A Love Letter To My Mom

Sometimes I find myself at 2:00am laying in bed with my mom as I attempt to put down the weight of the world I have always forced myself to carry. As I begin to stop being Atlas and start becoming Angela again, she will lean over and whisper “Who do you love the most in the entire world?”. I barely have to think before I respond “you”. Just then, my attention-loving clinically obese kitten, Dr. Grapes Figaro Mustache III, will jump on me and my mother will ask “Even more than your cat?”.

“Mom, I love you more because you are the one who got me my cat”

She laughs, and I kiss her cheek, because what I really mean is “I love you more than anyone in the world because you have always sacrificed so much to help me survive”.

My mother started saving me before there was even a “me” to save. Infertility is a struggle she knew too well, but both her and my father worked hard between fertility treatments and artificial insemination to create me. I like to joke that I was manufactured in a lab, but I know I was made miraculously by two people who loved me so much, even when I was just an idea, that they would do anything to be able to raise me and call me their child.

One month into the pregnancy, they were presented with the very probable outcome of the pregnancy being both of our deaths. For them it wasn’t even a question whether to carry me to term. So my mother, an amazingly independent woman raising both a 7 and 5 year old while my dad traveled for work, allowed others to help care for her and her children for 8 months while she stayed on bed rest to keep me safe. We almost died the day I was born, but by the grace of God, her own strength, and the boundless love for a baby she hadn’t even held yet, we both survived and were happy and healthy.

I don’t remember most of my childhood, which is a shame because in pictures and in stories it looks wonderful. For the first six years of my life my mother was a stay at home mom and with my siblings being so much older than me, we would do so much while they were in school. Whether it was going to Disney or the beach, I am told there was never a dull moment.

When the things that made me block out my entire early life began, I became a master manipulator because I was forced to be. I dissociated when I needed to, I lied when I had to, and I was very very good at it. But the funny thing about emotions and trauma is if you push it down, it will push back.

So despite my best efforts to make everyone believe everything was okay, I couldn’t control the debilitating panic attacks. I had to sleep with all the lights on and even that didn’t always stop the nightmares. But luckily, my mother was always there to hold me through them.

She knew I was crumbling and she got me in therapy when I was eight. I refused to talk about actual issues, but the therapist helped me put out all the small fires my internal inferno created, and I survived.

It got worse as I got older, and every time I blinked I was throwing a new unhealthy coping mechanism in the pit, trying to burn my past.

I was 14 when I finally let my mom begin truly saving me. You can’t fix what you can’t see, so I let her see all of it. In my head I often think of the parallels between that conversation I had with her and her appointment with her OBGYN where she learned she would have to be on bed rest. Both times in order to save me she had to be calm and stay still, I was unnervingly vulnerable, and most remarkably, in the end we both came out okay.

Every therapy session, every medication, every hospitalization, every recommendation a professional gave us, she fought tooth and nail for me to have, just like she fought for my life before my life even began. One of those recommendations was an emotional support animal, and so yes, she got me my cat. But she gave me so much more than that.

The most important thing my mother ever taught me is I am never trapped. If I am in a situation that isn’t serving me, I can always get out. For a child who had all power and decisions stripped from them, the idea of being able to control my life was something so hard for me to grasp. The idea that I had any choice in my fate was so absurd to me, but my mother has never ever stopped giving me choices. With her and the rest of my family, I have always had agency.

So I decided to leave high school and graduate early. Out of nowhere one day, I stepped in the car, told her I was ready to move on, and with her 100% support and excitement, I withdrew from the private school I was attending and finished high school online in 5 weeks.

I hate the analogy of there being light at the end of the tunnel, because in all honesty the tunnel never ends. Instead, I like to think of life as a series of hills. You have ups and downs, and some are bigger than others. So no, I am not at the end of the tunnel.

But I have conquered my mountain.

She has always helped me survive, but now I get to live. Because of her, I am no longer struggling to get by, because of her I have the ability and opportunity to thrive

Mom, I would not change a SINGLE THING about how you have raised me. I love you so much, more than anyone in the world (but don’t tell Grapes)