The kindest thing we can do for our children
is to heal. To be happy in our own being.
Not the kind of happy that is a mask
we remove at night
as we settle beneath the covers to sleep,
but the kind that takes root in our lips
and blossoms as something living in our skin.
Love for yourself that can be felt across the room
as you smile into it, onto others

Kids can feel our uncertainty,
our pain, our dissatisfaction, our anger,
when our smile is there
but there’s a shadow behind it,
pulling at us where we think no one else can see

Because like the white curve of your rib
or the slender slope from your wrist
to the cup of your palm,
they were once a physical part of you.
And though they have broken away
that connection remains;
it is impossible
to hide the truth of your heart from them.
They feel the ache in its beating,
deep in their bones
that look just like yours,
they know.
And it makes them inherently untrusting of the world.

You, the benchmark,
the earliest glimpse they have into what lies ahead
on this winding road we are all on
and when they look at you,
will they know that it’s worth it?

You, the most impenetrable force on this Earth
that at one time could lift the sheets
at the foot of the bed
and slay
all manner of horrors lurking there.
In their eyes, what could break you?
What hands hide in that darkness,
waiting and twisted
to drag them, too, into the black.
Will they retain in their own cupped palms
that glowing happiness of youth,
or will this world drain it,
drop
by drop,
until they too
become haunted

These and hundreds of other wordless questions
will linger like ghosts,
drifting amid the caverns of their subconscious,
doubtful and weighted and gnawing
for years before they ever realize they’re there.

Some of us never do