Echoes of the Willow

By Michelle Allen | www.echoesofthewillow.com

Michelle Allen is a community storyteller dedicated to preserving the history and charm of Hesperia. Learn more at www.echoesofthewillow.com

Every scar is a story. Some stitched and healed. Others still bleed quietly beneath the surface.

I’ve had surgeries—plural. Some with doctors. Some with time. Some with sorrow sharp enough to cut through bone. Each with its own history. Each leaving a mark not just on my body, but on the shape of my heart.

In 1985, I miscarried. A silent sorrow shattering my soul. A D&C followed, a sterile phrase for something unspeakably sacred that broke me open. The procedure was clinical, quiet. But the grief was not. It echoed in every room I entered, in every corner of my being. I don’t often talk about it. But the silence doesn’t mean it didn’t shape me. Only that something was gone—something I never got to hold, never got to name. And the silence stretched for miles.

Then, in 1988, light broke through again. Our daughter was born–pink and perfect and loud with life.  The moment she arrived, her daddy’s face caught fire with joy like I’d never seen before. He doted on her with the kind of love that ran deep and steady, all the way until the day he left this world in 2021, at just 61 years old. She was his whole heart walking outside his body. She still carries his smile.

But life doesn’t move only in straight lines. It twisted a new branch in 1989. There was another loss. We were met with a decision no parent ever dreams of facing. A choice I wouldn’t wish on anyone. One I have never spoken of publicly. A spoken hush in the shadow that echoes inside me. It was a decision wrapped in pain, made during a time when everything felt uncertain and overwhelming. It’s the ache I carry behind my ribs. A grief I can’t return or undo. On May 7th of that year, my husband and I faced an impossible choice—an abortion. Not a word. A wound. No one prepares you for what that kind of pain feels like, the way it plants itself quietly into the folds of your memory. I don’t defend it, I don’t promote it—I just carry it. Every May 7th, I find myself pulled into that same raw stillness. Wondering. Mourning. That day is etched into me like a second skin, one I wear under everything else. Not to judge it. Not to justify it. But to sit with it. And sometimes, I weep. Quietly. As mothers do when no one is watching. To remember. To imagine the little life that could have been. The grief still whispers, even now.

Then, like grace returning, 1991 brought us our first son. And in 1996, another. Two beautiful boys—each with eyes that held the same spark as their sister and the same gentle stubbornness as their daddy. They arrived like second chances, wide-eyed and wide-hearted. Each one a new branch on a tree that had known both winter and bloom. There’s a sacredness in that pain—body torn open, soul rearranged. Each birth a redemption, each child a miracle.

Other surgeries came too—a breast reduction surgery—part healing, part reclamation; a partial hysterectomy, as if I were finally agreeing with time that a chapter had closed–the kinds of changes no one celebrates but every woman understands. And then, a shoulder surgery courtesy of grandchildren turning me into the middle of a tug-of-war. They laughed while I became the rope. I winced. But the pain?  It’s funny now, but there’s something poetic in being pulled too hard by love. Love being lived out loud!

These scars I carry? They’re not just from scalpels or sutures. Some were born from decisions. Others from loss. But all of them from love. They are maps of the miles I’ve walked as a woman, a mother, a wife, and now a grandmother–a soul trying to make sense of it all.

Every scar is a story. Some are stitched and healed. Others still bleed quietly beneath the surface.

They do not define me. But they do remind me—I have lived deeply, fiercely, and with so much love.

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The Ones I Never Held

There is a cradle in my heart for the ones I never held, names never spoken aloud, but etched in the space between every breath.

I carry them like moonlight— quiet, constant, only seen when the rest of the world turns its face away. One came with silence, the other with choice— and both with grief stitched into my marrow.

May 7th hums a lullaby only I can hear.

I do not ask for forgiveness. I do not need forgetting. I only ask that their shadows walk softly through my story, that my tears fall like baptisms over memories I dared not name until now.