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I wanted to be able to talk to my mother the way I could with most other people, as myself. But she wasn’t just anybody. She was my mother, so that was impossible. There were limits.
For me, panic radiates in the threads of my muscles, bangs in the back of my skull, twists my stomach, and sets my skin on fire. It doesn’t rise or fall. It spreads.
We’d never found an easy way to talk about hard things, so we struggled to say anything at all in hard times.
I was tempted, as I always am, to take the bait when my mother offers me empathy. Tempted by my fantastical belief that one day I will lower my walls, and she will do the same. Then I end up blaming myself for not remembering to stick to the conversational paths offering the least resistance, furious at myself for veering too far into the unexplored or exiled. Or worse, I’d be drawn into her fantasy that we were already close. If my mother and I shared anything without having carefully considered it, it was this undying ember of a dream that we will someday, somehow find ourselves reaping the
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Feeling any of it felt like the beginning of losing control, and losing control felt like certain death in my body, if not my mind. If I didn’t process the feeling, I wouldn’t feel it, and if I didn’t feel it, it couldn’t kill me.
I was a child, unspoiled in a certain way. I didn’t doubt myself. I decided and I tried. Then I’d fail and try again. Or I would succeed and go on to try something new. I was not always as afraid of the world or as nervous about the other people living in it alongside me, or what they might do to me. When my life was new, I understood in my bones how little it mattered what anybody else was doing, or what they thought about what I was doing. I believed my bones then.
She said the word “sunshine,” and we said it back. Her eyes roamed the cramped space for something to support her lesson, a point of reference that might get this thing to click. The taupe tile floor, and its matching tattered and stained square reading carpet, had nothing to add. Nor did the sky, nor rain falling from overfull clouds inching down the window behind her. Still, she tried to get us to understand, to sit down, to stop talking, to want to know more about what the universe might be up to while life so far had been teaching us to be wholly consumed with ourselves. I wanted to know.
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After school that day, on the car ride back to our apartment, I decided I wanted the sunrise. I knew I couldn’t have the sunrise or its colors for my own. Some things were too precious not to be shared. They just had to happen, and you just had to make sure you were there when they did, and then, you were part of something with everyone else who showed up at the right time.
I didn’t think my mother wanted to kill me on purpose. It was her eyes. My mother’s rage drained the light from her eyes, and she became unrecognizable to me. There was Mama, the loving mother we knew before whatever sparked her ire, and then there was Mother who showed up in her place. Mother felt separate, somehow apart from our otherwise happy and harmonious existence.
Self-preservation had already been imprinted upon me as a requirement. Honesty was not always the best policy.
The sun had risen for me—for me alone—and turned the sky into the painted milk of a soggy bowl of leftover off-brand Lucky Charms. The soft roses and lavenders went on to burn blood orange on the underbellies of clouds. I told my shadow I wanted to keep the sun. My shadow whispered back the instructions for making a memory. I watched the light of day ascend until it hurt my eyes, then I closed them, and taught myself to remember.
My mother didn’t know I could do bad things and still have the sun. She didn’t know I could keep my own truth and memories inside. But I knew.
it had never occurred to me everyone might have a secret bad self. A self that didn’t tell the truth because it had learned the same lessons I’d learned and knew the quiet and the dark could be good places to hide from screams and slaps.
I was always asking questions, and she was one of the few adults who didn’t ever tell me to stop.
I knew how to disappear. Sometimes my mother needed me to disappear.
I thought that smile was her prettiest. I didn’t mind when she told those stories. I craved seeing her happy, witnessing that smile. It was easier to laugh at the jokes after you’d forgotten the pain. That smile sometimes made me forget the pain, and I would laugh too. Over time, forgetting the pain to make the best joke got easier and easier and easier.
“These things catch fire without letting each other go. We don’t give up on our people. We don’t stop loving them.” She looked into my face, her eyes watering at the bottoms. “Not even when we’re burning alive.”
On the bus ride home, I fantasized of arriving to an open door, my mother waiting in the frame, waiting to scoop me up into hugs, and kisses, and apologies. She would tell me how sorry she was, that she should have believed me, that she knew I was good, and she would promise never to hit me again. My mind wouldn’t let me imagine much further than that, but that part seemed key, appropriate even given the severity of response the night before. She would want to make it up to me, make it right. That’s what you did for somebody you loved, right? At least, that’s what you did in the movies.
and I was confused because I did not want power from my mother. I wanted her to acknowledge the pain in my body and heart. I wanted it to mean something to her because she loved me, and I knew it, and I couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just say sorry. What was so wrong with me that I didn’t deserve that?
Soph liked this
But I would still be standing there in front of her, crying. To me, it didn’t make sense to run. The time it saved in anticipation, you paid in pain.
My mother became hypervigilant about how I interacted with boys and men, even my own uncles and cousins. She wanted me to see danger everywhere.
I lost something that made me feel generally okay. It was replaced by the steady drum of fear that made my heart race and my stomach drop.
Grandpa didn’t have to tell me not to trust boys. I already knew I couldn’t. And men. Especially men.
I believed you could learn to outsmart your personality, but I knew you couldn’t hide from people who really saw you, and saw themselves in the part of you that tended to be just a little bit bent to the left. No matter what you wanted to hide from yourself, you couldn’t hide it from the people whose particular brand of bent matched yours.
In my daydream, I was the teacher at the front of the classroom, arms waving with the excitement of explaining something you’ve known a long time, but still love to share with the others.
He hadn’t grabbed or taken anything from me to make his point. He had offered me a bit of himself, the way he saw me, and I was as touched as anyone could be by the gesture.
Bradley thought I was beautiful, but he didn’t know me at all. That was probably for the best. The closer he got to me, the closer he’d get to the bad in me, and that would not do.
My desire for a physical representation of my father’s love led to me pursuing parental relationships with all kinds of authority figures I came into contact with. They weren’t all aware of their parental status, but they were all important to me. Combined with my mother, they made up the perfect parental figures: proud of me, hard on me, and charmed by me.
My mind was caught somewhere between extreme longing for love and tenderness, and the fear of being mishandled, or misused. Even as I was drawn to connect with the people around me, I feared them. Afraid of how much they might come to mean to me, and how terribly I would have to mourn when they inevitably left me behind.
I did not mind getting hurt as much as I minded being surprised by the pain. I wanted to see it coming.
“If I give you all of me, and you give me nothing back, then what do I have? Less than nothing. Less of me, and none of you.”
She was real, and as real people often are, she was complicated.
I tried to imagine their lives backward from the moment they stepped into that line. I wondered what they’d had to say or do to find themselves there and how many of those steps they wished they could take back. I was always wondering about somebody else’s regrets.
I was good at this. Control your breath, quiet your heart, die on the inside, only let them see life.
You should have known then, I thought, that something was wrong with anybody who loved you that much.
On the worst days, we carried on for hours yelling, hitting, hiding, crying, talking, and hiding again. We rushed through rapid cycles of joyful bonding, and soul-stunning violence, but it was never on the calendar, and I never knew when it was coming.
Some nights, when we sat in my room, watching our favorite childhood movies, he’d tell me how cute he’d been as a child, and I would remind him how cute he still was. Then he’d ask why I couldn’t be that nice to myself. Eventually, I couldn’t even fake an answer, so I just stayed quiet.
When you don’t grow up with a certain kind of affection, even if you know you’re worthy of it, it can be hard to accept in adulthood.
They were not obligated to me by blood, and so I could not fathom why or how they could love me unconditionally. I still wasn’t sure if I was loved unconditionally by the people who were supposedly obligated to do so.
My mother wasn’t perfect. Our relationship was complicated, and difficult. She was my imperfect mother. We were two different people, and found that hard to accept in one another. But I was hers and she was mine. That’s how it had always been. Who would I be, if not hers? I didn’t want to be without her.
I did not know that there are miles between running out of things to say, and running out of the strength to say them.
But in that moment, I felt like someone’s little girl. And I’d been waiting a long time to feel like somebody’s daughter.
“Do me a favor, Ashley? When you write about you and me? Just tell the truth. Your truth. Don’t worry about nobody’s feelings, especially not mine. You gotta be tough to tell your truth, but it’s the only thing worth doing next to loving somebody.”
For half a minute, I was flying. For half a minute, I knew I had it in me to tell the truth, and be loved anyway.
