Without a Mother

I have a few very scattered memories of her precious few 'attempts' at pretending to be a mother. She read me a book one day when it was raining and I couldn't go outside. It was a Dr. Seuss book. She packed my lunch a few times. She gave me baloney sandwiches and raw carrot sticks. I didn't like them, but I ate them anyway because she made them for me and I was so very hungry for a mother's love. I have many, many more memories of her hateful glares, of her telling me how much she hated me and how I should never have been born because I had ruined her life. She told me that I was a terrible, rotten kid and how desperately she hoped that I would grow up to have kids who were even more worthless than I so I could finally be paid back for ruining her life. I remember the times she purposely incited my father to beat me. I had no one growing up. The fastest way to win my mother's disapproval? For her to see me smile.

Conventional therapy and self-help have not helped me with this. Understanding that she also came from abuse and neglect does not erase or change in any way what happened to me or how I felt growing up all those years in an emotional desert whose only oases contained physical and sexual abuse. Understanding doesn't change a goddamn thing. Trying to 'be my own mother' hasn't changed anything, either. I am still just me and I am alone inside at a level that most people don't even know exists. My therapist? He's nice, but I bet you anything he would stop seeing me if I stopped paying him. A real mother wouldn't do that. I will never have a mother. Sitting and sitting with that hasn't changed anything. Mourning it and crying changed nothing as well. Accepting that it won't change has left me even more hopeless than before.

Nothing helps. I still always feel cold. I will never be able to get warm. I can't feel safe or hopeful for long enough to get much of anything done except in rare instances. That hurt little girl is almost always right there in the background - that girl who had the rug snatched out from under her before she was even born. She perpetually falls through space with no mother to catch her. She often grabs my shirttail in an effort to break her fall. I try to help her, but nothing I do helps her feel better and so... I keep going about my own business with this desperate child weighing me down because there is nothing else I can do for her.

I get up from bed and she grabs my shirttail. I hobble into the kitchen to start my day and get busy working and she climbs onto my back. I am quickly exhausted and limp through the day like The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I have to apologize to my family for not having the energy to do anything with them. Yeah, I still have to take the blame. And the load on my back grows that much heavier.

It will never get lighter. I will never have a mother.