Confessions to My Mom

Dear Mom,

I don't really know where to begin. Last year, you told me about your neighbor's anger that her mother had sold you her house. You described, in detail, the tears coming down the woman's face as she saw her inheritance turned over to a stranger. You told me you didn't want me living in that resentment. You didn't want me spreading stories of your betrayal to whoever you sold the house to. "I don't want anything like that between us," you said, "you'll tell me if you have a problem, right?" And I told you I would. But, like I said... I don't know where to begin.

Let's start with the good news: I don't mind if you sell the house. I mean, I love that house. I love the way it looks like it's grown from the land. I used to imagine bringing my kids there on vacation, the same way you would take us on vacation to visit gramma when we were children. But I think I always knew it wouldn't stay in the family. Even before dad died, the farm got too much to care for, so unless I decide I want to live there, I might as well pass joy on to someone else.

I am also not mad at you for telling me that I needed to get good grades and go to college to avoid working in fast food, even though I ended up in fast food anyway. I think perhaps even you were fooled by this social fairytale we tell children. Besides, you already apologized for that. Long ago.

But that's the heart of all this, isn't it, mom? Apologies. I felt like you were so sparse with them, always. In 7th grade, you scheduled my dentist appointment for the same day as the school spelling bee--my last chance to prove that I was just as good as my brother, the spelling champion, or my sister, the valedictorian. I cried. And you yelled. Just like you yelled a year before when I cried on the way home from the doctors office.

"I can't swallow pills," I had bravely told the doctor, at age 11, after being diagnosed with walking pneumonia.

"What, are you a baby?" he said to me.

And on the way home, the only thing you could say was, "What?! Is your problem?!"

Here's the thing, mom. Ever since dad died, I've been noticing more and more things I have in common with him. I hoard papers the way he did. I hide Easter eggs for my niece like him. I put so much effort into my students, just as he taught me. From him, I also got my obesity, my sore feet, and my sleep apnea. But mom, I think I got your anger. And I don't want it.

In the last days of the school year, I could feel it bubbling up inside me, against the patience my co-workers know me so well for. I can feel it forcing its way out of me when my husband tries to kiss me at an inconvenient time. And most of all, I can feel it hurling back at you, its progenitor, like a missile.

Sometimes, when I think about you, the explosion behind that rocket burns away all my other feelings. I think about how you made me clean up a spider-infested bathroom, even though you knew I was arachnophobic. Or how you demanded I get a job on Fridays so you could have the house to yourself without once considering my own need for personal space. I think about how you lied to me when I asked you to cut my hair because you didn't have the courage to tell me you didn't want to. Or how you mocked me publicly and expected me to apologize to you for it.

The funny part about all of this is that I don't expect you to remember any of it. I think I gave up on you apologizing to me around the same time I gave up hoping dad would listen. But these days, things are different. In the last years of his life, you told me how dad would forget things, ask the same questions over and over. And when I told you he had always been like that--asking my friends and I three times on the way home if we were hungry--you started to hear me.

So, for the first time in my life, I'm starting to wonder if you'll keep hearing me. Maybe you'll hear when I tell you that you were as nasty about me wanting a religious life as dad was. Or that dammit, mom, why couldn't you let me go to summer camp, just once? Maybe I can finally tell you how your obsession with "only eating food your grandmother would recognize" or checking the exact amount of sugar in everything you ate was probably the first step on the road to my horrible relationship with food. Only... your anger's not the only thing I inherited from you, mom. I inherited your silence as well.

I still remember the first time my brother realized you were intelligent. You just pretended you were stupid. Not that he needed to tell me. I already knew it. You had long ago revealed to me that you would play dumb in front of men--even my brother--even my dad--because you didn't want them to feel bad. And mom, did you train me well. When dad assumed I liked root beer, even though you knew I didn't, you told me to drink it anyway. When doctors told me my only problem was my weight, you told me not to challenge it--health be damned. And when you hurt me, you taught me to pretend it didn't happen. My pain didn't matter as long as I apologized to you.

I guess, in that way, I learned one more thing from you: avoidance. I stopped telling dad things I didn't think he would remember. I stopped visiting the doctor when I realized they only saw my weight. And I stopped telling you when you hurt me. Because I knew you would laugh and say that was a stupid thing to be upset about. And compared the Hell I put you through, I'd faced nothing.

Well, I guess I haven't fully learned my lesson.

I'm sorry.