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Welcome Home: The Root of Divide

By Adrianna Gass

We were planted in the same ground.

The same cracked earth.

The same childhood wind that carved our names into the backyard tree.

I once believed those roots were sacred.

I once believed nothing could sever what grew beneath us.

But even as children, I felt the soil shift.

I felt it carry them closer and push me quietly away.

Their branches braided into a crown of togetherness.

Warm, golden, laughing.

A circle closed so tightly it left no opening for me.

I learned to watch from the shadows.

To swallow my hurt like a secret.

To pretend the cold did not sting

while they bloomed in the center of a garden I helped plant.

And now I watch the same frost touch my children.

Tiny footsteps entering rooms

where joy has already made its choices.

Small faces scanning for a place to belong

only to find silence curling around them instead.

My oldest stands beside his cousin, same age, same height, same innocence.

Yet he becomes invisible in an instant.

They breeze past him as if he is air,

as if he is nothing more than a leaf clinging to a branch

this family never claimed as its own.

It is a slow, painful unraveling.

A grief that drips instead of strikes.

A hollow that deepens every time I see his hopeful smile fade

for reasons he cannot name.

But I can.

Because I have lived them.

Holidays arrive like ghosts.

Rooms heavy with warmth that never reaches us.

Laughter ricochets against the walls,

leaving bruises only we can feel.

The bottles clink.

The stories swell.

And we sit on the outskirts,

as if made of something breakable they do not want to touch.

I try to smile for my children.

I try to keep their hearts whole.

But on the drive home,

when they ask why they were not chosen,

I hear the child I used to be answering for me.

And it breaks me.

Because I remember that question.

I remember the silence that followed it.

I remember how long it took to learn I would never be wanted the way I wanted them.

I did not choose this distance.

It was carved into me.

It was taught to me.

It was planted long before I understood what family could take from a person.

They treat me like a splinter.

Something sharp.

Something useless.

Something to flick away so the holiday can feel whole again.

And yet the only thing broken is what they left of us.

Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning

to a tree that grows fruit we are never allowed to taste.

A tree that forgets we were ever rooted beside it.

A tree that lets our leaves wither,

uncared for, unnoticed,

as if our absence makes the branches stronger.

I have spent my life learning how to survive without their warmth.

But watching my children wilt beneath the same cold

feels like a tragedy I cannot unwrite.

Maybe one day we will grow far from this place

in soil that welcomes us.

In light that does not skip over our faces.

In a forest that does not pretend we were never part of its beginning.

Because I can bear being the branch they never reached for.

But I cannot bear watching my children fall

from a tree that never tried to hold them.