You Loved a Tempest

You weren’t always there for me you know. You were there but you just weren’t there. I was your oldest, the one who made you a mom. I was the start of fulfilling your dream of being a mother of four. But just because you wanted it, didn’t mean you were always good at it. It was always clear that I was my father’s child. Emotional and volatile, given to outbursts of anger. He was still developing as a human and you had no backbone.

Even still, you were my world. The one I relied on, the safe place I could run to when he became a tempest. The friend I could lean on when I became the ‘weird’ kid in high school. I learned how to be your perfect child. I learned how to hold in my own tempest in the hopes of being better than he was. I stuffed away everything that made me special in order to fit your mold. It was a house of cards.

It was always easier to blame him for my problems. His words were the ones that echoed in my darkest moments. It was his face I saw when I hated myself. His voice I heard when I wondered if anyone would care if I was gone. Maybe there was a part of me that hated you even then, for loving him when he had done nothing but hurt me.

At some point I stopped feeling anything at all. Well, I suppose that’s not entirely true. I could feel the anger. Eventually that’s all there was, anger and the void. I blamed him of course. I had inherited his tempest, taken on that volatile nature. I had become the very thing I hated. It was better to feel nothing at all but that didn’t mean the storm stopped brewing.

You loved all your children. You did a lot of things right. That’s why the neglect was so hard to see in the shadow of his anger. You were always the perfect parent in my eyes and I made myself in your image all the while trying to crucify any part of myself that was like him. But I wasn’t like you. I was wounded like him. I was volatile like him. I was a tempest as he had always been.

I’ll give you this, you never gave up on him, despite his rage. You loved him through counseling. Loved him through his demands. Loved him through his high expectations of what a wife should be. You showed again and again the loyalty of a wife. I longed to be a wife like you. Loyal, steadfast, calm, the exact opposite of a storm.

For 30 years everything that was ever wrong with my life was his fault. I never in my life would have imagined your part in it. Never imagined that the pain you caused ran so deep I had hidden it from even myself. Never in my life considered that I might have a mom wound.

When quarantine pressed in, I thought it was my own depression that kept me from calling you. It made sense that I would withdraw after getting fired from my job. You always wanted me to be perfect and my life was crumbling into oblivion. I didn’t want you to remind me of everything I was failing to be. I thought it was a simple funk. That I would pull myself out of it when things got better. Everything would go back to normal when Covid was behind us.

I was wrong. It wasn’t about that. It was about how there was a tempest inside me and someone had told me it was okay. It was about how someone gave me permission to feel angry. It was about how someone looked into the eye of the storm and told me that wasn’t who I was. It was about how someone else did what you were too afraid to. Someone else did your job.

When it really mattered you weren’t there. Truthfully I might have even been able to get past it. To forgive you as I had forgiven him. I could have brushed it off and thought nothing of the pain you caused me. But you threw my little sister to the wolves and left me to clean up the pieces.

From the time she was born you weren’t there for her. She jokes that all her problems started in the womb. She jokes that she has to carry on for the brother she lost. She jokes that maybe the wrong twin survived. She jokes that she absorbed him in the womb and that’s why she’s gender confused. She jokes and we laugh and roll our eyes but maybe she’s just a little bit right.

You never did get over him. He wasn’t the only one you lost but he was the only one you didn’t get a proper chance to mourn. You couldn’t because you had a living baby to take care of. You were torn between mourning and being a mother so you ended up failing at both. If it was only me that you hurt I think I could have handled it. But you failed to be her mother. You put me into that role at the age of 6 and I had nothing but a tempest to raise her with.

She was our perfect little golden child so I guess that meant she didn’t need love the same way. She was the peacemaker, the gentle soul, the sunshine of our lives. Until she wasn’t. When she needed her mother the most, you weren’t there for her. You never could accept my tempest so I suppose I shouldn’t have expected you to accept her sexuality. You neglected her…right into the grave.