A Beautiful, Honest Poem

I was scrolling through facebook today and I came across this blog:#BeReal by Nicole Marie.

Here is a poem on the blog that really hit me:

I might have been seven

– Nicole Marie

when I’d grown old enough to know the
hard difference
between love and
convenience,
I started about fashioning
the most beautiful smokescreen

with

bits of old velcro
wrinkled bubblegum
wrappers

the first tears that ever made me aware of every muscle in my body
in one single, fleeting motion

you know it
the kind of hurt that rolls in and out like violent ocean.

I might have been seven when I realized I didn’t like me.

I kept all those costume bits in a pencil box
with my name scrawled in immature
loops on the front, the “e” half smudged away
like my heart.

I am a woman now
or some novel version of one

who on occasion takes aging bits of herself she’d rather forget
and mixes them with words, with her husband’s sweet empathy
with anger, resentment, and all the other ugliness
she can’t seem to detach from her sorry ribcage.

so, a woman now
a mother, even

plotting self against self 

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I think it's fair to say that we all have felt like this at one point in our lives. It reminds me of the moment when all of sudden you've grown up and you're no longer a child. It's like a sudden event that changes everything. I'm sure it's different for everyone but for me it was when my mother was having treatment for her cancer when I was nine. I was old enough to realize that she could die, and I'd have to grow up with out a mother. I think that's when my childhood sort of ended. Thankfully she is in remission and has been for over 20 years now, but that moment, that moment changed my life.