Unsent Sentiments

Dear Mummy,

I don’t know what to say. You are comforting and I can feel you genuinely want to be nicer to me. I wish I could have a worse memory and let us start from scratch. But I just can’t let go of all the things you said, all the things you did and how much you passed on to me. I know you were treated so badly too, I know your behaviour had a reason, that you were so torn down by everyone and everything. It's weird, I feel like looking at our relationship is like looking through 3D glasses. On one hand, I got my heritage from you, my appreciation of beautiful things, common sense and magic. But on the other end there is anger, paranoia and shame. It’s so hard mummy, you hurt me so much when I was your child. After being distanced, being in different countries, and now back again, you treat me better. I see the glimpses of improvement, but I just can’t get over it. The uncomfortable twitch inside my gut wriggling and writhing around reminding me of how it was. You give me these warm hugs and the worm in me sends me chills and I just can’t return the warmth.

Her mum gave it to your mum, and she passed it onto you, and you passed it onto me and the shame never seems to end. You have images of yourself at the height of anorexia and me and daddy were constantly in aim of the same thinness. I used to be the same, starving and exercising to be smaller. I went away and got better now I can see everything so clear and it breaks my heart. Grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins, daddy and you. All relentless in trying to be thin and shaming yourselves for eating. It’s woven into our culture and woven so tightly in our family sometimes I think it’s the only thing we all have in common.

But I die a bit inside when I see what everyone could have been, versus how it is;

Aged 80 and still fearful of bread.

Aged 59 and still being shamed for eating.

Aged 47 and still on a diet from age 13.

Aged 45 and still restricting.

And you are all so much less warm to me, now that I became fat. I like myself finally but my body is one of the most frequent topic of every conversation. You talk behind my back to my partner about my weight, and the rest of the family too. There are constant tips for losing weight. Sometimes I wonder if I never recovered and died. You would finally get the message. I don’t enjoy hating my family so much, I cry when I think to myself, I hate my mum. I hate my family. Those are things that shouldn’t be happening. I’m supposed to feel safe with my family, supported by my closest allies. But every time I meet you I feel like I need to ‘ready’ myself.

Really mummy, I don’t think I’ve ever actually been myself around you. Maybe once when I was a child. But you don’t know my humour, what I really like or how I act when truly happy and feeling comfortable. I can’t genuinely laugh around you. I wish I could be myself fully, but I’m so different with you and I can’t change it.

I like being alive, I won’t ignore that you carried me and birthed me. I don’t want to have not been born, but I don’t think you were ready to have me. I don’t think I should owe you for a choice I never made. You were so full of anger and you abused me in quiet easily concealable ways. You broke my things, threw things at me, screamed at me, but also forced me to do so many things. You never respected my privacy, and broke my self-esteem, all behind closed doors. To the rest of the world you were mild and soft spoken. You broke me mummy. And now I have to face all the cleaning, all the fixing and I’m so bad at it all. You left all the stains from your pain on our family, and now that I’m trying to clean my own stain, I can’t. It’s so hard, I slip up at being better and I guess in the end I’ll become you. The more I let you in to my life mummy the more confused I get. I wish it was easy to just definitively hate you and cut you off or definitively love you and be involved. Instead I feel half emotions. Half safe, half in danger. Half forgiving and half unwilling to let go.

I see reflections of myself in you. I think it is the saddest thing in the world that I’m not proud of those reflections, that I am not in love with you or daddy. How sad and stupid. A daughter who can’t love her mother in a world that loves mothers so thoroughly. I’m surrounded by these images of mothers being nurturing and that they can do no wrong.

“But she’s your mum. You only have one mum.”

So? I am also her child, why does the responsibility of a parent-child relationship fall on the child? Why couldn’t the world question the parents, what could a parent do to a child to make them not want to be connected anymore? What could someone have done to push away a child? I know I probably sound spoilt to you mummy, you think that I’m being immature and selfish and following the new trend of children hating their parents. How western psychology is so flawed and warped because it looks at childhood trauma. I know you think I’m being unfair, stamping you with being a ‘bad mother’ even after all the nice things you did. But I’ve grown enough to know that being un-abusive is simply the standard and ‘nice things’ aren’t redemptions.

I’m sorry though, I think writing this has made me pretty heated just recalling everything. In reality I have no idea how I feel about you mummy. But I don’t think I will ever be able to tell you.