The Table

I want him to eat. I want him full and warm and not hungry in the cold somewhere wondering if anyone loves him. I want him to eat.

He cannot eat at my table.

This is not contradiction. This is what love looks like when it refuses to lie down in the road and let the harm pass over it again. This is what love looks like when the woman doing the loving has already learned, in her own body, what it costs when someone looks away.

I did not look away.

I know what it is to be the one whose body became someone else’s decision. I know the particular silence of the people who loved the person who did it, how they kept setting his plate, kept passing the bread, kept laughing at his jokes while I learned to make myself small enough to disappear. I know what it meant that no one said no, this is what this is. I know what it cost me to learn that love, for them, was just permission in a softer dress.

So when I heard what my son had done,

I said, I want you to eat.

And I said, not here.

Not because I stopped loving him. Because I never stopped knowing what it means to be her. The one he decided. The one who will now spend years learning to live inside a body that remembers. She does not get to un-know what he did. She does not get a choice about carrying it. So I do not get to choose comfort over consequence. I do not get to make the table a place where harm is just something we don’t bring up.

Some people will call this cruelty dressed as principle. Some people will say I abandoned my child. Some people have never had to choose between the table they set and the truth they know, and I hope for their sake they never do.

But I have been the girl no one chose.

I chose her.

Love without permission means loving what is true more than what is comfortable, more than what is ours, more than what we made with our own hands and watched learn to walk. It means knowing that the overgrowth we refuse to cut does not stay still. It spreads. It covers everything. It takes the light.

I want him to eat.

He cannot eat at my table.

That is not cruelty.

That is the whole of it.

It was not overgrowth I cut.

That was bone.

And I did it anyway.