A mother's call to arms

I wok e to the caterwaul of my mother's ringtone, as dread drenched me in sweat, I weighed my options. It was my Birthday, just another opportunity for her to call me, oblivious to the pain it cause each time. Oblivious to the memories it dragged from the darkest corners of my past. Allowing a moment of bad judgment, I answer her call, to be greeted by her sickeningly sweet voice, the same one that told me for years the abuse we endured was "okay", as though this exact treatment isn't exactly what caused her own mental torment. As though her own father didn't cause a menagerie of mental afflictions by providing the same trauma as she allowed her husband to inflict me with.

"Hiiiii hoooonnnneyyyy" came her slurred and elongated speech, an impediment caused by brain trauma and shock therapy. The same brain trauma that caused her to forget my entire childhood.

"Hey...mom..." My mind collapsed with thoughts of her husband, of staring in her eyes as she sat catatonic while her husband entered me, laughing.

"Where have you been? We've been so worried about you" she always spoke as though she remembered who I am enough to entitle her to the level of ownership and devotion over me she always demonstrated. I felt myself welling over with silent tears.

"I-I've been busy working, you know me...a workaholic..." I had become accustomed to my half-baked excuses, but my chest tightened anyway as i remembered each morning waking and lying to her as if all was okay and the night before never happened. We spent each day pretending to be a normal daughter and mother only for it to dissolve in a moment when her husband arrived

"OOOOOhhhh, yeah, what do you do again?" the sing-song quality of her voice was making me sick. *It was because of her that I was unable to hold a job, It was because of her that I felt the need to work myself to illness. The world never saw the monster that i saw, they only saw a damaged woman who did her best, a fact I have often argued. She was exceptional at pretending her innocence, as she allowed unspeakable horrors to take place to her only children.

"Oh, um, I'm a manager and massage therapist, which reminds me, I need to get off the phone I have to...schedule people." my throat felt dry and lumpy as I slammed my thumb on the end call button. Dry, moaning tears came first before the flood gate opened, allowing tears to flow down my bare chest as silent, rough feeling screams threatened the air between me and the walls of my room.

I collapsed to the floor, feeling my elbows and knees crunch into the hardwood floor under my soft rug. As tears and snot poured through my grasping fingers, it absorbed into the rug. Memories of my absent and vacant mother echoed through me as I rocked back and forth, now screaming as memories of my abuse wracked my soul. Breath escaped me as liquid was all I could grasp. As liquid dripped down my throat, my brain felt as though it was unraveling, leaving me with nothing but my past, nothing but that little girl I left behind.

My nails scratched through the skin on the back of my neck, before slowing the pulses of flashbacks and panic attacks subsided, leaving me feeling nothing but empty, drained of humanity like the woman who brought me into this world. The floor seemed as far as my pain. I gently remind myself this is the reason I never answer her calls before allowing myself to numbly lay on the floors, disrupted only by bought of gentle sobbing.