essay

Love is pain. It causes heartbreak and unwanted emotions to bombard an unsuspecting victim in order to bring them down a fiery pit of uncertainty and confusion; spiraling out of control to distort the ever powerful mind and destroy the tender loving heart. I, personally, don’t believe love is a real emotion. It is a word that is thrown around so carelessly like a used rag, damp with the quintessence of false hopes and aspirations of feelings unknown to the naïve mind. “I love you” is a phrase I believe to be a cliché. It leaves no thought or curiosity behind the elegant wording, but can deceit unsuspecting with its initial feeling of wanting, although it is void of anything but.
My mother got divorced a few years back after a ten year marriage. A marriage filled tender moments that could make cupid himself blush. While most marry out of love, she married out of the duty to her soon-to-be family, a vow to not have another child out of wedlock and be the typical Black parent. I was her only child before she met and married the man she divorced and he grew to love and treat me like I was his own daughter not too soon after; buying me gifts on my birthday, fixing my scrapped knee when I feel, being my pillar of support when I felt unstable and isolated in reality. My mother raised me by her lonesome and wanted to marry in order to have a man to help her with my developing baby brother.
My mother’s plan of having a man around in order to keep and maintain the “typical” American family did not work. After my brother was born, soon came a sister, and then another brother right after that. I found myself in a house full of children, practically raising them all myself because my mother was working for herself, out all hours of the day, and her husband- my step-father- was too busy being lazy to help me raise his children. His words did not directly tell me he wanted to be bothered with raising children, but his actions and negligence after the third child was born did. I saw myself as a ten year old raising two kids alone, my mother out working to provide for our needs and necessities financially and her husband out with his friends doing gods knows what in god knows where. I found myself maturing faster than hoped and having an outlook on the world that suited a legislator. Everything has its reason and there is a reason for everything.
My philosophy was- and if figured this out when I was ten- if s a person really loves someone, they would go to great lengths to help them, support, them, be more than a lover but also and friend or confidant. My mother’s husband was neither, his actions, sudden episodes away from the home, and constant bickering with my mother that started all because of the sudden realization that this wasn’t the fairy-tale reality she hoped for like the classic damsel in distress that played in Disney movies. Even an added bonus of a hidden affair with an anonymous woman who went by the name of a seeded fruit/berry, was the reason to which I found myself not wanting this relationship of love and devoted anointment, tears spilling and cascaded like overflowing waterfalls were the very epitome of my hatred towards the dreaded “I Do.” And the “I love you” that was to follow in its void footsteps.
Not to my surprise- but the time span that it survived this long- my mother’s marriage ended in a bitter-sweet divorce. She was relieved that an unknown burden had been released from her life and her husband- now an unknown entity of which resemble a ghost figure rather than a man of devoted and bountiful affection- was now free to frolic and go happily to wherever he chose. Now, they hate each other like a possum and a rat, and treat each other like common strangers, side glances toward each other as if the other were a passerby. They weren’t in love, but loved the thought of one another.