Beauty & The Beast: Letter #2 Your Actions Belie Your Words

Dear Beast,
I am still greatly offended by you telling my husband in one of your fights with him that YOU were the one who helped me through the loss of my son. I bled for days and was so sick, body, mind, and soul, I could barely walk. My husband almost never left my side, taking days off from work to care for me. When the doctors feared for my health due to blood loss, and brought me in to scrape the rest of my baby from my womb, I watched on the sonogram, my mind and my mouth screaming in grief. The nurse left. The doctor left as quickly as possible. And my husband stayed, wrapping his strong, steady body around mine and holding my sanity and my body to this plane of existence by his sheer force of will! He and my girls are the reason that I lived. And i don't mean just physically existing inside this body, on this Earth, walking and talking and breathing. I mean truly lived, engaging in my life, picking apart where I have come from, the spot where I stand now, and where my journey will take me next. And while I was doing that, you were on to the next girl, or two, or four, as you told one, "...no need to worry about her, she's just a friend...happily married, etc," dismissing me for your next port of call destination. I do not say this to be unkind, as you had no true investment in me at any point throughout our story, but a vow, spoken in a make-believe place, and a promise broken over and over again as to distort what it originally looked like in its simple, quiet beauty to something ugly and misshaped by the repeated blows. You did, however, give me a precious gift to mark the passing of my child...an angel to put by his grave-site. She is not beautiful. She is somber and striking in her morose appearance and she is, as an angel should be, non-corporeal, untouchable. Her quiet, dark symbol, however, gives a visual of what pain and grief must look like to one's eyes as she now stands sentry for a boy I will never see in this lifetime. I remember your boyish trepidation when you gave her to me, afraid I wouldn't like her. I knew in that moment that I loved you. Not "roller coaster ride" love or "romance novel hero" love, but a deep, quiet, love that settles into your bones and stays, even now that the damage is well and truly irreparable. I loved you then because you understood my pain even though we had never met in person, gotten to know one another in a traditional sense, and never really had a place in each others future. It is those glimpses that made me hold on so long and fight. When the light shines on those dark, beastly spaces inside of you, what is also there is profound beauty. You did not help me through my pain, my loss, my grief. Often you poured salt on those wounds. But I healed in spite of that and I learned the lessons I was supposed to learn in regards to that situation and in the end, that is the point. We are all here to learn and grow, or not. What we do with each lesson we are faced with becomes a choice.
                                                                                Signed,
                                                                                 Beauty

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