//------------------------------//
// Beautiful Boy 
// Story: Beautiful Boy 
// by FabulousDivaRarity 
//------------------------------//

I turn on the sink, listening to the water run as the dishes clatter in my sink. They clang together, so loud it makes me jump. I almost put them on flannel to quiet them, but I need to wash them. I’m shaking as I do the dishes, all over my body. I try and force myself to stop. If I don’t stop I’ll wake my sleeping son. But I cannot.

I scrub the dishes automatically, washing plates. I’m doing it so much it’s becoming moot. But I cannot seem to stop. If I stop moving, what happened will seep in. And if it seeps in, I do not know if I will ever stop crying. Worse yet, I may make my son cry too. He’s only eight months old, after all. He knows when there’s something wrong with Mommy. I couldn’t dare do that to him. So I keep a lid on my emotions, and keep moving, yet cannot quell the shaking of my body.

I’m a naturally kinetic mare. I don’t tend to stay in one place for too long, or if I do, I’m moving somehow. I’ve always believed in the power of moving forward and looking ahead. All my life, I’ve tended to make grandiose plans for the future, and because of my inability to stop and smell the roses (so to speak) and my work ethic, many of those plans were fulfilled. I got a good education. I got a steady job. I even found a bit of romance, and married. My biggest ambition, though, was to have a family. And when my son Sunburst was born, I’d felt the fruition of all the plans I had made for myself a million times over. There was no greater accomplishment than to see the beautiful life I had helped bring into the world. 

But the issue with life is that things don’t always go according to plan.

You can make millions of plans for yourself and your life, and no matter how many back up plans you may have, you will more than likely end up with one thing or another going off the rails. It should be said, of course, that many general goals you may have will work in the way you wanted them to. But the actual execution of how these come to be, and what happens after are subject to change. 

So many things I wanted for myself, I got because I made them happen. But life has a way of deciding to make other plans for us all.

My career was excellent. My son was healthy. I had a good marriage. What more could anypony have wanted? Much more, actually, if they saw behind the curtain. My career was wonderful, yes. Nothing about that was untrue. It was, in fact, the only area of my life which I didn’t fret about at this point. 

My son was healthy. Yes, he was now. But when I gave birth to him, it was in my home alone. My husband Sunspot had been away on business and my son hadn’t been due for three weeks. I’d had false labor pains for weeks before, so by the time I realized it wasn’t false, I was so weakened I could not get to the hospital. My son was born in my bedroom, and I cleaned him and carried him to the hospital in the dead of night because I wasn’t able to teleport in my exhaustion. I’d given him to a nurse and then fainted. When I woke up, I feared for him, having been born in an unsterile environment with none of the usual equipment on hoof. By some miracle, he was perfectly healthy.

From the moment he was born, I swore to protect him by whatever means necessary. I promised to give him all of my love, and to dedicate my life to helping him succeed in whatever he chose. I promised him I would give him a good life. All these promises I made to him, I made on the day he was born. It was him and I. 

All of the promises I have made in my life were of little importance compared to those. What I did not know was that a promise made to me was apparently of little importance to somepony else. Namely, my marriage vows. 

Sunburst was eight months old. In those eight months I had been the best mother I’d known how to be. I’d stayed up too many nights when my son was crying to take that off of Sunspot’s shoulders. I’d nursed him every day so the expense of formula hadn’t come up and we could stay within a budget to add to a fund for Sunburst’s schooling. I never complained about cooking dinner after taking care of my son all day, because I knew my husband was working hard. I’d cried privately to myself when I felt fat or ugly or particularly emotional because I did not want to burden my husband with it. He’d found me nearly every time, and he’d comforted me. There was not a day that I did not honor our marriage vows, or believe he would honor his.

But yesterday, he’d walked out on me and our son.

There was no warning. He’d left while I was getting Sunburst ready for the morning. I’d heard the front door close. That was a red flag. He never tended to leave home on his days off. And yet, I’d fallen into the foolish belief that he’d gone to the market, or wanted to do some extra work to get more bits for us to live on. 

I’d gone on with my daily routine. I’d fed, bathed, changed, and played with my son. It wasn’t until dinner came and went that I began to worry. I wondered if some kind of accident had happened. But I immediately nixed that idea. Somepony would have told me. It’s a small town, Sires Hollow, and everypony knows one another. That night, lying in my bed, I knew with certainty he wasn’t coming back.

The amount of questions that can fill one’s head in that situation is immeasurable. The one that bounced around in my head the most was Why did it have to be now?

There was no indication that he was ever thinking of something like this. I thought about it over and over all last night and all through today. I performed my daily routine on autopilot as I tried to formulate an answer. But there wasn’t one. That’s what nopony understands. Sometimes you do everything right, and there are no good answers. Sometimes things just happen without an explanation and we don’t get to know the reason why. 

There weren’t any problems in our marriage at that point. There were no fights, no worries about money as we had plenty of bits in savings. There wasn’t any sign of another mare he might have been seeing. And I knew he adored our son. I saw it in his eyes when he first saw his son. He wept with joy and kissed him and me over and over thanking me for bringing him into the world. And every spare minute he had from work, he spent with myself and our son.

There wasn’t any indication that this was going to happen. So I was left wondering what might have gone wrong, or what he knew that I didn’t. It’s only been two days, but I am constantly questioning why it happened now. Even more so, the question I ask myself is how he could turn on his own son this way.

Sunburst may not be old enough to remember this, but I will never forget it. The idea that a father could do that to his child disgusts me. Sunspot may have left me without a husband, but leaving his son without a male role model is something I will never be able to forgive. To know that he abandoned the flesh of his flesh and that his son will likely ask me questions someday about why he doesn’t have a Daddy is the most heart-wrenching thing I can imagine.

My shaking is so severe it’s extended to my vision. It’s not in sadness in which I shake. It is in anger. I drop the plate I’d been so vigorously cleaning. It lands in the sink with a wet plop, and doesn’t make a sound when it hits the bottom. I lean against the sink, head bowed, and feel hot tears oozing down my cheeks. I’m crying quietly, making sure not to make noise to wake up my son. I’ve perfected the art over the last months. I want so badly to scream, but I cannot scream. This is my burden to bear, and my son does not need to hear my distress.

I cry quietly for a few minutes, before I manage to pull myself together by sheer force of will. I cried over it, and now I can go on. I know very well that not acknowledging feelings only makes them worse. I’ve decided that if this chooses to continue to haunt me (which it undoubtedly will for a while, but in time I hope it leaves me) I will allot time to acknowledge this grief and upset each day, so that I can hopefully continue moving forward without delay.

I finish the dishes, and go to see Sunburst in his nursery. I’m thankful the hinges on the door were oiled recently, or else it may have creaked horribly and woken him. I peek in. He’s there, sleeping in his crib. A small smile creeps on my face, and I enter the room, sitting down on the old rocking chair I moved from my room to here for the time being. I could spend forever watching him dream. He’s so perfect, so beautiful, so innocent. My beautiful baby boy.

He begins to make noise, the same small whimpers and hitches in his breath that signal he's about to cry. I go over to him and whisper.

"It's alright, Sunny Bunny. Mommy's here. Mommy's right here." I whisper to soothe him. Occasionally this works to get him back to sleep, and today it seems to be enough. He stops whimpering and settles down, as I beam at him from overhead.

It is said that children give us a purpose and an identity. This is especially true for me now. If I didn’t have my son to look forward to, I shudder to think where I might be right now. When your world of order is thrown to chaos, you look for a constant. He is my constant. His needs, his love, his wants are what is keeping me glued together. Whenever he opens those bright blue eyes, I see the reason why I’m still here, and still fighting for a good life. I’m not fighting for me, I’m fighting for my son. I have to keep myself together because he needs me to take care of him, to teach him, guide him, and help him grow. 

I made a promise that I would do anything for him, and I will always keep that promise to my beautiful boy.