Mother Pain

I was trying to talk on the phone this morning while Pup napped and Bunnie chalked. But that was a joke. Minutes into an intense conversation ("Did he even say the word heroin when you talked to him?") I noticed  Bunnie was coloring the rug pink with a crayon.

The white rug.

I hung up. Bunnie teared up. Poor thing. He'd thrown up five times since morning and had only started to feel better.

The conversation was with a mother I'm very close to who is watching her son, her twenty-something son, slip away with heroin. It is incredibly painful. It is so painful. It is like watching a slow, slow death. As anyone near an addict knows, the bystander is powerless.

This situation sits heavily in my heart. As I type, a sweet baby nurses at my breast. A healthy meal cooks slowly in the oven. The washing machine hums. My day has been spent raising young boys. But no matter how much we do for our children, we do not own them. Anything can happen to them. Which means all the half-slept nights Choppie and I now endure, all the money we will soon dump into nursery school, all the dishes we wash, teeth we brush, books we read could be money in a bank that simply goes belly up.