Relationships not Created Equal

I always knew you were hurt. I always knew you had been broken. I was able to hear your soul crying out, buried deep within the rigidity of your expectations. I just couldn't reach you in it, and you couldn't reach us from inside of it.

The need to try to control our thoughts, perspectives, and actions was a way of protecting yourself, not us.

Your unwillingness to understand or accept was your armor, shielding a heart that was perhaps at one time just as deprived as our own.

You couldn't let love out because you couldn't let love in.

Love was coming from a desperate place inside of you, fear was suffocating it, and you were expressing it in the only way you could find access to it.

You fearfully allowed yourself to believe that your narrow understanding of love was the only way to love.

I hope you realize someday that your choice limited access to love for everyone involved. That it protected no one from anything.

You allowed yourself to believe this because you were afraid to believe anything else. You acted afraid of us because we believed anything else.

You seemed so scared to believe that there were other options. Other ways to live, other ways to be loved. Like you were frightened of the decisions we made to accept those other options.

Afraid of the opportunities presented in our reality.

Afraid of us becoming ourselves without you.

That really it was fear acting like jealousy of our future, our options, and opportunities.

Only you know for sure.

But in your case, maybe only god knows for sure.

I understand more now, I can see clearly how you were wrong, not just that you were indeed wrong.

And I know this only now because of what I've gone through myself. How I've gone through myself. Exposed every piece of myself in order to clearly see.

Clarity is after all, discovered through self-reflection.

The kind of reflection that has taken me years.

The kind of reflection that was never allowed to happen in your presence.

I know that clarity of truth was never your priority. I will never apologize for the fact that it is mine. Specific truth was your priority, your specific truth. And I would never ask you to apologize for that either.

Clarity must have been a frightening concept for you, it would have exposed the truths you were trying so desperately to hide away.

The options you were trying to keep from us because you couldn't bear to look at them.

I know I never asked for permission to unearth those truths in front of you. I make no apologies for that either. Permission would not have been granted, and those truths craved illumination more than any one of us could see at the time.

I know it was scary for you to see them exposed. I'm still not sorry.

Your burdens are your own. They were never mine to shoulder. That's why I left them behind. And I will never be sorry for that.

My only advice, is that you should consider leaving them behind as well.

I will never ask you to be sorry for being true to yourself either.

I won't ask you to be sorry for not being able to understand.

It was just something you weren't capable of providing.

Lack of understanding is what hurt me.

Lack of acceptance.

But I don't suffer through that anymore.

I provide it from within. I am proud of me, I don't need for you to be.

I don't expect you to be sorry for things you could never recognize.

Even when it hurt me.

I won't ask you to be sorry.

I just forgive you anyway.

I am sorry, that I ever expected, wanted, needed you to be someone that you are not. Someone who you could never be.

I'm sorry that I held that against you while I learned more about who I truly am, not just who I needed to be while I was in front of you.

I was never any good at that because it was never who I was meant to be.

I'm sorry you couldn't get what you needed from me. I'm just not the person who can provide that for you.

You weren't the person I needed you to be either. And that's okay.

And I'm sorry that I ever wanted that from you in the first place. Hypocrisy is somthing I condem and regect.

The truth is, I am not your reflection. Nor are you mine.

I am not your teacher or your guide. Nor are you mine.

I am not your partner, or your best friend. Nore are you mine. And that's okay too.

I can not be those things for you and you can not be those things for me.

But it really is okay. It's how we're meant to be. Different. Separate from one another. Foreign in our perspectives. And that can be a good thing. But it doesn't mean we have to try to make it fit if it doesn't. We can just let one another be. And love each other for the different creatures we truly are. And that connection come in its own time in this life or the next. The change will come from within, not from pushing at one another. I will always continue to do what I need to do. Let it go.

I let it go, and I forgive you.

And if I know one thing, I know this truth to be the most necessary and blessed thing for both of us. Even if it has gotten a little lost in translation, it remains the truth and that has never changed.

I love you.

Your Daughter.