A Fragment of Closure

“I don’t want her at my graduation, my wedding, or even my funeral,” I vent. “For all I know, she can burn in hell.”

“Is there something that happened?”, my therapist asks.

I scan the room, gazing at the ostentatious room and quietly think to myself about how after seeing a dozen mental health care professionals, I am never able to maintain eye contact. I come back to the room, right before I continue.

About a week ago, I blew up the relationship with my one and only mother. Actually, I would consider it to be a joint effort, seeing as though that anger does not come out of nothing.

“After all that I have done for you, you don’t even appreciate me!” my mother yelled, while she sat in the driver’s seat, sending me up to school. I knew better, to bite my tongue and look out the window: but this was different.

“What is there to appreciate? You didn’t raise me, Dad did!” I replied, and instantly regretted it. Not because it was completely false, but because I knew better.

“Fuck you!” my mother exclaimed as she began to pound the steering wheel, “How dare you say that? My life is ruined because of you and you are telling me your father raised you? I wake up early to waste an hour driving you to school everyday and this is what you tell me? Fuck you!”

My nose began to tense up. A cold tear fell from my eye and glided across my cheek and onto my cupid’s bow, and it was not long before there was more, and more.

Here, beside me, was the woman who gave me life by growing me in her very own body. Yet somehow, fifteen years later, she speaks as though that same baby she grew had a choice in being born. Of course, she would go on to assume motherly roles by putting food on the table and a roof over my head.

But what was the sacrifice? Making me her couple’s counselor at the age of nine, who she would place the fate of her marriage on? Was the price living through reruns of her own rendition of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, called The Woman Who Cried Leaving Her Family? It was always her family, but not her husband whom she made it a mission to belittle on a daily basis. Was it worth being told I was lazy when I spent the slow rotations of the earth in my room after my first attempted suicide at the age of twelve? Is this why I endured her blaming me for getting hospitalized under the Mental Health Care Act?

“How do you feel towards her?” she says as she gets up to get a glass of water.

“I don’t know,” I reply, trying to latch onto one of many floating emotions, “Anger, frustration, irritation?”

“Do you want to know what I think?” she replies as she makes her way back with her water.

“What?”

“I think you love her,” my therapist answers as she sits down, “When I hear you talk about her, I can tell you love her.”

I look at my therapist, dead in the eyes. Something so obvious, yet so shocking slowly dissolves into my brain. The almost compulsory emotion of loving your parents is strange. It comes easy for most, yet there comes this strange phenomenon when that person who is supposed to represent the epitome of love and trust, becomes a pure poison. The phenomenon of your greatest unrequited love is your own mother.

“It’s not like she loves me back. If she loved me she would give me an apology. You know- I keep waiting for this big speech, the ones you see in movies after a parent has wronged their child. Where they say ‘I am so sorry, I was wrong, and I will do better’,” I explain.

“But that’s the thing: you are never going to get that from her, and you have to accept that.”

“That’s sad.”

“I know it is. But she does not know the love that allows her to apologize.”

Without speaking, I repeat those words until they penetrate my mind. Only then, do I shift myself into the memory of the first time I came to this office with my mother: my then-new therapist had asked my mother how her experience was when she was pregnant with me.

At the age of 25, my mother was faced with the news that she was pregnant with her very first child. It was then when she moved in with my paternal grandparents, and it became evident to my mother that her mother-in-law was not fond of her.

My mother was strong minded who came from a line of hard-working mothers. Her mother was barely there during her childhood, because she too worked hard to put food on the table. Her parents were strict and deemed physical punishment to be the most efficacious form of parenting. But years later, that strength was tested when she arrived. Here my mother was, a fish out of water, pregnant, and barely knowing the people nor the language. My grandmother would insult her, telling my father to leave her while she carried his child.

At the time, this story was a mere shocking revelation that changed my perspective on my grandmother. Nevertheless, until this therapy session, did I realize that that was not the lesson to be learnt.

For the greater part of my childhood, I had resented my mother. I had expressed this to a close friend, who had proposed that I was no different than Christine from Ladybird. But I wasn’t. It was never the hate that grew from a mother hindering her teenage daughter from living the cookie-cutter teenage dream. It was never Christine wanting to be Ladybird.

This sentiment was rooted in the deep disappointment that my mother was not a mother to me. But that was just it. I spent years desperately awaiting an awakening in her, that would prompt her to become a better mother. Then, with every fight, I grew closer to realizing that that was out of the question. So, instead, I awaited the cinematic apology speech, because it was the least she could do.

Because even an inch of forgiveness could provide a fragment of closure.

But she couldn’t give that to me, but not to her fault.

She had her own demons and troubles. She had been through hell and back with her mother-in-law and was deprived of love from her very own mother.

This is what she knew to be love.

How could she know that she did wrong, when she did not know what it meant to do good?

She never meant nor chose to be a shitty mother.

She never was not what I had wanted or remotely needed, no matter how much it killed me, the consequences were mine to cope with.

The important thing was that she tried her best.

I appreciate her for that.