Alena Long
People are complicated. We come from a long schema of wants and needs that often begin way before we become verbal. Once we can speak we can verbalize the needs we’ve had all along, but the lack remains or is overindulged or becomes central to that which we crave in our lives. Alena Long was breastfed for six days. On the seventh day her mother set her down in a clear locker at a Fire station a hundred miles from where she was born and everything she should or could have known. For seventeen years she moved through a system that didn’t want her, shifting from house to house and family to family of people who ultimately did not want her. She did everything she could to be wanted. Her actions and need only pushed people further away. Little by little the need shifted from something she wanted to something she hated in any possible form. She stopped believing in what she could have, and started accepting what she could get from people who had needs of their own.
She was twenty three when she became a mother for the first time. Her second daughter arrived a short ten months after. It wasn’t her intention to transit that need to them. It just developed naturally out of finally and for the first time feeling what she’d lost six days into her own life. She became a mother first, a wife second, and nothing existed beyond that.
It took her a while to realize she had her own beliefs and feelings and needs that were outside that fundamental push. It took twelve years in fact, when her first born realized that she wanted a life of her own and it didn’t involve mom being there every waking moment–throwing her life into her daughters as though everything else were secondary. Now Alena is at a crossroads. She can’t be all about these kids who need more space and she doesn’t have a sense of mooring beyond that. All she knows–all she wants is to be there and to be available and to be ready when they need her.