My greatest fear as my mother’s daughter was not that I would die, but rather that I would live.
It takes strength to live, courage to wake up each day and face someone that you are so unsure of.
You do not know whether they love you, and yet they say they do.
This is the ambiguity that leads to the ambivalence towards live and living. Out of your uncertainty concerning them and their actions towards you, you grow unsure about yourself, your attitude towards life and living.
You want to be successful and thrive, and yet a part of your remains unsure, uncertain.
I live with this uncertainty, this ambiguity that expresses itself in my uncertainty towards live and living each day.
If my mother loved me, then why did she they beat me?
How could she say, “I am doing this for your own good,” as she was hitting me?
Did she not see the pain upon my face, witness the ache and fear written across my eyes?
Where did her heart go when she hit me?
Did she even have one?
Or was she made of stone?
My mother possessed a heart within a body of flesh and bones that knew pain. I saw that in the hours following my brother’s death from drowning.
But by then, I was sixteen, it meant nothing. Worst yet, it delivered confusion.
I took care of my mother in those hours. I undressed her, as she sat catatonic like upon the bed while staring at the wall in front her.
But I could not feel for her loss.
I knew my loss. I had held my brother in the emergency room as he lay upon the table warm, but absent of life and growing cold.
He had escaped. “Why him and not me?”
I had already tried suicide once and failed.
What was and is the purpose of life if you this is what you face?
I will never forget that day, that time and period of my life.
Death and sadness with what seemed retribution and rage filled my coming of age.
Only now that we have three daughters of our own, my husband and I, can and do I truly begin to perceive what the loss of any child means to her or his mother.
It still do not know, for ours are blessedly still with us.
More over I wonder how does one make peace with the loss of a child they repeatedly hit?
How does a mother justify promising, threatening to kill a child before she will allow them to enter a situation she deems as dangerous, but in actuality is probably safer than the one in which she takes him?
What does it take for one to awake to their own suffering?
I only know mine. I wish I knew my mother’s.
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