From Your Secret Admirer

My life started within the womb of a woman. Not just any woman, but one who seemed to be tattered, broken, bent, and bruised. There we were 6 days past my arrival date, heart beat to heart beat screaming for our lifes. Then, at 7:40 pm on the night of September 25, 1992, you fiercly nestled my cut up and bruised faced into your bossom and I knew I was in love.

Love. This thing I'd never known until that moment, slapped me right in the chest the moment we touched skin. Here she was, the woman whose voice I'd heard for months, now staring at me, holding me, touching me. Now, I know what you're thinking... you remember your own birth? Well, no not entirely. However, my heart does and my body is marked with the blueprints of all the trauma that came with that day. I've spent hundreds of dollars on hypnosis and therapy just to try to understand why my birthday has seemed like the most Earth shattering day of my life, yet leaves my heart beaming with the purest gleam of love. The only answer I have found is that travel plans get mixed up, the cargo gets bumped and bruised all the time. However, that love.. it's once in a life time. I grew up, I kicked and scream and was defiant as hell towards that love of my life. At some point, one would probably say it looked more like hate than love. Around the age of twelve, I started to think so too. That love started to become something that burned like hot coal rather than soothed my crying. That love started to feel more like a fun-sucker, and a dictator than it did a beaming ray of cosmic light. And at some point as I grew, that love started to feel like a heavy weight of responsibilitiy and obligation.

Single and alone with me, my mother did her best. Her best entailed working, working, and working. Then, one day it was like the sword of Zuess struck the skies and lightening rained down on her. The emotions, the feelings, the trauma, the tears all held in her body overcome by her willpower and strubborn stregnth nestled their way into her left hip and took up residence. 6 total hips surgeries later, this time they ate her alive from the inside out. Her mobility slowed, she became a fragmented fragile version of the once ferocious force she used to be. One can only pretend to be "okay" for so long before the "okay" turns into a a tornado of chaos. Chaos hit. It hit hard. Sometimes it's felt more like I am my mother's mother, rather than she is mine. Then, somewhere between arguments and teeth chattering grief, resentment came into my chest and stole love right out of me.

It survived puberity, my rebellious teenage years, college parties, and now the pressure became too much, this was the final break. The break of my own heart. Yeah, that's right. My mother was my greatest love, and my greatest heart break. That's the thing though, no one tells you how messy love can be. Love. Do any of us know what that really means anymore? Through systemic connotations of love through ancestral lines, we learn what we THINK love should be. Yet, FEELING that love is something that breaks us. Breaks us, freaks us out, and even shuts us down.

When my mom toppled off the perfect pedastal I saw her on when I first came into the world, the love I had came crashing down with it. Then came the shattering of my own heart. But, then something strange happened. Through watching my mother struggle through the ups and downs of a imperfectly perfect life, to crawl on her aching limbs, and worn hands THAT taught me true, real, love. Love isn't something that can be wrapped up in Christmas dinners, and birthday gifts. No, it plays no games and takes no shit. Love breaks you. Love breaks you done to the sternum and splits you wide open. The heartbreak we often feel, isn't a breaking so much as it is an expanding, an opening to something greater. My mother, she broke me, she expanded me, and she taught me how to fly.

In the little moments between busy schedules, work, and daily life becoming a circus, in the little moments when her stubbborness melts away for a split second, love creeps up and draws us together. The pain, the changes, the chaos, the crazy, the trauma, the mood swings, the imperfect, and the greatest times of my life I've shared with this woman. Some my age loathe sharing their life with their mom's. They shut them out, keep it to surface level and put on a mask in order to play a role for their mothers. Not me. Even if I tried, my mother knows me. She knows me so well that if I even tried to show up and be a mere fragment of who I truly am, she'd look me in the eyes raw and bare boned and call me out as if I were a disciple before God. She opens me up and there's no way I can close down when she's achingly soul-tied to the strings of my own heart. She's become my best friend. She's become the epitome of the power of love to me. The glory of true relationship.

I know what you're thinking, "oh you're one of those girls whose always done everything with your mom, shared clothes, and were more like sisters". No, not exactly. There was brutal battles of flaming words thrown from one tongue to the other, there were hostil eruptions of rage, slaughtering by silver slithering tongues, and running.. lot's of running. I tried to escape her, my greatest trigger. You see that ability to know me more than I knew myself came with an arsenal. She knew just what to say and just what to do to strike that nerve. Maybe it was a disregulated nervous system, maybe it was my ego? Who knows, but she was GOOD. The master manipulator if I've ever known one. She'd waltz into the room and strike her match and then leave me on fire to shout for help afterwords. It was like a trecherous black sea that led sailors to their own demise by tricking them to believe they could navigate the raging waters. It was vicious and blood drawing. Yet, it led me here.

Where's here? Well, this place where love has no bounds, no words, no limits. A place where love is unconditional and raw. Here is a place where I am able to stand in the pool of the past and it reflects back at me and appreciate the journey I've taken with my mother. That journey. What a journey. It's like when you set on an a wild mountain adventure at four in the morning. It start's really exciting. You jump out of bed and rush around your house getting your backpack together. Next thing you know you're on the trail looking at the climb in front of you jumping with joy (or maybe that is just us weird adrenaline nature junkies). Then around thirty-minutes in, you hit that wall. The wall that questions your own sanity and why in the world you ever found it FUN to wake up before the sun and climb up a rotten rock that has sat in the same place for hundreds of years. WOW, what a great idea! NOT. However, you keep going. You keep going for the pure hell of it. Then, you reach that last mile and a half. You start getting a decent view and you feel electrified, like an eel just shocked your soul and you're being birthed all over again. The summit is up ahead and you start moving faster. Then, it hits you. There you are, a small tiny human in comparison to the vast landscape below you. Somehow, someway you crawled up this monter of a moutain, and are now somehow sitting there watching the Sun rise over the horizon just as most people are grabbing their coffee.

That is the power of my mother. She drug me along this journey, where I dragged my feet and wanted to turn around and quit not once, not twice, but a dozen times. But, there she was. There the LOVE was. The power of it twisted between our two hearts, pulling me forward even when I could barely stand. Keeping me looking up to that moutain peak when I felt like I couldn't carry the weight of the world any longer. There. She. Was. Maybe it was those matching tattoos we got when I got out of the hospital. But I feel like that force field between our hearts was truly what kept us going, togeher, side-by-side, no matter what.

I got lucky. Yeah, I said lucky. My mother was the greatest teacher my soul could ever have. She taught me how to be human. She taught me how to make mistakes, many mistakes. She taught me how to screw up. Then, how to screw up again. She taught me how to fight. She taught me how to use my words as a weapon. Then, she taught my how to destroy myself. She taught me how to destroy everything I thought I was, in order to become something new. She taught me how to fly. My mother taught me how the greatest secret of life, unconditional love.

But shh... don't tell her that, I can't tell her she's THAT important to me. You know, we have to keep the plantonic banter into the day to day mix just to keep the journey intersting. However, mom... if you're reading this. I love you more than life itself. Yes, I still have that picture of us on my fridge held up by that dirty old disneyland magnetic I begged you to buy for me when I was eight. Thank you for listening to my 2 A.m. rants about everything under the sun, thank you for supporting me in questionable situations (you remember that rave in Witchita), thank you for instilling in me the spirit of the phenoix for with out you I would have never risen.