Dear Mom

What do you confess to a mother? Don't they know everything? I have thought and pondered, and slept on it only to find that....I have so many things to say but not even an iota of what or if the words or revelations could be considered confessions.

My thoughts on you are mixed, a juxtaposition of love and adoration and feelings of misplaced betrayal. I admire you but have never quite been the one to be your best friend. Our relationship is meaningful to me and the poignancy of being a daughter is not lost on me.

And while I wonder if there is anything that you do not know about me, I wonder if perhaps there are things about me that you may wonder about. Such as my actual thoughts or brevity of character. What type of person might I be, now that I am an adult looking backwards.

Sometimes it is as if we come from two separate worlds although we have lived in the same one for four decades. We hold separate identitites and maybe even separate belief systems, yet we are mother and daughter.

Perhaps, I don't believe the way you do or you don't agree with the way I believe but it is what it is. Because we are mother and daughter.

I haven't perhaps been the warmest daughter in the world, preferring my own independence and world views over a closer realtionship with you. For this I apologize, but I am grateful to understand that you are a mother. A real one who knows what this position of prestige and frustration entails.

I understand that my differences and aloof attitudes to the world around me may have made you feel outcasted from my life, but to explain it doesn't mean I don't care it is merely a facet of how hard I do care. My sensitivities to the world around me are greater than that of most. Even as an adult I still expereince moments of sensory overload and must run and hide in my bed until the emotions and frustations subside.

I wanted you to know though, how much I admire you. How I look up to you and am sometimes awed by your strength and beauty. I wanted to express how much I appreciate that you seem to be a woman in a world that has forgotten what it actually means to be a mother.

To epitomize unconditional love and strength to a separate individual to whom for many years you a god to and even for life responsible for, feel responsible for, or are made to feel responsible for. These are awesome accomplishments. Huge feats of superhuman strength that often go unrecognized and underated.

That being said, perhaps these things that I think of you are not known by you. On other notes of interest or topic, although we were not best friends and consorts in interests like many mother and daughters are I wanted you to know that I appreciate you and I hope raising me as the person that I am hasn't been as difficult or forlorn as I imagine it to be.

So with this I must say that I loved reading more than relating, and biking and dreaming of boys more than learning to cook (which I now woefully regret). That I preferred to paint a picture for you rather than hold long conversations about subjects that didn't interest me. But I was glad to know that you were always there, as I lived in my hugely imaginative otherworld and you cared for the mundane and not so mundane tasks of every day existince with pinache, humour, and grace.

I sat quitely content while the converasations between you, your friends, and my father were safeguards murmured around me. My solitary ways may have been different than what you expected or wanted but you raised me to be me as a mother would. We need more women like you in the world today.

Now for some more intersting things about myself that you may not know. Yeah, right. But anyway, It took me years to develop the understanding and self-acceptance for the person that I am now. After my torrid trials in teenager hood and yound adulthood I had quite lost the capcity for self acceptance. I wasn't sure if you knew how hard and cruel my peers were, once developed. Hence, my solitary behaviors and less considerate ways were further cemented into my phsyche and dealings with others.

Having finally escaped the mistakes of adolescence and growing into myself, however, has brought some pretty hard truths into light that have caused me some grief and emotional turbulence.

For example, I look back into my life as broken as it may appear to some with gratitude for who I have become, and for what I am blessed with. As you know is my tendency to do so, as you would often tell me to remove the rose-colored glasses.

But I have also had to acknowledge some pretty hard griefs, such as the fact that my deepest desires were to be married, have children and my own home. These are goals that I have never reached. At this age I have realized that at least one of them I may never reach. I work to come to true terms with this.

Because humanity is a complex affair. Growing up, I was all about children, babies, and playing mother. As a teenager, I looked at the world around me with jaded eyes and decided to adopt children as the world had enough problems and I couldn't imagine bringing another innocent life into it. As young adulthood gave way to maturity, I slowly became who I am now. Which is a person who, may not be who she was as child, and may regret the adolescence she believes wasted, but is the whole woman that she is now with confidence in a future that holds the loss of the past in the arms of a better future.

So in summation, perhaps you think I don't recognize the sacrifices you made to be a real mother, my mother but I do. I am proud to be the person I am and to come from the poor social demographic that I do. I am proud of the sacrifices you made and the resourcefullness you used to make my life more privleged than it could have been. I am proud of you for maintaining a point of security in life that I could grow to be a literate, pure, innocent and self assured woman who knows her value as such in this life.

I am proud of where I come from and proud of who I am. My shared heritage with you(my mother is half Cherokee) is one of my favorite points of pride as the dignity it carries is far reaching and historically, a sacred point. Thank you, for the love and determination with which you have used to bring me life, a childhood, and the strength needed for me to be myself in this life.

Love,

Melissa