The mind is a dangerous place, my mind especially. Neurons form associative pathways based on past experiences, and it is extremely difficult to reprogram them. Add to the mix…well, we’ll call it background noise, and some days I feel like the top of my head is about to explode outwards in a shower of gore and fire. I am a person who takes medication to keep things manageable, and I make no apologies for this. There is a marked difference in my mood and tolerance for everyday stumbling blocks when I do not, so I have chosen to keep taking meds. Even still, I find myself ruminating on past life experiences more lately, and I think maybe it is time that I purge.

I know part of it has to do with the weather. It’s spring, and warm with a cool breeze, the kind of day I used to hope for when I was running in Baltimore. That way, you see, it’s not too hot or cold in the abandominium hideoouts where I and the other junkies liked to sit and hoard our meager scores. I miss sitting on scavenged milk crates, avoiding foul-smelling piles in the corners, and talking big with random people. I know it’s somehow disturbing that I miss the griminess, the feeling of being bad, the rush of my heart when a cop drove by (”Will he stop? Does he see me?”), and I want to leave it behind. It seems to dog me, waking and asleep. It would be so easy to slip back to that life of running and hiding and dealing with nothing.

So I guess I keep putting one foot in front of the other, having little community meetings in my head, and trying to concentrate on the good in my life now. Some days it’s just really fucking hard.

I was thinking about this a lot today because I had been having some symptoms of pregnancy, and while the pee-stick told me I was not, it brought up some stuff. I love kids. I love my own kid. I want more kids. But Badr and I are not at a point, financially, where having kids makes any kind of sense. I was still so sad when I got the – instead of the +.

I used to pride myself on being a good mother. It was one of the few things in my life, I would say to myself, that I had done right. Now that illusion is quite shattered, and while I really was a good mother for the first few years of Bear’s life, I certainly let him down in the end. I couldn’t even pull myself together enough to get to his 6th birthday party. I think that will haunt me forever, along with all the innumerable other missed school pick-ups, weekend get-togethers, etc. Not to mention I had my head stuck so far up my own ass I wasn’t even there emotionally.

It’s hard, sometimes, to come to grips with that. I abandoned my own child for my own selfish reasons, and while his father certainly picked up all the slack admirably, it left behind a huge scar, on my heart and his. I had THE TALK with him, explaining what had happened, and where I was for all those nights and months and years, and he handled it really well. I’m not sure how much of it really sank in, though, and I know it is a talk I will repeat probably more than once in the future.

It’s just… how do you make up for that?

And the answer is, of course, you can’t. And that’s hard for me to accept sometimes. I want to feel that if I am good, and do the right thing, and “act right”, somehow it will all disappear. But I know it won’t, and that makes me very, very sad.