Goodbye, Mom

I saw her today. My mother.

She had always been an exquisite beauty, what with her midnight locks and her radiant copper skin. My childhood friends could hardly believe we were related on the few occasions that any of them met her. I am twenty-two years old now; and to this day, I have yet to encounter a woman who was even half as lovely. Seeing her laying in total stillness today, looking so serene, my mother could easily have been taken for a carving of a goddess.

And I hate her. At least, I should.

The beauty had never helped her personality; and she had utterly failed me as a mother. Of course, I didn’t fully realize this until I was older- nearly an adult. When I was a child, I took her behavior as normal.

I thought it was normal for a five-year-old to come home from kindergarten and get beaten every single day.

My teacher had a system in which every student started out the school day on a green card. A disciplinary infraction brought us down to a yellow card. I was a talkative child- I spoke in class, often. The yellow cards were my mother’s justification. Something had to be done. The pain would teach me to behave.

I hated those yellow cards, hated school, hated my teacher- because at the time, it was easier than hating my mother. Easier than having to accept the fact that I only ever felt peace when I was away from her, when I didn’t have to tiptoe around her and pray that she wouldn’t ask how the day went. Easier to accept than the fact that my “normal” was being in physical pain every time I had to walk or sit because the soreness from one beating never quite got the chance to go away fully before the next one.

I thought it was normal that my mother would get up and leave, for weeks at a time. She’d go gallivanting around the globe; and I would beg her to take me with her. Instead, she’d leave me in my unstable father’s filthy basement apartment with him (and more often than not: whichever strange woman he was courting at the time) for weeks on end. He also had a temper, and some substance abuse issues. You didn’t want to see the man after a few drinks, and while he was normally good enough when he had me... he still had a few lapses. Terrifying lapses.

But after a few weeks, my mother would come back from France or Japan or wherever she had been while her elementary-school-aged son was living in filth with his potentially dangerous father, surviving on Dr. Pepper and stale pizza; and she would bring me something. A souvenir. A medallion from Italy, a toy from Korea. A little thing to make her feel like a good parent, and I would forget my pain, accept the gift, and forgive her. Forgive her just in time for her to do it all over again. Because I thought that was normal.

Like how I thought it was normal to be threatened by adults as a child. I had gotten into some kind of trouble. I don’t remember what exactly I did; but I do remember David, my mother’s new husband (who also happened to be an MMA fighter), hissing at me that I was lucky we were in public, otherwise he would have legitimately beat me to death. My mother was listening to the whole conversation, and she let it happen. She agreed with David. She let a grown man- an MMA fighter, no less- threaten her eleven-year-old child’s life. Like I said, I don’t remember what I did- and I don’t care. That wasn’t normal. But I thought it was; and clearly, so did my mother.

And when my mother left me (again) when I was in sixth grade, I still thought it was normal. This time, it wasn’t a vacation. She and David had packed their bags and decided to move to Las Vegas. Without me. Leaving me again, with my unstable father and stepmother #3. The only plus side was the fact that my three siblings lived with us: my half-sisters, Anna and Amelia, and my stepbrother Marcus. I loved them, my siblings. They almost made it worth it.

But my father hadn’t changed. He and Jo (my stepmother at the time) got into fights. Often. Loud, screaming, dangerous fights. Things were thrown, holes were punched into walls. At one point, my father was so angry with Jo that he decided to go after her son. He ripped Marcus’s door off its hinges with his bare hands while Jo screamed at him to stay away from her child. Marcus was six years old. He must have been terrified; I certainly was. My father never actually wound up touching him, but that was when reality started to sink in.

My mother abandoned me in an unstable environment with a dangerous man to go live happily in Las Vegas with her new husband. Her new family. She didn’t give me a second thought. She rarely ever bothered to text me and check in, and she didn’t call me once. She didn’t need a son; she never had. And I thought that was normal.

I thought a lot of things were normal. Like the time she ripped my glasses off of my face before she could hit me because, and I quote “these are worth more to me than you are right now”. Or during my time living with my father in the sixth grade, and the mere thought of her would shatter me so completely that I’d burst into tears randomly; and I’d have to go run and hide in the attic crawl space whenever that happened because I didn’t want anyone to ask why I spent so much time crying. This happened at least three times a week for months on end. And somehow, this was all ordinary to me. Commonplace. Normal.

I think the moment when I finally, completely broke- when I stopped making excuses in my head for my mother’s behavior, was in my freshman year of high school when she found my journal.

It was nothing special really. Just a little black Moleskin notebook with an elastic band stretching vertically across the front to keep it closed. By this point, my father had been arrested and had spent roughly two years in federal prison. Drug charges mostly, plus a few theft issues. He sent me letters on a semi-regular basis. I never responded- I didn’t know what to say- but I kept every single one of them. I stashed them in my little black book, folded up between the pages.

I wrote my own letters in it too, but these were all to myself. Journal entries. Not all of them concerned my mother, but enough of them did. Slow realizations that she had utterly failed me as a parent, plus small accounts of her general cruelty- which had only escalated as I got older. At this point, being around her had begun to cause me actual physical distress. I felt sick if I had to be in the same room as her for more than a few minutes at a time.

So when she found my journal, she didn’t have a positive reaction. She didn’t get violent, or ask her husband to- both of which might’ve been on brand for her. She just sat me down and confronted me about everything I’d ever written. She went line by line telling me how I was wrong, and remembering things incorrectly, and how she had always been a good mother. She said I was too sensitive, that her behavior was normal, that me having had to raise myself was normal, that me being afraid whenever she opened her mouth to speak was normal, that me flinching whenever I saw anyone raise their hand for any reason was normal. She didn’t even seem that angry; she actually laughed at me, at my pain, at the continual agony she’d been causing me for years. Like it was a joke.

And as if that weren’t enough, she’d read my father’s letters too; and continued to tell me that they were filled excuses for his behavior, that she’d been a much better parent than he had, that he clearly hadn’t loved me or his other children enough to try to stay out of trouble for us, that I shouldn’t waste time missing the half-siblings I had been separated from when he got sent to prison . That I should be used to him disappointing me, because that was the norm.

It wasn’t the norm. None of the things my mother said “the norm” entailed were actually normal. And if I’m wrong and they somehow are, then normal is the problem. I deserved better than this. Any child would deserve better than this.

As I said earlier: my mother was beautiful. Impossibly, breathtakingly beautiful. But she was also selfish, neglectful, and impossibly cruel. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

I should hate her. And I do hate her, for a lot of things- for abandoning me repeatedly, for being so selfish, for not protecting me from the dangerous adults that were only a part of my life because she allowed them to be.

But when I saw her today, looking so peaceful in her casket before being laid to rest, all I could think of was my single good memory of her. I had been cleaning the stovetop, and my mother was able to see me from where she sat on the couch in the living room. She looked up at me, completely unprompted, and said “Nick, I love you” and she said it with such a genuine smile that I couldn’t help but say “I love you too, Mom”. And in that moment, I meant it.

Still, I was shocked when I found out that I was in the will- I was shocked that there even was a will. The lawyers said I inherited $20,000. I didn’t know where she came up with the money- she never really had a job beyond waitressing, but apparently she managed. It would go a long way in helping me continue on in university; she knew I wanted to go to graduate school- a necessity for my intended career. $20,000 is more than enough to erase my debt from undergrad. One final gift from my mother, after she abandoned me again- more extravagant this time, because she wouldn’t be coming back to me. One last thing she did for me, enough to make me forgive her again, maybe for everything. A way for her to help me realize one of my dreams, even if she wasn’t around to see it happen.

And I still hate her. At least, a part of me does. Because this feels like one last manipulation, an epic pulling of my strings from beyond the grave. But there’s a voice in my head, a voice whispering: “Maybe that’s all she could do. Maybe she wanted to give you something. Maybe she cared about you. Maybe she was sorry”.

Maybe that voice is right. And maybe I don’t have to keep hating her. Maybe I can focus on that one good memory I have, where I knew she loved me and I loved her; and maybe that will keep me together.

Maybe I can forgive her. I’ll certainly try. Because for all my pain and rage and hate- a part of me still loves her, still remembers what it felt like to know that she loved me. I think that can be enough if I let it.

Goodbye, Mom. Despite everything, I think I’m going to miss you.