What's a meta for?

It's a metaphor I use often...
Wait, is it metaphor??

I'm no longer sure it is metaphor.
Is it even a figure of speech?

I don't mean it rhetorically.
The high road is a path that I choose daily when it comes to my perspective on coparenting and dealing with FOB. It's a tangible visualization, I can smell the soil and hear the scrape of the rock under my feet. 
It started in a field. I felt like I had been dropped there after some sort of out of body experience or alien abduction. Dawn breaking over hills and solitude, it is just me and my body ready to work and keep working--from child labor to emotional labor to manual labor.
Yeah.
It's not a figure of speech.

Aw, man.
It has to do with morality?
Catholic school just absolutely formed and ruined me on that at the same time.
Fine.
Let's do that one, too.

OK. I think I've got the gist of that one. I mean, granted, in my existence (as with most humans I think), I have created a gray ground of moral ambiguity so I could sway between, learn from, and exist in right and wrong without hating myself or over loving myself. Like, that line between the black and white part of a yin yang? It's gray.

I guess the point of this post is this.
I joke? confess? profess? declare? state? exist? in a place with coparenting where I feel like I build the high road on a daily basis. One little goddess shoulder Mallory says, "fuck that cocksucker he dumped you make him pay {insert maniacal, hurt laughter here} and other Little goddess shoulder Mallory says, ''think of the kid, think of forever, think and build... even if it's hard."
And that's who I've tried to listen to for the past year.

It's fucking hard.
It's me after a year of building. I have a sunburn and my hands are no longer pretty. Water is running low but it looks like it's going to rain soon.
I have one giant rock in each hand.
Fingers clenched around each piece of earth, withered, broken, bloody, and nails bent.
Feet underneath each fist exhausted, confused, vulnerable, holding the world upright. Moving forward continuously with the occasional stumble, building the road as you go means it's always behind you. More earth to move, more to labor.
This birds eye view of these hands backed by a mind of thought.... wondering what it will do today.
Will it take each rock and smash whatever (or whomever) is in the way to smithereens?
Will it continue to build?
Will there be an alarm that goes off before the bloodshed at least?

Oh, the bloodshed.... it's a metaphor.