Dear mom,

I know you don’t love me, and I wish you could admit to yourself that you don’t love me. It would make everything easier. 

You didn’t have children so that you could love them. You had children so you could fill a void in your soul. But people can’t be souls for each other. You birthed me into a trap. 

I wish you could see me. In our final years of interactions, after your cancer, sometimes I thought you almost could. Remember when you made a joke at Christmas 2021 about how on day 3 of our visit you hadn’t asked me any questions yet. Sometimes you are so close to seeing it. 

But I know that you won’t see it, that you can’t. I understand that your ego and identity are grounded in a narrative that you can’t edit. I have always experienced you as brittle, inflexible, cold. You have had to be these things to yourself too. I believe you were parented by people with those traits. Still. You could have tried harder, and I’ll never forgive you for making me be the cycle breaker alone. 

I wish you could see the whole world, I wish you were willing to grapple with reality. There are good parts. There is horror. The way you raised me was to keep all of it at arms length, the joy and the horror both. I have had my fill of each now, the joy and the horror. I will never turn back for you. 

I wish you could see how little of me was allowed to exist until I left your house. I wish you could see the way that you tried to keep me small, silent; smaller, quieter; and finally, the way you tried to force a narrative in which my wins outweigh my losses. They don’t. There is no narrative in which that is true. 

I don’t understand why you chose Christian Science, I don’t understand why you tried to pass it along. I don’t understand why you cannot post-cancer understand why there is a debt in the childhoods of both of your children that you owe. I don’t understand why it isnt obvious to you that you owe us both an apology. 

Maybe I understand why you cannot apologize. The brittleness is also whiteness, is also classism, is also fear and stigma and status and pathology. Who could take that lump in both hands and still figure out how to apologize?

(Me, I am one of the ones who figured out how)

There is nothing you can say that would make me feel loved because all of your actions show that you do not love me. 

I don’t want you, I don’t like you, I don’t miss you, I don’t love you. 

Cori