No. 008: To My Mom
Vilhelm Hammershøi's Interior with Young Woman from Behind (1904)
"The cost of trying was always higher than the cost of staying quiet."
Mom,
I've spent most of my life trying to figure out how to love you without it requiring me to self-sacrifice.
I don't feel like you were doing anything out of malice. I think you genuinely believe you were doing everything right because through your lens it was better than what you had experienced. That's the part I keep coming back to. You were handed something broken long before I got here and you didn’t know what else to do with it except pass some of it along.
I wish there was a world where someone had held you before your own inner world closed itself off. Someone to show you that softness wasn't something to be ashamed of. That love between a mother and her child wasn't supposed to feel conditional or transactional, but rather safe, nurturing, and unconditional.
You deserved better than what you were given.
The wounds you collected and inherited were never given the opportunity to heal. In your mind it was easier to lock away what you could, hoping you'd never have to face it. I don't think you realized what that choice would inevitably cost both of us. Because what you couldn't lock away became mine to carry.
I was left to grow up before I was ready, stepping into a role that was never supposed to be mine.
I became your caretaker before I was old enough to understand what that word even meant. I learned that the only way to keep the peace between us was to shrink, to manage, to go quiet when the air between us shifted. Because when I didn't, you would disappear.
Not physically, but in every way that mattered. You would walk past me as if I didn't exist, as if I had ceased to matter the moment I stopped being who you needed me to be.
On the rare occasion I did find the courage to tell you that something you said or did had hurt me, there was never an apology that held any weight. Just mockery, or a dismissive "sorry you feel that way" that somehow made me feel smaller than the silence did.
Over time I stopped bringing it up at all, because the cost of trying was always higher than the cost of staying quiet.
I still grieve that some days.
The relationship we could have had if things had been different. The version of us that never got to exist. But despite all of that, I still love you. I always will. I don't think either of those things — the grief or the love - will ever fully go away. I'm just slowly learning to carry both differently. And I'm learning that loving you doesn’t have to mean losing myself in the process.
I know I'll never be able to say any of this to you.
Not because l don't want to.
But because everything you’ve shown me over the years tells me you wouldn't be able to hold it with the care that it needs.
- Your child, who is learning to heal
Submitted by: Anonymous