An Ode to my Mother
“Was it hard to like, give up your money and time and, well, life when you first had us?” my teenage self inquired in an uncharacteristically civil conversation with my mom. I gazed out the shotgun window, absent-mindedly trusting her to navigate the winding, tree-lined pavement away from our house.
Looking straight ahead, without a trace of bitterness in her voice, she casually replied, “Well, not really. I will say that it got really tricky when you guys first looked us in the eyes and said, ‘I hate you.’” I didn’t say another word, but I felt the weight of her statement squeeze the air out of my chest like a balloon that had just been punctured.

I recall that I facilitated these heartbreaking “I hate you” situations more frequently than I care to admit. Of course, at my first utterance of the phrase, I’m certain that I had no idea what it meant. After all, from the time I took my first steps at 9 months of age, I spent almost every waking moment chasing down and following around my older brother and the four neighbor boys who lived next door to my first home. But those three words became addicting when I saw the consequences.
Those words completely crushed my mom, and I immediately saw it in her eyes.
Instead of her reaction invoking compassion and empathy in my soul, it incited an overwhelming desire for others to experience the pain that I felt inside. My mom was forcing me to take a nap? Rage formed a cesspool of toxic waste rising in my throat until I looked up into her eyes and spoke those piercing words: “I hate you.” Suddenly, I was no longer quite as alone in my emotional experience.
These acts of intentionally and knowingly causing my mother (among many others) agonizing pain are certainly not something that I am proud of. And for the record, because of the truly self-sacrificing woman my mother is, I still had to take naps, she still kissed me goodnight, and she never stopped loving me.
I don’t doubt that there are many times she lost the belief that I loved her back. Things got “tricky” at times. I’m not sure if I was born with the innate capacity for unconditional love that she seemed so astonishingly accustomed to doling out.
And I have further come to understand that it is toward those who are the closest and the safest among our kin that we direct the most profound emotional projection, and the fullest brunt of our internal pain. Only very recently did I gain some awareness that it wasn’t that my mother didn’t believe that I needed help for my eating disorder; it was my internal subconscious belief that I redirected toward her when I couldn’t reconcile it within myself.
In reality, I was met largely with empathy and compassion from my family throughout my illness and my life. I witnessed my mother’s faithful love and devotion to my father; she held down the fort at home with three small, rambunctious children so that my father could take on an increase in travel at his job and move up in his career. Coming home from her part-time job, after collecting us from the neighborhood’s familial supervision, she taught us to ask her about her day. However, her response

was always the same …hectic. Years after our call-and-response “how was your day, Mom?” … “Hectic,” we learned to question her further. She told tales of holding human hearts above her head during cardiac surgeries and assumed the position for us to try out ourselves. She laughed and she cried and she truly, deeply cared. Once, her older brother called our new landline one evening and made a joke about the “weird” answering machine message that she had recorded. Her eyes grew somber and subtly tear-filled before she quietly closed the door to her room for the evening. “She’s sensitive,” my dad remarked before gently calling her name and following her up the stairs to comfort her. “I just need to get some thicker skin,” she told us the following morning.
I got that very same skin from her, and I’m learning to love it …slowly. I’ve watched and I’ve learned and I’ve seen her wear her skin with such grace. I do hope she never actually thickens it. It is one of the things that I value and admire about her the most. It is one of the qualities that I am most proud and grateful that I inherited from her. She feels deeply and fully, and at her bravest, she isn’t afraid to do so. She knows it will hurt — and at times that hurt will seem unbearable — but she counts the cost and carries on anyway. And, frankly, I think that is something we can all learn from. I love you, I love you, I love you.

