Through My Daughter’s Eyes by Sandra Laraine Coleman

Sometimes the world can be a colorless, bland amorphous wreckage manipulating itself into collapsible ruins and discarded carnage that lived long past usefulness. Sometimes the world can be lively, loving, warm, welcoming like the yearning in a lover’s tender embrace we find ourselves never wanting to live without. This describes motherhood in an abusive relationship with your daughter’s father when life becomes an empty offering of neglect, misery and sorrow. Yes, your daughter’s father, whom you’ve loved since sixteen because that’s what sixteen-year-old girls do. They fall in love with hopeful hormones rioting to test-taste waters of grown and living prepares pre-woman for the woman who will eventually conjugate and ornament life with vibrant fleshed fruit. Ah yes, it was love ripening in you, trajecting into and out of “him” and that adoration would have continued had it not been subjugated with fists. Then one day you realize that a woman/mother should never have her words choked from her throat, then rammed down again. You have become skilled at swallowing strangled sentences and absorbing blows. The repeated silencing of your words accompanies eyes blackened and puffy blind, busted lips throbbing the fluffy color of pain, bloody noses that are percolating facial sacrifices, bruises decorating your body like cheap misshapen tattoes, stinging slaps from hardened hands so large they consume your entire face with wanton wrath and afterwards the rape. You never know what will initiate his vulgar violent rages, all you know … this is no “living” for you or her.