her boyfriend took her away from her and raised her with his wife. It was not a pretty picture for my grandmother and it was not a pretty picture for her children because my father is one of them and he is a narcissist. 

Apparently, what I seek is understanding how we, as women are supposed to go on when the bond has been attempted to be broken. My daughter  has been running away from me for a long time, so this post isn’t about how to be a mother or being a mother- it’s about motherhood and what that means and motherhood begins at conception and I’m no Christian, I believe in the right to choose and believe me, I am very pro-choice because there are women that get pregnant and can’t keep their baby and I’ve had an abortion and I know it’s hard to go on wondering for the rest of your life what could’ve been but that is nothing compared to actually giving your child away. And even though I am not a mother who gave her child up for adoption, the bond still, eventually I guess, becomes broken. I don’t know if it did for her, but I don’t want to be abused by my daughter anymore. For the last three years I’ve been talking to my therapist about how to break this bond I have with my daughter because she is killing me. I’m going to go ahead and be super honest here and say that I did try to commit suicide twice in my life, and both of those times are ancillary to my daughter attempting to extricate me from her life. That was such a hard thing for me to deal with that I literally tried to kill myself twice and the first time I was really good at it, I had the right cocktail and I was on life support for four days and in the hospital for another six trying to recover from the drugs I had taken. The second time I wasn’t so lucky with narcotics so I failed miserably and woke up a couple days later in my motel room and immediately checked myself into a mental health hospital and began therapy and I knew right then that it was my relationship that I had with my daughter that was killing me so I’ve been trying to break that bond for three years. Yet as I sit here and write this, I am so saddened by the fact that I’m about to extricate her from my life. I have no choice; that relationship is toxic so now I sit here like a mother who has to give up a child even though my daughter is 31. My point is, that bond is never, ever broken, and that is my point. 

So what are we as mothers to do? I’ve walked away from so many people in my life including my father of 52 years because I’ve just been beaten up by narcissism and abuse and belittling and lack of love my whole life, my daughter acts a lot like my father but he’s worse because he did the same thing to my sister.  My sister and I are very different in that way; she’s a Sagittarius and she will keep trying. She’s almost a Scorpio, so she will forever try to have a relationship with our father. Me, I won’t and that wasn’t easy cause I love him but the relationship is toxic. My father is toxic until I had to break the bond in that relationship but I have to say, doing so is much easier than letting go of my mother. I’m very spiritual and sometimes my friends and I believe that I have not allowed her to cross over because I still need her with me at 51 years old. So I don’t know how to let go of my daughter. How do we live with the subsequent of a broken bond that is maternal, eternal and unbreakable…

by Deannalynn Arzola