The Sweetest Devotion (The Affair Series Book 2)

Facing It

STEF POV

When my mother chopped and butchered my hair up as a young girl it took 6 months for it to grow back halfway decent. Why, why she had to do that it was so hard to understand. And it was so hard to understand why she chose to humiliate me my entire childhood. Sure maybe I could blame her for the shitty life she gave me filled with poverty, abuse and loneliness but I wouldn't. I wouldn't blame her for the issues I struggled with now as a result of the choices she made as my mother. I just wouldn't for how would that help. How would that help me as a mother myself to three children, and as a woman who craved love, and who craved a relationship but didn't know how to have a healthy one.

Diane left and I needed to close that chapter in my life. And she had been a very big part of my past and my adulthood. But letting her go no matter how hard it was and the grief I felt from it was needed. It was needed for the both of us for we couldn't do that anymore. We couldn't continue to hold each other back from growing, from becoming the women we wanted to be and from learning what a healthy relationship was. Maybe we needed someone else to show us what that was, someone different  despite the fact that the love we had for one another would never die. It just wasn't meant to be no matter what we thought or predicted might happen. We were meant to love other people and to go in opposite directions only ever meeting up as friends. 

Lena. As she sat all night with me in this hospital talking to me, holding my hand and rubbing my back she was that different person. So different that I feared her. God did I fear her because she wasn't like anyone I had ever known in my life. The shit I put here through the last few months was enough to make anyone run from me and run far.  She had no reason to stay here, she had no reason to come here and support me and she had no reason to have any feelings toward me. My anger could drive her away and it did.  My sleeping with Diane could have as well on top of my drinking which Frankie was surely privy of. I knew it was her who was watering them down and dumping half my cigarettes. She too, that little girl was different as well along with Jude for their love and the love they had for me was one of the reasons I was still standing and had not fully fallen into a whole of self destruction. Yes I needed help more than I was allowing myself to get for maybe I did need to check into rehab for my addiction, maybe I did need more therapy, maybe I did need to wake up and realize I could really lose everything again if I didn't start taking my life and my future serious. It wasn't enough to say I was changing and wanted to change for it was more then that. Way more and the same went for Callie.  She too was keeping me afloat despite how destroyed our relationship was and despite the hatred she had for me. No part of me could use that as a weight to stay drowned or down in life. If anything it would make me work harder.

As I walked into my mother's ICU many of these thoughts cycled through my mind as I told Lena to wait outside for me. Not because I didn't want her here but because I needed to face this alone. I did as I saw the woman who hated me more than life unable to breath on her own, attached to an array of machines and look as if she had no life in her. None. Her hair that was bleach blonde my entire life was grey, rough and wild. Heavy makeup that use to cover her eyes, lips and cheeks were no more. Her hands were frail and it had only been a few months ago that she had shown up at my door demanding to stay and looking like she had no aged a day.

This sounded like a good idea down in the cafeteria as I looked behind me seeing Lena smiling as I now took a seat beside my mother as she lay motionless in the bed. Seeing her chest rise up and down the doctor said she was in and out of consciousness for she was so heavily sedated because of the pain. Pain. She knew all about that word and then some.

Thing was I had always wanted my mother to love me if anything. That was really all and it didn't matter that we were poor, that we lived in the shittiest of places, that she rarely worked and had boyfriends. If she had shown me any type of love, even a hug none of that would have mattered. None of it but she never had, she had never even said one time that she loved me and never would. Ever. Swallowing hard as my eyes scanned her skinny and sunken in face for she barely weighed much now she was so helpless. She really was and I felt like a jerk. A jerk for saying what I had to say to her because I should have done it years ago. Years ago and maybe decades. But instead I ran, I tried to start my own life that I vowed would be different from hers. But in many ways I repeated her mistakes and I needed help for all of us. For every bit of it and it was not something I could do alone and I knew that. I knew that more than ever now. 

Gently grabbing her hand and feeling her dry hands why would I even begin to show such affection toward her. Why as I moved the chair I was sitting in closer to her thinking of any words to start this, any at all but none of them seemed right to start with. None.

"You sure are a piece of work mother. You really are and always have been. Part of me really just wants to give it to you and tell you how miserable you made me, how screwed up you were to me for my entire life." Feeling the tears roll down my face and burn my throat it was as if the words were stuck in my throat as I continued to push them out.

 "Just, I just wanted to know why? What I did to you for you to hate me so much? I mean did I ruin your life that much to the point that you hated me and left me feeling lower then well shit most days. Why did you kick my ass so much, why did you beat with iron cords, dog leashes and take me all around the damm world as a kid so you could run from your problems. I didn't even give a crap that we didn't have any money but I just can't get past what I did to you. All I wanted from you was love. Love and I didn't think it was such a hard thing to show. Really not because I look at my three babies and there is not a single bone in me that doesn't love them, that doesn't thank god for them and doesn't want the best for them.  Not one mama. You, you took me from the one woman that cared about me. The only one on this earth and I never got a chance to even say goodbye. Never. Why?"

Shaking my head as I wiped my tears my hand still remained in hers as I felt her gently squeeze it. Very gently and as I looked to her, her eyes opened a tiny bit. They were weak eyes very weak as they soon found mine.

"I'm, I'm sorry." she managed to get out as I saw tears fall from her eyes. Maybe it was the morphine drips or the pain she was in but I was frozen, frozen in my position feeling her gently squeeze my hand once again and it was the last time. "I, I did love you. I do."

With no response and feeling like a brick rested on my chest now it was the last time I'd ever see my mother alive for she died two days later leaving me confused and more screwed up than before. It was then I decided to take control of myself and checked into rehab for 30 days leaving Jude and Frankie in Lena's care.

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I guess Stef is not playing around with getting well this time.

Well Sharon was it the meds that made her say that? You gotta wonder.