Oct 2015
Mother Dear,
I love you with a love that is uncertain, tentative, conditional as the sun in the sky
You broke my heart years ago.
you took my life, the one I wanted and ripped it up
you claimed I never loved anything that I did, and never wanted to be with/see/love any of it, all of it again you claimed I asked you to do that
As if I didn't know my own head and my own words
You took away the horses that ran as fast as my thoughts, the books that reminded me that I wasn't truly alone, removed me from the friends like mirrors of my heart
and for the first time...I knew what it felt like to love nothing and be loved by no one.
I wrote I hated you, I starved myself to feel like you didn't own me and you took that from me too...taking away my journals, forcing me to eat when I would rather have allowed the bones to jut from my body in subtle defiance
You couldn't take the novels I wrote in my mind or the memories of those days, pieces of words and conversations forever circling back to haunt me like the ghosts that make you who you are
You made me a shell, a blank, southern, suburban wife in the making someone who disgusts me...but you are my mother and I can't hate you
I have to love you- even when the feeling is fleeting and I question it.
Your hair curls like mine you say and I can only imagine yours curling from the heated vapors frying in your brain all empty the way you want it
"Ignorance and bliss" you say and that is why you live in your tiny bowl of stupidity and joy- a hopeless optimism that angers me more than anything else.
I want to despise you sometimes and others I want to be your best friend
You have hurt me in ways that nothing else could ever compare to
but without you and your dedication of 87 days to a hospital bed, I would not be here at all
I do not know if I can handle looking at your eyes with my own or holding a hug for more than a moment but i know i always try
I must always try.
Moments pass with us in tune and as friends or even better a mother-and-daughter
not at war but at peace and it is nice
And then you say, your hair is too long, your shoulders or slumped or you need to lose weight and the feeling spirals and fragments like a million little snowflakes
no one feeling the same but all of them razor sharp
cutting me in jagged pieces of who I was and reshaping me into a girl, young and frightened, a girl who I do not recognize. A girl who I do not want to be
the pieces of your cold words bury themselves under my skin and
they rattle around in my mind long after they melt against the warmth of my anger
I love you with a love that is uncertain, tentative, conditional as the sun in the sky
You broke my heart years ago.
you took my life, the one I wanted and ripped it up
you claimed I never loved anything that I did, and never wanted to be with/see/love any of it, all of it again you claimed I asked you to do that
As if I didn't know my own head and my own words
You took away the horses that ran as fast as my thoughts, the books that reminded me that I wasn't truly alone, removed me from the friends like mirrors of my heart
and for the first time...I knew what it felt like to love nothing and be loved by no one.
I wrote I hated you, I starved myself to feel like you didn't own me and you took that from me too...taking away my journals, forcing me to eat when I would rather have allowed the bones to jut from my body in subtle defiance
You couldn't take the novels I wrote in my mind or the memories of those days, pieces of words and conversations forever circling back to haunt me like the ghosts that make you who you are
You made me a shell, a blank, southern, suburban wife in the making someone who disgusts me...but you are my mother and I can't hate you
I have to love you- even when the feeling is fleeting and I question it.
Your hair curls like mine you say and I can only imagine yours curling from the heated vapors frying in your brain all empty the way you want it
"Ignorance and bliss" you say and that is why you live in your tiny bowl of stupidity and joy- a hopeless optimism that angers me more than anything else.
I want to despise you sometimes and others I want to be your best friend
You have hurt me in ways that nothing else could ever compare to
but without you and your dedication of 87 days to a hospital bed, I would not be here at all
I do not know if I can handle looking at your eyes with my own or holding a hug for more than a moment but i know i always try
I must always try.
Moments pass with us in tune and as friends or even better a mother-and-daughter
not at war but at peace and it is nice
And then you say, your hair is too long, your shoulders or slumped or you need to lose weight and the feeling spirals and fragments like a million little snowflakes
no one feeling the same but all of them razor sharp
cutting me in jagged pieces of who I was and reshaping me into a girl, young and frightened, a girl who I do not recognize. A girl who I do not want to be
the pieces of your cold words bury themselves under my skin and
they rattle around in my mind long after they melt against the warmth of my anger
