I Am So Pretty Now

I cry a lot nowadays. I cry and cry and cry because my daughter is gone and there’s nothing I can do about it except fucking CRY. I cry until my face is red and puffy and my nose is completely stuffed - sometimes my eyes are almost swollen shut by the time I’m able to stop and it takes hours for the swelling to go down, my eyelids burning and itching while I wait for them to recover.

I look in the mirror at my disfigured face and think, “Am I pretty now?”, because my ex-husband used to tell a young, pretty, insecure me that I was, in fact, prettier when I cried. He told me he was more attracted to me when I cried, it made him want me, it aroused him and made it hard to “resist”.

I cringe thinking of this. I am disgusted. However, I do not blame that young woman for not understanding how alarming those statements are. She couldn’t have known. She was taught that the people who “loved” her would make her cry, and often. She was taught that the pain is part of the love. People who claimed to love her told she was vile and awful and just barely lovable, sometimes not worthy of love at all, so why wouldn’t her tears bring satisfaction to yet another person* that “loved” her? One person’s nonsense is another’s thoughtful conclusion, and it can’t be helped or changed now.

My ex-husband wants me to hurt. He wants me to cry. He has for a long time, and since he let our daughter die, he will succeed in perpetuity.

*a man 11 years her senior that would take a 17-year old to motels, get her drunk, fuck her raw, and act like that was dating until he finally decided she would be worth cumming in for the sake of keeping around and then had her sleeping in his mom’s basement on a boxspring, no mattress, covered in cardboard for her entire pregnancy