[Janeytwo]

My babies, I write to you in here because deep inside is the hope that though you will never know these letters are for you stil by some small chance you will find your way here and something I said will matter to you. So I write with that belief.

But there is something I must tell you, something I regret. A terrible word surrounds my short time with you both...desperation. That is the word that separates me from moms in hospitals, their babies safe in their arms, waiting for the moment to go home to balloons and cards and visits from friends. Desperation........

You do not know about your history, the time before you were born and I think that is good because before I conceived you I was living in cars and on porches on Six Mile living hand to mouth which was better than home. Then I discovered you were on your way and for one small hour I entertained myself with fantasies of keeping you. But I knew that that was all it was...one young girl fantasizing about her precious babies. I would not condemn you both to poverty...poverty is the worst sort of violence my darlings. No child should suffer it.

The poor are looked down on and that I would not have for you. No wondering when you'd eat again, no wearing clothes with holes, clothes dug out of garbage bags, no looks of pity or disgust from those above you. That poverty is a kind of desperation almost as desolate as the words I offered myself for that hour.... the maybes and possiblys, the sandcastles.

There was the desperation of one last touch of your skin, one last smell of your bodies, that sweet baby smell....those memories plays themselves out in my mind again and again.

There was the desperation of searching through boxes of files in my attic to find your adoption papers just so I could hold them. You know what I told myself as I knelt there in my attic, clutching those papers? They're still alive! As long as I have these papers they're still alive! Nothing can hurt them! There was this terrible fear I had back then that something bad would befall you both. I don't know why but I went through that for a time. Rarely would anyone who knows me hear me use these words but that...that I must admit was agony.

Someday I will tell someone what I did with those papers in the end but I'm not ready for that...not yet.

Finally there is one last desperation. One that has gone unnamed until another post appeared here that brought it to the surface. Something I don't want to be. A person so broken by the past and by fruitless hopes that I become a non-person. I become something that simply breaths and eats and becomes insane with rage or grief.

My babies, that happens sometimes. A person can be devoured by what they can't have or by what they've lost and hate and spite can drive them to treat others as non-humans too.

That is the desperation I most fear and I think why it's been so hard to come to this place finally and begin to get myself back.

Janey