Dear Mom,

It would be easier to write about how you have been there for me, which in and of itself is something to be proud of. It is not a guarantee that any parent will care for and love you for all your life, so thank you. It would be easier to write how you took me to the hospital when I ate something that my immune system was unfortunately unprepared for, or how you comforted me when I was struggling with my mental health, or how you opened your home to me when I needed it. It would also be easier to omit the painful truths. How home was filled with empty alcohol bottles which was why I declined your offer, or how I saw that you ignored the scars on my wrists for weeks until you were emotionally prepared to deal with them, or how I remember every hospital trip as an endless lecture of responsibility and sacrifice.

I want to talk about how it was hard. How it is hard. How our relationship and our love has progressed past a purely familial presence to a brutally honest friendship. The years that it took to evolve from me crying in your arms to you crying in mine. I'm not going to lie and say that this development wasn't a shock, because it was. All my friends who never had a single mom, or who always had a functioning serotonin receptor for that matter, could not fathom how a relationship could be so heartbreaking and so worth keeping at all once. That's just as well, not every friendship necessarily has to be based in a mutual understanding of the one another's problems, but perhaps instead, a mutual agreement to accept and acknowledge those problems as legitimate. And another mutual understanding to sometimes sweep your opinions under the rug when you deem problems as less than legitimate.

But that's just it, I will never know how legitimate your problems were because I've never had them. I have never had to figure out how to feed two hive-minded demons, armed with a schoolteacher's salary and a child support check. How it feels to come home to asthma attacks and broken bones, after working all day so other children will pass their turbulent tests. So, I can't even tell you that I can understand what you went through and how we got where we are, because neither of us will ever have the full story. In my limited capacity there are so few reassuring things I can tell you.

I will not tell you that you have taught me to be a mother, because I just have my two cats and that's enough mothering for now. I will not tell you that I am particularly jazzed about needing to go to therapy for at least two more years. I will also not tell you how you should've handled things differently then, because I have given up any hope of changing the past. I will also not tell you how to do things differently in the future, because if the past year has taught us anything, it is that the future is unpredictable, and never promised.

This is what I will tell you: You have taught me that strength does not lie in the still perfection of your surface but in the trust found in the rocky and uncharted waters. That it is always my choice who I help and my choice who I accept help from. That we are more than our past. Even now I could write a long list about what you've done lately to piss me off, and I will bring them up to you on our weekly Sunday walk. I will tell you that I have loved you for your strengths, and I have loved you for your faults, and I have learned to love myself just the same.

With love,

E

P.S. See the attached bill for my therapy sessions