Brie Nicole Inked

I don’t know how to grieve you.
Not the way grief is supposed to look.
There are no soft memories to cradle,
No tenderness to fold into your name.
Only anger.
Only the ache of being six years old
And believing adoption meant chosen,
Believing I had finally found a mother,
A family,
A place where I belonged.
Only to learn I was never the one you wanted.
I came because my brother did.
An afterthought with a heartbeat.
A daughter by circumstance,
Never by love.

And now you are gone,
And somehow I am still expected to mourn
The person who spent so much of her life
Making me feel unwanted.
How do I grieve someone
I spent my childhood grieving already?
How do I bury you
When I am still burying the mother
I needed you to be?

I am angry.
God, I am angry.
Because death does not make you innocent.
It does not erase the years.
It does not give me the apology
You never gave.

But somewhere inside me
There is still that little girl;
Six years old,
Hands open,
Waiting to be chosen.

And maybe that is who I am grieving.

Not you.

Her.

The child who deserved a mother
Who wanted her.

The child who deserved
To be chosen
For herself.