Tracked Changes

Happy Mother’s Day!

I love you every day but especially today!

It seems like such bliss. Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you, "You will know true love." Who doesn’t love love?!

But they don't tell you, "You'll probably need it."

After where you've been.

Babies are tiny and fine, milestone by milestone, and you think you know. You love them with every tender toe stroke and inhaled embrace. You love them with your full attention, and you wish them the world. The world you imagine for them.

When they're young, you start to see things. You can't help it. You're a human, pattern-recognizing consciousness. And they're there.

Similarities.

The way she holds her mouth when she's deciding whether to cry. The way she chooses silence instead of asking. The way she watches you from across a room like she's measuring the distance before she crosses it. You recognize it. You invented it. Before it was hers, it was necessary in you first. You fed it right to her, wholly.

It's just the beginning.

You used to walk by my door every night at bedtime. "Goodnight," you'd speak into my room, "I love you." The door was cracked just enough to backlight your silhouette with the light from the hallway. I remember I was about 13 years old. One night, you said it, and I broke into tears, unable to echo back the usual refrain.

"I don't know if I love you," I said. Your face didn't change. You didn't shrug. You didn't move. You just listened to my sobs and didn't try to soothe them. You couldn't.

I'm sorry.

It's like one day you just remember that you never knew love at all. You have nothing to compare this to. There is no comparison to make. It just is.

Now look at what you’ve done. They’re going to take all of the strength that you give them and use it against you.

You thought you bled so they wouldn't have to, but they're going to bleed anyway. You can already see it. It's in the way she loves too hard and apologizes too fast. It's in the way she chameleons to fit the room. It's in the way she comes to you at night and stands in the doorway, waiting for something you're not sure either of you knows how to name.

Why do we do it? Why do we have them when they turn out just like us, and we hate ourselves?

You both asked me to stay put. To transform the soil around me instead of abandoning it. To disregard generations of force-fed leachate that had poisoned the soil. To stay rooted where I was sown. You both somehow said that the toxicity would end. That I was placed here on purpose. That if I stayed, something would thicken my skin.

My father, too. Your husband. The man you agreed to raise kids for while he provided. The man you stood by, citing anonymous quotes of the ambient wisdom of women who stayed together for the kids.

Him? He was easy to forgive. But you? You knew better.

Let's just call it what it really is. Happy day of fulfilling your biological obligation to survive and reproduce another human being to inherit the bleed. Happy annual commemoration of the day it all finally manifested.

When I look at her, I see you. I see myself. Then I see you in myself. The three of us, rooted together in the soil beneath the surface of the converging paths we walk.

I'm trying. I want you to know that. I'm trying to be the place where it ends.

Happy day of burden we sell to our daughters.