What I Turn to When Faced with Rejection

Cry Academy prompt

Photo by Pedro Mealha on Unsplash

My first taste of rejection cut so deep that I am still feeling it nearly 71 years later. The sad thing is it wasn’t really rejection, and I can understand that logically and have since I was in my mid-thirties. But my heart has not healed; that pain is still there, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that I can do to get rid of it. I think I will take it to my grave.

When I was four days old, my mother had her second nervous breakdown. (Her first had been about two years before, toward the end of her senior year in college.) Because of that first breakdown, it was recommended that she stay with her mother instead of my father for the last few months of her pregnancy; Dad was working several hours away. My mother, I was told many years later, was treating me like a doll, not feeding me and not letting anyone else take me. In the struggle to take me away from her, she threw me on the bed and threw herself on top of me. My aunt’s husband was the one who got her off me. She was taken to the nearest mental hospital, where she stayed for the next nine months.

I never even thought about how lucky I was that my grandmother and aunt, who lived in different halves of my grandmother’s house, agreed to keep me. I’ve heard stories since of relatives not being willing to take in other family members’…