Letter To My Mother

I lick the envelope like it’s the last thing I’ll ever taste, taking a moment to savor the flavor on my tongue.

My hands are shaking and my heart feels like a bird trying to escape from beneath my rib cage. I breathe.

I am tangled in my last lifeline. What once kept me safely secured to the shore now drags me under for ever-extending intervals. The serrated edges of these words will be sharp enough to cut through sea-salted fibers and set me free. I am ready.

It is not as simple as making one cut though. It never is. It has been six year of tediously untethering myself from her. It has been six years of her sometimes carelessly, sometimes maliciously tugging at this lifeline, submerging my heart and my spirit.

It has taken 28 months, 598 miles, and my first Christmas without her to be ready to set myself free.

I reflect on the words written in my sloppy scrawl across page after page of notebook paper. Starting with:

“Dear Mom,

You broke my fucking heart.”

I never expected my first heartbreak to be like this. I expected it from some sweet, sappy teenage boy. Not from my mom.

No one can prepare you for breaking up with a parent. It’s nothing like losing a person you met in a hallway or a coffee shop. It is like losing pieces of yourself.

How do you end things with the person who created you — the person responsible for your entire existence? What do you say?

Once I began writing it was like a river, like a life force, like all of the nights and days I had spent agonizing over my mother were being spilled onto the pages.

My writing was panicked, as if I knew this was the last thing I would be writing to her for a long time. I began making a list.

Things I Wish You Knew About Me

1. I have actually become a really good person. I strive every day to see the light in people and to create my own light to share with others. Coming out as bisexual and polyamorous was a huge part of this! I told you but the confession was met with silence so it felt like you never knew. Every day I choose love and nothing has ever felt more true to who I am.

2. If you had never asked me to choose between you and my father I never would have. I love you equally and I wish you could have seen that. Instead, you attacked me for the half of me that wasn’t you.

I will never forget how much hate was in your voice when you said:

“You are just like your father”

And

“You let your dad brainwash you. How does it feel to be so stupid?”

And

“Have a great life with your new family”

Your rhetoric was poison.

I constantly doubt my perception of reality because of how many times you told me I was brainwashed. BRAINWASHED. That is the word you used again and again. Each time it was like the banks of world were being swept away by your angry current and I was helpless to it.

Being called “crazy” by anyone sends me into a world of doubt and insecurity where I actually can’t distinguish between what I know about myself and what you have told me about myself. Maybe those words seemed inconsequential to you but they have lived in me every day.

3. I hate being around my friends’ mothers. It’s just a reminder of the things I can’t have. A few weeks ago, I cried at my girlfriend’s house because I couldn’t bear to look at her mother’s belongings. It was too intimate and too real and too familiar to watch her love the things her mother loved the way I still love many of the things you love. I love lavender, and artisan soap, and wool socks, and fairies, and scarves all because of you. My room is filled with artifacts of the ways in which I have loved your loves. Books, blankets, photos, poems. Each one is like love letter.

4. Some nights I still can’t sleep. So, to pass the time I stalk your facebook page like an ex-girlfriend that never really got over the breakup. As if consuming those little pieces of you is like having the real thing. But everyone knows that imitation chocolate isn’t as sweet. How could it be any different with people?

5. I never stopped believing in the good in you. Not after you disappeared for a summer when I was 15 and I needed you. Not after you kicked me out of your home for standing up for what I believed in. Not after you missed my graduation or my final concerts or my first day of college.

No, instead I kept coming back like people do in abusive relationships. I saw that you did love me and I believed that you could change. I still remembered what it felt like to be loved by you, to have you help me with my ballet tights, to share slices of banana bread, to sing along to our favorite songs.

Then suddenly the currents of your affection changed without warning and the daughter that I used to be to you was washed away. What was left was the daughter of the man who could not give you enough, who could not love you right, who let you down and I had his eyes and his quiet temperament and his love for poetry.

And you began to choose me less every day.

You broke my heart.

Even now I still have to look people that I love in the eyes and tell them, “No, I’m sorry. I love you but I just don’t have room in my heart for you because it’s completely consumed by this heart break” and then they ask “what heartbreak” and I have to explain about you and this wreckage and it hurt more than it already hurt.

Because I am never going to get over you.

So now here I am dreaming about, writing about you, talking about you to so many people that want to listen. But the only person I wish could hear me is you.

The list goes on, filled with questions and love and anguish and honesty as if writing it all down would somehow make up for the words at the end of the letter:

“Mom, I can’t have you in my life any more. And I’m sorry.”

My best friend told me that once I sent the letter I would need to be prepared for a grieving period..

But . . . I never imagined that it could feel like this. Like untethering myself set me free but into a void where I struggle every day with my identity without my mother.

She raised me to be strong-willed and independent. But no one tells the fiery feminist that without her feminist mother she will feel small and weak. At 20 years old I never imagined that I would still need to be mothered but I do. I seek guidance in every adult woman I meet, hoping for a surrogate.

Some mornings I wake up and I am fine.

Some mornings I wake with dreams of my mom swimming in my head, her presence bleeding out all over my consciousness.

I wake with regret and fear gnawing at my stomach.

What have I done? What have I done?

I feel her absence all around me. Most often in quiet, unexpected moments of needing her. Needing her hand on my head when words hurt me more than hands ever could. Or in cruel seconds of daydreaming about my future before the awareness of her absence floods out those dreams. I crave her comfort.

But somehow in all of that absence she is still everywhere. I see her when I look in the mirror. In my long, dark hair, in my chapped lips, in the shadow of my collarbones. I see her in my preference for tea over coffee and in my many articles of burgundy clothing.

Before sending the letter I recall the postscript penned neatly on the last page of the letter:

“P.S. Mom, I love you.”