Right Time, Wrong Mother

Dear mother, I wish you weren’t the one who raised me. The painful nights crying myself to sleep, hoping and praying for a better time, a better love, a better caregiver. The screams and shouts resonating through the walls of our small house, every slamming door causing me to flinch as if I was swung at with a baseball bat. The clinking of empty beer and wine bottles rolling across our white tile floors as you wailed for a better life, ignoring your only child as she too wished for that better life you so loudly wept about. The empty hollow eyes of your husband who wished death more than his own marriage to work.

Dear mother, why was I never enough for you? Why was I always the one at fault for your shortcomings? What led you down this destructive path that you put on your small child to clean up? My birth was a curse, and I wish you had told me how to cure myself. Instead, I had a target painted on my back, with your eyes and words as the daggers that pierced it every day. Who know what we could have been, what we CAN be?

Dear mother, the phone calls are becoming more and more burdensome as time goes by. Your name lights up my phone, but fear keeps me from answering it. Why? Is this what a mother’s love is like? Fear and isolation? I don’t even recall what you look like, the memories blurred into one shadow, looming over my mind with an empty touch. Are other mothers like this? Do they instill the same kind of fear into their children as you did with me?

Dear mother, my question is, why? Why do we choose these paths into the unknown, only to come out as a monster, instead of a loving figure I needed so many years ago? You say your actions are my fault, and that you’ve done nothing wrong, but how is it that I am now who I am? I love out of fear, I fear out of love, I trust no one and fear I will follow your footsteps because I have no other example of how to be a person. Misery follows me but I try to not blame others for my own misfortunes, but it’s easy to fall into those habits when it’s all I’ve seen in my life.

Dear mother, will we ever be able to start over? Your years are coming to a close, but I fear stubbornness of old age prevents us from truly being mother and daughter. I still speak softly to you when I can, but the anger comes out when I speak of you to friends and colleagues. Is this the impression you wanted to place on your child? Will I ever be a better mother than you were? Or will I follow the same path as you did? A simple apology would help mend my broken heart as a start, but I’ve yet to hear that come from your venomous lips. Mark my words, one day I will mend this relationship, whether it be at the end of your life or mine, but it will be mended. I wish for my mother back, the mother I needed when I was a child, facing the world on my own without a hand to hold. I wish to hear you say that you’re proud of me, when all I ever was to you was a disappointment. Someday, mother, I will happily call you my mother, than just the name everyone else calls you.