I am my mother's daughter
on mothers & daughters, sickness & resentment, reflections & miracles
I spent many years thinking I was not my mother’s daughter. I was a part of her that should have died a long time ago but didn’t. I stopped breathing when I was born, and my mother always said I was her miracle. I used to think no, I am something that should be dead. I am not supposed to be here. I used to think there was less miracle and more curse involved in my taking another breath. I never stopped to think of how it must have felt, having your child ripped from your arms because they can’t find a heartbeat and not being able to do anything but wait. I never stopped to think of the kind of relief she felt when I took a small, gasping breath. I only ever thought of where I must have gone in those minutes, and how it seemed to be what I needed to return to. My mother used to say I was her miracle, and it took me too many years to stop recoiling at those words, to stop thinking horrible things as she smiled at me with nothing but love.Â
I used to wish I had someone looking back at me through the mirror, someone I was afraid of turning into. I was never afraid of turning into my mother, but often I wished I was. Like many thoughts from sick minds, it wasn’t meant to be terrible. It wasn’t meant to be anything, but I know now it was more hopeless than cruel. I wanted a reflection of inevitability, something to fall towards. Someone to say: you are turning into me, and what a miserable thing that is.
My mother could never understand the kind of hollowness that grew around me, from me, inside me. I spent many years as an angry child because of this. It was, to me, some sort of injustice that I was singularly so vacant, so burdened. Why did I have to carry this? I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t hold it. It was too much. And nobody around me, it seemed, had to carry anything of the sort. My mother, the one person that was supposed to understand, couldn’t. I resented her for this, as I resented anyone who wasn’t feeling what I felt. I know now that it was less about anger and more about wanting someone to tell me what to do with that heaviness I was holding.Â
No one has come before me to say I know this hurt. It goes here. It stays here until it ends. My mother never told me where to put this emptiness because she has never had to put it anywhere. She knew it, perhaps, the way you know of someone or something; a distant acquaintance, or perhaps she came face to face with it, before me. She knew it, perhaps, but I was the first one to hold it in my hands and make her see it. I’m sorry, I want to say to her, I never meant to make you see it. I’m sorry, I almost say to her, sitting in the kitchen, the dough sticking to our fingers, her laugh echoing off the walls that hold nothing old and nothing hurt, not yet. I’m sorry I ever let it get near you.
I thought I knew what it felt like to create something dark, something sad. I’ve done it, I thought, I created this child, this monster of mine that swallows every good thought. I know, mother, I understand, I know the creation of pain. I know how much it takes from you. I know how little it leaves you with. But of course, I was not a monster, not a being of pain, but a child, wrestling things that seemed much larger than anything I had ever come across; much stronger than anything else — even my own mother. I was sick, that’s all.Â
I thought of our plights and their convergence; I thought at some point, this child of mine is going to swallow me whole, and at some point, I am going to swallow you whole, mother, and this is how it goes. Mothers create and daughters destroy, daughters create as a mockery of themselves; I created a sick thing from the sick thing you created.Â
I raged and resented and hurt people who were only trying to help me. I blamed my mother and I blamed myself, but being sick is not a mother’s fault, and it is not a daughter's fault. It just is.
I write it comforts me, in a way a mother’s love never could. I notice I don’t say my mother’s love, just a mother. I distanced myself from the rotten thoughts I had just enough that it didn’t seem sacrilegious to write them down—a mother’s love seems like a religion, often. On my worst days, there was no comfort to be found, not in religion and not in my mother’s arms. It all made me sick. The only word I can think of to capture how it makes you feel when you reject the most innate comforting things is wrong. It’s a cruel feeling. It makes you feel like something that shouldn’t exist, the antithesis of a miracle.Â
What it leaves behind, even years after it dissipated, is still with me. It’s not something you get to forget easily. Being unable to find comfort in inherently familiar, kind, love-filled things, to seek and find comfort in your emptiness feels like an inversion, something demoralizing. It leaves you feeling hollow and unclean and warped and utterly hopeless. Â
My mother and I take turns trying to understand each other. Clumsily, awkwardly, but we are trying. We do not carry the same scars but that does not mean we will never understand each other. Mothers and daughters are not held together by anything that can be severed easily.Â
I think often of the myth of Persephone and Demeter, and how the vastness of Demeter’s mourning caused everything around her to die. I think of Persephone, underground, watching. I think of rotting crops and grief that leaves a mark on the world. I think of reunification. I think of a mother’s love.
Sometimes, these days, she cries; she looks at me and she says, you’re doing so much better. I wonder how many tears of this nature — this relief— it will take to compensate for the tears of before— tears on the precipice of loss, of fear—and if it will ever come close.Â
I am my mother’s daughter. I have never been anything else.
Thank you for reading <3
i don't really have any words, just happy and grateful that you're writing and i get to read it
incredible and heart-wrenching and relatable - thank you for sharing this!