Why Should I Care?
I made a choice. Why is now any different?
I try very hard not to think about her at all. But ever since November hit and I knew my birthday was drawing near, it became harder and harder to push her from my mind.
She’s my mother. I only have a birthday because of her.
And she never let me forget that fact.
It was my choice to cut ties. At first, she tried to get me to talk to her but her attempts were nothing more than guilt trips that — as per usual — made all of her actions my fault.
I deserved every awful thing she’s ever said and done to me.
It took a lifetime for me to walk away. Despite the abuse, despite my complete lack of a childhood or any self-esteem to speak of… she’s the only mother I have.
Children aren’t supposed to walk away from their parents. It shouldn’t be my decision to block her from my email and phone and send her letters back unopened.
She stopped trying a long time ago. I know from my brother that she’s been dealing with her cat being ill so I’m sure she’s mad at me for not reaching out. I know she would assume he told me.
Thanksgiving is just over a week away. My birthday is a few days later. People will ask where I am and she will make an excuse. My husband had to work and it was too much because of the animals. Those are the reasons I gave my father for not going to New York to spend the holiday with him.
The truth is I don’t trust myself. I cross that state line on a holiday and I will feel her siren call luring me to my own detriment.
I’ve always hated Thanksgiving so it’s not important to me to be there for that. But no matter what happens a few days later — it’s going to bother me.
Scenario one: She ignores my birthday.
She’s my mother. That hurts no matter what. I don’t want anything from her but I know that if she lets the day go by without any attempt to make contact, it’s going to bother me.
Scenario two: She sends some kind of package.
My mother doesn’t believe in giving gift cards or money as presents. She feels very strongly about the power of a wrapped gift. She also knows I’m not going to pay to send a package back but I can write ‘return to sender’ on an unopened card and put it right back in the mailbox with little effort at all. If she sends something — it will definitely be something that will cost me to return it. It will be a gift of spite. A dare. Keep it or pay.
Yes, she’s that petty and vindictive.
My husband’s birthday is exactly one month after mine (different years though) and I wouldn’t put it past her at all to ignore my birthday and send something for his. That is another type of spite she’s incredibly capable of.
And I honestly don’t know which I’m hoping will happen. I don’t know if I prefer that she ignore it or she doesn’t.
At least if she ignores it, then she’s respecting the fact that I told her to leave me alone. But your mother being alive and ignoring your birthday is painful even when her presence in your life is also painful.
On the other hand, if she doesn’t ignore it, it won’t be some kind of gesture of love. It will be her attempt to buy me back before Christmas. She can explain my absence from one holiday, but two? Appearances mean everything to her.
My mother has attempted on many occasions to buy me. She likes to flaunt the fact that she has money by buying lavish gifts that serve only as bragging rights for her.
I bought my daughter a new couch as a housewarming present, I wonder what her father got her.
He gave us thousands of dollars toward the down payment when we were outbid and traveled back and forth from New York to Rhode Island to check the houses for us and make sure we getting a good home. Bitch.
Also, we hate that couch, it’s incredibly uncomfortable, and the animals made three of the cushions explode. So fuck your couch.
Clearly, I have a lot of anger toward her but if you’d lived my life with her, you would too. She’s a malignant narcissist who tortured me for my entire life while telling me I never should have been born in the first place. She even threatened to kill me on multiple occasions and once, attempted to stop an EMT from saving me so that I would die.
Yeah. You’d be angry too.
Yet she still has power over me and I’m giving it to her. I said I was done and I meant it. I pushed her out of my life and closed the door forever. And I know that anything she sends me has a motive. Keeping it would be like signing a deal with the devil for a golden freaking fiddle.
How can you simultaneously want nothing from a person and be incredibly hurt if nothing is exactly what you get?
She’s my mother. She should be fighting for me. Not because of appearances and what other people might think but because I’m her daughter and she wants me in her life.
I was asked the other day if she was trying to look for me. Maybe trying to figure out my new Medium name or asking my brother about me or the spies she had checking my social media to the point that I stopped posting anything meaningful.
“Another cat video” is the most news she’ll get from that trickery.
The problem is that it’s not her that I want this time of year. It’s this idea of a mother that I have in my head. A mother that wanted me from the beginning, has always loved me, and is happy that I was born. A mother that I don’t have. So my brain tries to turn her into that version and I dwell and drive myself crazy.
What is she going to do about my birthday?
I cut ties with her in mid-December of last year. Christmas gifts were already bought so she sent them and so did I. I acknowledged her birthday in January but that was the last time I reached out to her. Then came the letters that I didn’t open and simply sent back. The last time she reached out to me was when one of my pets died but an argument about that very animal had been the last straw for me with her so her saying anything about his death just made me furious.
She knew he’d died because of her social media spies. The last thing I said to her was that my life was none of her business and if she didn’t knock it off I would block everyone she knew.
I haven’t heard from her since.
Ignoring Mother’s Day was a strange thing. I always hated Mother’s Day. She was very particular about cards (again, for appearance's sake). They had to be sentimental and she would check the back to make sure they were Hallmark and not a generic version.
I’d spend hours every year in the greeting card aisle looking for a Hallmark-stamped lie. She was not the type of mother that Hallmark makes cards for.
Happy Mother’s Day to the woman who held me down on the kitchen floor with her foot in my stomach daring me to scream.
Have a wonderful Mother’s Day Mom, thank you for all the times you told me that you wished post-birth abortion wasn’t murder and that I was a mistake you wished had never happened.
A Beautiful Mother’s Day wish to the woman who didn’t teach me anything about being female but instead shipped me off to a ballet boarding school where I was tortured. Thank you for all the bones that I broke!
Wishing a Happy Mother’s Day to the woman who forced me to lie and call a brutal assault a car accident because she felt it made her look bad that it happened in her house.
They don’t make cards that tell the truth about our relationship. If you call abuse a relationship.
It was a relief that I didn’t have to seek out a lie that she’d be happy to display on her mantle. It was weird to ignore it just the same. It was the day that I realized that I’d actually chosen not to have a mother anymore.
I told myself it was for the best. Better to have no mother than one who hurts you again and again and again. The expensive gifts were nice but not what they cost me in the end. They always had an agenda behind them.
It was easy to tell myself that when it was a day about her.
No matter what she does or doesn’t do — I know she doesn’t care about my birthday. She sees it as the worst day of her life because I’m the worst thing that ever happened to her. She made sure I knew that. Now, I’m living life without her.
Most of the time I’m fine with that.
Then the calendar turned to November and I wasn’t. I feel like the lonely child I used to be sitting alone in a dorm wondering why my mother didn’t come to my performance. I danced because she wanted me to and she didn’t come to watch.
I’m alive and exist because she gave birth to me. So how do I face my birthday without her?
How am I supposed to feel?
Someone tell me because I don’t know.
She’s not a good mother. She’s not even a good person.
This should be easier. I pushed the person who hurt me away. Only a masochist would want that back. And I don’t.
I just… don’t know what I do want.
