What Love Asks

You miss going to work.
Waking early with purpose.
Kissing toothpaste-scented cheeks as you fly out the door,
coffee sloshing in one hand, keys in the other,
the morning still soft around you.

Shouts of “I love you!” and “Don’t forget the recycling!” echo down the hallway.
This used to be the beautiful scaffolding of your life.
You miss pulling out of the driveway with righteous resolve,
hell-bent on making your small corner of the world just a little bit better.

That’s not your life anymore.
Now your purpose is quieter.
Urgent in a different way.
Measured in medication doses and safety checks.
Stretched thin across school drop-offs and blood draws.
Dictated by hemoglobin counts.
Interrupted by fear.

You can’t work a traditional job anymore,
not when your child’s life hangs in the balance.
When every plan is fragile,
every commitment dissolvable by a single fever.

Not since the court, almost grudgingly,
ruled that your autistic persistence,
while noble, still counted as illegal. Technically.

The judge apologized.
The petitioner perjured themself. Twice.
The stenographer cried.
The bailiff stayed close to you,
after the judge chastised the petitioner
that rolling their eyes
at photos of a dying girl
would not be tolerated in this room.

Still, the law, however misused, must be upheld.
And the law branded you disruptive
for seeking the only thing left
that could have helped ease the suffering.

You sent the judge a thank-you note.
Unusual, maybe.
But he had insisted on doing something
that is still learning how to be done:
he respected you, out loud, to your face.

He didn’t have the power to rule against a poorly written law.
He used the power he did have
to end the relentless churn of being reduced
from person to problem,
right there, right then.

And you needed him to know:
you recognized this deliberate act of grace,
and you will not forget it.

Still, your name is flagged,
misread by systems that don’t have the full narrative.
HR departments don’t ask for nuance.
Background checks don’t flag context.

Even FAFSA flinched,
your lifeline erased with a single line of digital ink.

You were studying again.
Trying to build a future that didn’t depend on miracles.
Trying to earn stability the long, honest way.

But there’s no scholarship for surviving this kind of grief.
No grant for raising a family through organ failure and courtrooms.
Doors keep closing.
Applications vanish into silence.
You’re forced to weigh the cost of survival against your idea of dignity.

So you learn to live inside the maybe.
You watch your life move on without you.
You tell your youngest that Santa doesn’t have your new address yet.

And you pray,
quietly,
painfully,
that she’s still small enough to find magic in a new toothbrush.

She lines it up beside her old one like treasure.
She doesn’t ask why there’s nothing else.
She’s never known that anything else exists.

Your older children try not to look at the tree.
You regret putting it up this year.
But it’s too late to take it down now.

They watched you unravel old sweaters late into the night,
knitting slippers like prayers.

They unwrap secondhand hoodies without complaint.
They wear the mittens you make in hospital waiting rooms.
Their thankful smiles are too bright.

They’re trying to make it easier for you.
They shouldn’t have to.
Your heart breaks a little more.

You switch to black coffee.
There’s no room in the budget for milk.

You take your medication every other day,
not from neglect, but necessity.
You eat on non-medication days.
You tell yourself it’s something to look forward to.

You learn your hands shake most in the afternoon.
You learn how to hide it.
You learn to live with headaches,
those tight bands that never fully let go.
You learn to breathe slowly when you stand.
You can’t afford to faint.
Not now. Not here.

You learn to cut their hair.
You learn to patch their clothes,
embroidering little flourishes,
hoping their classmates only notice the art
and not the strain.

You’re trying to get better at darning socks.
Your first attempt left blisters on his heels.
He didn’t tell you for three days.
He knew you were already carrying too much.

You soak his feet in Epsom salt
and pray infection hasn’t arrived.
Antibiotics mean the electric bill goes unpaid.

You top up the soap with water once a week.
You tell your youngest, “Yes, that’s how soap works.”
She believes you.

She giggles in the tub,
not knowing it’s a few drops of laundry detergent
you’re sudsing in her hair.
There’s no shampoo left.

She splashes and says
maybe the Easter Bunny doesn’t have your new address either.
You don’t correct her.

You buy frozen blueberries.
Make pancakes Easter morning,
hoping to distract her from the bunny-shaped hole in her childhood.

It’s the first fruit in the house in weeks.
You call it a feast.
Her eyes sparkle.
Your heart breaks again.

You play peekaboo with twin toddlers at the food bank.
You don’t take the last gallon of milk,
hoping their mother sees it.

Your kids still have access to milk at school,
at least while there’s still funding.
These two perfect little girls are too young
for even that security.

You find the crumpled driver’s ed form
in your son’s backpack.
He never gave it to you.
Didn’t want to make you say it.
Didn’t want to watch your face fall:
“I’m sorry honey. It’s not in the budget right now.”

You brush your hair more gently.
Too tired to investigate if it’s falling out
from stress or some new horror.

You check in quietly, consistently,
with the people who love your little family as much as you do.
Just in case.

Because shelters don’t allow dogs.
Or teenage sons.
No matter how badly you need them to.

You weep only after everyone is asleep.

You learn how to navigate court filings.
How to write motions.
How to defend yourself in a courtroom. Alone.

Not because you’re capable,
but because there’s no one else.

You do all of this
while burying every dream you ever had.

The degrees unfinished.
The career abandoned.
The home you became too poor to keep.
The version of parenthood you imagined.
The vision you held of safety, of dignity,
of a life not stitched together by crisis.

You try not to remember your aspirations.
You try to be content with survival
as the only metric of success.

You let yourself forget how to dream.
But not how to mother.

You think back,
not to what went wrong,
but to the moment you chose to speak.
To name what was happening
before it could sink its teeth into someone else.

You thought you knew truth like this comes at a price.
You didn’t know it would cost everything.

It asks everything from those who tell it first.
It breaks the ground open.
It doesn’t wait for infrastructure to catch up.

Still, you tried to shepherd it softly.
You still do.
You weren’t reckless.
You weren’t unstable.
You just refused to throw the truth like a weapon,
and the system didn’t know what to do with that back then.

So you shouldered the collapse, alone.
You had no cushion to soften the fall.
No title to shield you.
No letters behind your name.
No time to wait for the process to catch up.

Only your voice,
your instincts,
your quiet hope
that the right someones, eventually, will listen.

You never meant to be a disruption.
You only meant to stay.
To mother through the unraveling.
To show up, again and again,
even as the ground gave way.

You listen while others speak of God’s love.
Of His grace. Of His justice.
Of systems that need reformation.

You agree with them while wondering:
“Is this what God’s love in practice looks like?”

Because actual love costs something.
It costs energy you don’t have.
Mornings you don’t get back.
A name that’s now synonymous with unease.

It costs being kept out of rooms
where decisions are made
about people like you,
without people like you.

Still, you keep showing up.
Not to accuse.
Not to shame.
But to witness.

To hold the door open
for the next family.
Because they won’t know how to get through this alone.
They won’t know how to knit grief into mittens.
Or fill their children’s bellies with borrowed hope.

But you do.

Sometimes it feels like the only thing you know.
So you offer what you’ve carried.

Not in rage.
In service.
Not because it’s easy.
Because it shelters.

Because you know love,
true, inconvenient, generational love,
asks it of you.

And when those called to listen finally say,
“Come in. Let us do this better together,”
then maybe everything love has asked of you hasn’t been wasted after all.