The creek was a cold companion, its murmur a constant reminder of all the things that flow away. I was seventeen and running, then twenty-five and building, then thirty-something and broken, a mother of three small anchors in a boat that had already sunk.
We learned the map of strangers’ couches, the geography of motel carpets, the cold, hard ground of a world that had no room. Their faces, small and trusting, deserved a world my broken hands couldn’t build. To give them solid ground, I had to split my world in two, a choice that tore the root from my own heart. It felt like dying, only slower.
My home became a sheet of nylon, my floor the damp, forgiving earth. Days were for scouring, bleach on my hands, erasing the dirt from other people’s lives while mine was caked in mud. Nights were for balancing plates, smiling, pouring coffee for ghosts who never saw the hollow in my eyes.
But a seed, even in stony ground, remembers the sun. Bit by bit, a single shingle, a scrub brush, a promise kept to myself. I learned that strength isn’t the absence of fear, but the single step you take while trembling.
Now, at sixty-four, I see the lines around my eyes, and I know their names. One is for the creek, one for the cold, one for fighting to bring my children home. They are not scars. They are the etchings of a map, showing the way from a place of ruin to a house built, finally, on solid ground.
Pam Beach ‘Beyond the Blog’
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