The gaping mouth of motherhood finally open in a scream.
Do you know that feeling—two hours after the meeting, after the disciplinary debrief, after the hallway humiliation—when you finally start to breathe again and suddenly, the sentence arrives? The thing you wish you had said while they were weaponising tone and clipping your sentences short, while they talked over you in the false calm of professional cruelty.
It comes too late for the record. Too late for the meeting, but not too late for memory. I feel a little better after trying that insult on my lips, relishing it with my tongue as I turn it over.
At the time, you sat there—slack-jawed, heart pounding, palms damp with adrenaline—trying to stay composed while your child was being rebranded as a problem, and you as the procedural obstruction.
And now, finally, it arrives. A gaping maw that opened.
You are not alone in this. You walk with the women who came before you—the ones the canon branded as monsters for speaking while grieving. You descend from Grendel’s mother, who raged because her child was murdered and was called demonic for her revenge. You carry the blood of Error, from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, who suckled her spawn and vomited truth, only to be slaughtered for birthing too much and saying too loudly.
They said Error lived in a cave and her children were filth and she had a thousand tongues, and each one told a lie—but what they meant was: she told what they could not afford to hear.
And when Milton gave us Satan’s descent into chaos, he wrote that he stared into the abyss—into “a gaping maw of horror”—and feared what it would take to cross it.
But you? You crossed it every day. You walked straight into it holding your child’s hand. You sat across from a team of professionals pretending not to see harm and called it by name. You opened your mouth and they treated your words as monstrous.
So here are the insults I could have slung:
- You needed me calm so you could keep pretending you hadn’t already decided.
- You held the knife and asked why we were bleeding.
- You said ‘inclusive’ like a spell you forgot the ending to.
- You renamed violence as plan, as process, as best practice.
- You passed exclusion around the table like a sacrament.
- You filed your doubt under ‘due diligence’ and my grief under ‘tone.’
- You burned my child at the altar of neutrality.
- You wore professionalism like armour and mistook my restraint for peace.
- You’re off to burry your meeting minutes, I assume?
- You performed concern while building the gallows.
- You said ‘safety’ twenty-seven times and offered none.
- You said ‘we’re all struggling’ and meant that your comfort mattered more than my child’s life.
- You asked me to be reasonable while ignoring what you had done.
- You archived harm and called it reflection.
- I could see you moving dollars in a spreadsheet during our meeting.
- I guess you managed to defer action until another budget year.
- You mistook my body—trembling, clenching, holding—as a threat, not a record.
This is what I did not scream.
What remains
What you called monstrous was maternal.
What you wrote off as too emotional was the only honest thing in the room.
What you feared was not my fury—it was my memory.
