An Ode to a Woman

When I became a mother and started to love my son, I became painfully aware of all the ways that my own mother did not love me. I became painfully aware of a truth that at the core of my being I have felt since I was very young but have allocated an immeasurable amount of defense to protecting; my mother never loved me.

I know what you’re thinking. I am being very dramatic with this statement and that it is impossible for a mother to not love her child. You may be like me and are a mother or parent yourself. I agree, I can’t imagine not loving my children, it’s true. My life revolves around their comfort and happiness. But I also can’t imagine killing anyone and yet we have people that unfortunately do. Unfortunately also, it is possible for a mother to not love her children. It is possible for a woman to birth children and have absolutely no connection with them or with the identity of motherhood. It’s possible because my mother is one of those women.

The most ironic thing about all of this is that I love my mother more than I have ever loved anyone in my entire life. I love her like a pimply, nerdy, socially awkward 14-year-old boy loves the older, hotter, more socially inept captain of the high-school cheer squad who is also the homecoming Queen. Hilariously, my mother was both of those things, a cheerleader, and the homecoming Queen. I love her like the 10-year-old me loved some imaginary guy somewhere out in the world who is waiting for and made for me and who would love me as passionately and unconditionally as I loved him.

Blindly, unconditionally, without knowing who she was, and ultimately, refusing to believe that it made no difference to her life whether I was in it or not. This is how I loved my mother.

I’m not trying to sound bitter here and the point of all this is not to be depressing, as I hope to convince you towards the end. It’s not my aim to invoke feelings of pity for myself. This is just another fact of my life, like my age, my birthday, my favorite color (yellow,) or my favorite movie (the Notebook.)

My husband thinks my mother is a jacked up human being and that I had a jacked up childhood, but really the only thing that I can look back at and say deeply hurt and wounded me was how lonely I felt growing up. The loneliness was jacked up. All of us experience loneliness but I really experienced it in the fullest since of the world, to the point that I was really just a walking, talking, eating, sleeping, moving, Loneliness.

But I need to say something so that you understand fully; my mother is not a bad person. I'm not trying to make her out to be the villain because there is no such thing as all good or all bad in this world.

I was a weird kid anyway. I spent a lot of time by myself. I never asked for much. I don’t know if I ever really knew how to ask of my mother. To this day my mother is not someone you ask things of. I have never called her to ask for advice or ask for comfort or even ask for a simple favor. The less I asked of her the less I think my mother made an effort to respond to me. I'm sure she assumed that I didn't need anything, but it wasn't that I didn't need her to give me advice or comfort, or for her to just be in my life, it was that I just didn't really know how to ask. Isn't it something we give to our kids without asking? My mother’s unstable, chaotic, neurotic, messy life has always placed more of a demand on her attention than I could ever, anyway.

She is not a bad person. It was just a slow building benign neglect for me that was developed. And she developed the same thing for my brother, Mekhi, who grew up almost entirely with his father.

My mother is not a bad person but I do believe that she never should have had kids. I was her 16 year old bathroom floor mistake. My brother was an obligation to his father because they were married. My youngest sister, who is the same age as my oldest son, was an even worst mistake than a 16 year old getting knocked up on her grandfather's bathroom floor.

My youngest sister’s name is Mia and I have made a very important and special place in my heart for her in which she is sitting like the beautiful Queen she is until the time presents itself and I can take her away. Mia is the reason why I no longer have rose-tinted glasses for my mother and why I have a much clearer perception of who my mother is and what I, and all her kids, mean to her.

My mother smoked cigarettes her entire pregnancy with my youngest sister. Whereas I was addicted to McDonalds sweet iced-tea and feeling terrible about consuming the extra sugars, my mother drank alcohol while knowingly pregnant with Mia for 4 months. At one point she considered giving Mia up for adoption. I regret being the one who talked her out of it simply because I wanted to comfort her and tell her that she absolutely was strong enough to do this and was at her core, a strong, loving mother. She wasn’t. She shouldn’t have kids. But I still had the rose-tinted glasses on.

I can forgive the fact that my mother really wasn’t bothered by the birth of her first grandson. I can forgive how, even though we lived together in the same house, she never once came to show me how to soothe my colicky son night after night after night after night of me not getting any sleep. I can forgive how, on top of that, she didn’t bother to help with making dinner or cleaning in the house and how she expected me to not only watch Mia while she worked when I had an 18 month old son and the newborn son who cried all the time, she even held it over my shoulder when I left to go to the grocery store alone for an hour just so I could breathe.

I can forgive how ruthless and cold she was about my severe post-partum depression after I had my second son. I can forgive her for when my father asked her, during that post-partum period, "how is Aubree's mental health?" to which she said, to my face, "Why is your father asking about your mental health, what about MY mental health?." I can forgive the countless, countless times she chose some idiot man who would take advantage, beat, and then leave her over me, over the only person in the world who would EVER truly love her.

Honestly, you can’t imagine the kinds of things I have forgave and will forgive my mother for.

But I will never forgive her for Mia.

I can’t forgive how painful it was to watch how unmotherly and how unbothered and how untouched and how disconnected she was with Mia’s existence and how I had to traumatically realize that this was how she was with me.

She was not the loving mother I had sitting on the throne in my heart.

I made so many excuses for why she wasn’t in my life growing up, why she wasn’t there to take me to the playground, to read books with me at bedtime, to soap me up and scrub me in the bathtub after playing outside and getting dirty, how she wasn’t there to encourage me or support me or embrace me as I changed and grew. How she wasn't there when I started puberty or when I kissed my first boy. She's a good manipulator and she manipulated me into believing a lot of those excuses which I ate up willingly because I loved her.

But then I had two sons and let me tell you I would destroy this entire planet and every living thing on it, I would break myself apart piece by piece and the extent to which I would suffer, fight, live and die for my sons has absolutely no end.

So what excuse did my mother really have for not being there?

At the end of the day, I needed there to be a reason for why she wasn't there. I believed her because I had to have a reason. I wanted there to be a reason for all those times when I needed her but got reasons instead. A reason that wasn’t because she didn’t love me, a reason that wasn’t because she cared about herself more than she can ever care about anyone else, and a reason that wasn’t because she wanted nothing to do with caring for someone else and being a mother. A reason that wasn't because she didn't want to deal with helping a kid out with homework, soothing their nightmares, taking them to doctor's appointments, making sure they ate healthy, picking out prom dresses, picking out wedding dresses, picking out baby clothes.

If it wasn’t because of Mia, all I would have still to this day are her excuses instead of just dealing with the truth of the matter, grieving it, and moving on.

If you still have rose-tinted glasses on I hope this prompts you to peek over the lenses a little because the freedom of letting ago is better than the slavery of waiting and wishing for something that will never happen. Not because it's your fault, but because the person you're waiting on is not actually going to come.

I looked at the submissions for this prompt and I saw many that were about moms and the reason for this, I think, is that our first place of belonging is with our mother. We belonged to her heart, her womb, her breast, her arms, and her home. When I sat down and asked myself “what is a time when I generally felt like I didn’t fit in?” I instantly remembered my mother, and I decided that I would just let out whatever wanted to come out and then let it be.

Nobody can understand this kind of wound except people who have it. I take a certain amount of comfort in this. I take comfort in knowing that I belong to a group of people who struggle with parenthood because of a similar wound and people who have to work enormously hard to have happy, healthy lives because of this wound. Most of these people are what you would call fish out of water.

It gets better, my friend. Not all fish were meant to swim. Some decided one day, for no particular reason, to come to shore and start walking. I'll see you on land.