Afraid

Dear Mom,

I am afraid of you. I've never told you that.

I'm terrified to tell you anything. Even an ocean away from you, I can't escape the way you control my decisions. I hold myself back simply because of the terror of having to tell you what I want.

Is it because I desire your approval? Because I wish to remain the good, perfect, unproblematic, favorite daughter?

It used to be a source of pride, you know. I spent so long working to always agree and never protest or argue, just for those few moments when you'd say 'You really get me' or 'Talking to you is so nice.'

I'd come away feeing warm and soft inside, like I'd amounted to something. I couldn't scream or cry for attention and I was ever easily charismatic, but I certainly could sit quietly and nod along as you spoke and I milked any misbegotten affection out of it. Terrible, right?

I'm sitting here wondering how I felt unloved when we said it so often, but I've always felt like 'I love you' in our family was never real. It's just something we're obligated to say, trained to tack on to the ends of our sentences without feeling.

I never chose to love you. I never felt sure that you chose to love me either, because for all the 'I love you's, I rarely heard praise for my accomplishments or personality.

I only ever got praised for being able to sit quietly and agree with you.

Maybe that's why this honesty is so difficult. I'm risking the one thing I felt you loved me for.

I think about telling you I want to stay here, about talking about how scared that makes me, and it makes me so afraid.

All I can hear is you complaining about how you don't yell at us, you've never been an angry mother, why are we all so afraid of you being mad, you're never mad.

(You're often angry, Mom. You do yell and you do get mad.)

But it's not fear of you being angry. It's fear of losing that one thing you valued about me.

When my sister left, you told her she was being selfish and she cried for ages because she felt like she was letting you down by doing what mad her happy. You and my brother fought, yelled and screamed at each other, the last time I was home.

You've never told me I was selfish, never yelled at me. Is it because I sit quietly and tell you you're right? Because I'm good? I have held my head high because you've never treated me that way. I've looked down on my siblings, thought 'maybe if you were just more like me, she wouldn't treat you that way.' But it wasn't about me, was it? Or them.

It's about you, about the way you want us to act, the way you think we should be.

I am terrified, terrified, that I am going to step off the path you think I'm traveling and then you're going to be telling me how disappointed you are or yelling and screaming at me.

That's all it's going to take. Just one misstep out of the perfect, smile and nod daughter I've become before I lose the only thing you ever cherished me for.

I hate that I crave this approval from you. I can already hear the disappointment or the yelling, and somehow, for the life of me, I can't understand why I still even care what you think. Why I still try to please you, when I know that it's been giving me nothing but grief.

Sincerely,

Your Daughter