How devastatingly horrible it is to be your daughter
How devastatingly horrible it is to imagine what it's like to be in your inner psyche

The rushing streams of my hatred for you runs just as deep and thick and strong and authentic as my love for you

I like to believe and fantasize that you did your best in raising me
It's farther from the truth but it's more digestible for me to believe

But it was also not enough for me

I grieve everyday
Whether I am conscious of it or not
And I worry I will forever have this lingering depression like many generations worth of women before me

You do not know love

How to receive give or radiate it's nature
It did not make a home in your bones

For that I cry rivers
Rivers for the little girls that we once were and yet still are

You exert power and harm and control and call it love
All while having eyes of hatred pin-pointed sharply at my averted shy gaze as you utter it
For that's what it was packaged to you all your life

You do not know of a gentle yet fierce love
It is foreign to you
Thus you do not know how to pour into others what was never poured into you

You show me glimpses of it
So quick and fleeting in color that I question whether I experienced it or not

These glimpses of a motherly love are authentic and true
Just as your rage and violence and pain

I hold onto to those tender yet scarce memories as I child clings to their mother's leg when they start kindergarten and are afraid to be abandoned and explore the world separate from what they understand at the time is to be their life source

I do not know how to categorize you
Mostly good or mostly bad
Maybe that's not even the point
But I'd like to believe that we exist in another dimension where we do not have oceans of harm between us
Where we speak the same primary language
Where you weren't traumatized beyond what you were capable with your two hands to heal from so you could tend to me as a mother should
Where we go on tea dates because we both don't prefer it to coffee and I can come to you for comfort and cry in your arms as you stroke my hair softly
Where silence is a source of peace rather than an activation of my sympathetic nervous system
Where I never come to know you as my first bully
Where your eyes never show hatred towards me
Where we live in a dynamic ebb and flow as natural and soft and smooth and light as our breaths and bellies are when one meditates
I love you
And I mourn my relationship with you in every time I mutter those three words

Happy Mother's Day

As I gather the courage to feel my grief
To sit with it as I cry
I ask myself tirelessly
Will it always be like this
To feel as though I am constantly on the brink of tears
It's not every day now
It comes and goes
But fu€k this *****
I wanna bottle it in
But the latter would lead to more chaos
Unconsciously
And I refuse to suffer from repressed emotions that I chose to repress
I refuse to pass along the unprocessed pain of generations worth of trauma onto others
I will feel it ******
I'm just tired

I was almost always told how I felt
It's one of the reasons why I struggle to identify how I truly feel now
Or decide what I want
Lack of connection to self
As some psychologists would say

Mom my shoes feel too tight
No they're not they're fine
Oh okay

Dad I'm full; I don't want anymore food
No you're not, finish everything on the plate
Oh okay

I was told how I felt
I learned to ignore my body's communication
And look to the other
To determine how I felt
Or looked
Or what I wanted

I'm learning to unlearn this
In the minuscule activities to the larger life decisions

So please
Be patient if it takes me time to either speak up or share how I feel

Am I tending to my leaves more than my roots? It feels less painful and more safe.

How do you heal a diseased root?

Why am I scared to leave?

Can we do a prayer together? Can you pray for me? Can you write me a letter or note that I can go back to and read when times get rough for me?

We tell people to go against their bodies...to remove themselves from protection as their nervous system understands it. Leave that person; be MORE in your body; say no.

I desire to live a more conscious life that's not as unconscious and habitual than most people.

I fear that I am luke warm. My faith is not stable right now and I don't want it to be but I know it's how I feel. It's hard. I don't know how to go about it. How to pursue. I worry I have intellectualized the gospel and now I struggle to listen to sermons. I find myself criticizing more than anything.