Hope -- A Red Writing Hood meme

This weeks Red Writing Hood Prompt:

This week we asked you to write a post beginning with the words, "This was absolutely the last time" and ending with "She was wrong." (I sort of ended with she was wrong. Hope this works)

We asked you to be creative, to think outside the box, and we can't wait to see what you came up with!

This was absolutely the last time. It was what she always told herself in the moments when she felt weakened and too tired to fight any more. Moments when she wept and begged God to deliver her little family of the endless tumult that commanded their existence -- moments when she couldn’t take any more and screamed at her now adult son to get out of her house and not come back.

And, always again, she would tell herself it was absolutely the last time when she would allow him to come back home.

Raising this child had always been a battle. He was headstrong, intelligent and self destructive. He was a stereotype, a sign of the times; the needy boy born to a too young mother and an absentee father. He was born screaming and continued screaming and shaking his fist at the world as if held fast in a ceaseless tantrum.

Bipolar they had told her when he was sixteen. As if that would provide some reasonable explanation to why he stole her prescriptions and her car, why he, both emotionally and physically, lashed out at her whenever he didn’t get his way.

It didn’t explain anything that mattered. It didn’t explain where she’d gone wrong with her beautiful angel faced boy. It didn’t tell her which of her choices were responsible for destroying him. It didn’t tell her that one day things could possibly be OK.

This was the hurt that always followed the anger; the honest truth that she didn’t want to hear.

She craved nothing more than for someone to give her back her boy. She wanted back those times when he would look at her as if she had all the answers and would bare his little soul to her – when he would climb in to bed and snuggle up to her to tell her all about his day.

She wanted back the little boy who would tell her, “Mommy, I love you so much I ever saw.”

She couldn’t keep doing this. At what point did she finally decide that it was enough, that she couldn’t keep living in this vicious cycle, vacillating between bliss and misery?

But now, here he was, home again. Something was different now. This was a more humbled child. This was a child who was having honest and real conversations with her. This was a child who was actually developing a realistic plan for his life, a child who had matured in the six months she left him to fend for himself, a child who was working and taking care of his own needs.

She had told herself that it would never change, that things would never be OK, that there would never be an end to the cycle. And now, as she sat looking at her angel faced boy, she dared to hope what she had never previously had hope for.  As he stretched out across the foot of her bed, looking at her as if she had all the answers and telling her about his day, telling her how much he loved her and acknowledging how hard she'd tried, she dared to hope that she was wrong and it was finally OK.