How Are You Going To Justify It?

How are you going to justify it—not only to yourselves,
not only to your maker,
but to everyone else?

To the ones who watched.
To the ones who knew.
To the ones you dragged into silence with you.

How are you going to justify
the whispered conversations,
the quiet insinuations,
the way you clutched your pearls while pointing fingers coated in honey-laced venom?
How are you going to explain what you did,
not just to me,
but to the child who listened through the walls?

How are you going to justify saying they neglected their firstborn?
That they abandoned her, pushed her aside,
pawned her off like she was a chore,
like love has limits, like care has capacity?
How are you going to justify weaponizing the very notion of parenthood
to suit your narrative?

How are you going to explain away
the cruel certainty with which you declared them guilty of the unspeakable—
that they made their own child disabled?
That they chose this?
That Munchausen by proxy wasn’t a horror story you read,
but a label you licked and stuck to someone
already drowning in appointments and acronyms
and exhaustion that doesn't clock out?

How are you going to justify denying them access
and then turning around, empty-handed and shaking,
knocking on the very door you barred,
asking me and my husband for protection?

How are you going to explain that she didn’t want them involved—
not because she was cold,
but because she was finally safe?
How will you twist that into malice
when you were handed truth and returned it unopened,
marked return to sender?

How are you going to justify making a list—
a fucking list—
as though love can be audited?
As though parenting is a ledger
and empathy is a debt someone owes you?

What mental gymnastics will you perform
to make this all my fault?
Will you stretch until your spine snaps
just to land on your feet with your hands clean?
What lies will you tell?
And how many of them will unravel before the ink even dries?

How many people are you planning to take down with you?
Are you really so sure of your cleverness
that you think you can outrun the truth?

How are you going to justify
the patriarchal belief
that they ruined their youngest child?
That they somehow made things worse
by fighting tooth and nail for autonomy, for safety, for breath?

How are you going to justify
the patriarchal rage—
hurling accusations of abuse
from the high horse of entitlement,
drenched in self-righteousness and convenience?

Because the truth is,
your lies are unfurling like threadbare rope.
Unspooling.
Untangling.
And what’s left is sharp.
Unmistakable.
You aligned yourself with cruelty.
You danced in step with liability and abuse.
And what’s worse—
you guided others into the same pit,
with smiles and nods and quiet confidence,
leading someone who trusted you
into a trap that may yet snap shut around their ankle.

So I just wonder—
I really do—
how you’re going to justify it all.
Not to me.
Not even to yourselves.
But to every single pair of eyes
that’s watching now
as your performance collapses under the weight
of its own fiction.

Because some things cannot be buried.
Some truths demand resurrection.
And this—
this is a remembering
of everything.