"I need a father. A mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty." - Sylvia Plath

On motherhood

My mother got married when she was 17.

Her father had just died, and she had 8 siblings, so there wasn’t much of a place for her to be parented.

By the time she was 21, she herself was a mother. Being so young, she never fully formed an identity beyond being a mother. But by all accounts, my mother needed a mother.

So, I gave her mine.

I, at a very young age, learned to be hyperaware and vigilant of people’s feelings, mainly my parents. My father because of his violent outbursts of rage and abuse, and my mother.

It’s not as if my mother wasn’t nurturing or maternal to me, she was extremely maternal, and it was a mutual mothering relationship between me and her.

I gave her half of my mother, and she gave me half of her mothering.

She loves to tell me that when I was a born it was like God gave her a best friend, she mentions often the fact that when I was a baby (one year old or less) she would speak to me like I was a grown-up which is why I started speaking so early in full sentences. She’d say that she would talk to me constantly about things happening in her life, that she had a special baby carriage that made it so I would face her while we would go on our walks so “we could talk”. She of course says this anecdotally as a funny story of how deep our bond was.

This breaks my heart for several reasons. Primarily for my mother and how her entire world and concept of self and identity and companionship was built on a baby, which sounds like the loneliest existence in the world. To me at least.

Secondarily, because that sense of companionship and identity is built around someone she doesn’t know.

I love my mother so much that who I am and its relation to her and her potential opinion of it breaks my heart. Not because I particularly care of what she thinks of me, but because I know that who she thinks I am is so defining to her.

Sometimes I imagine if my mother and I were actually the best friends she imagines us to be. I imagine what it would be like if she knew who I am fully and accepted it and didn’t hang on tooth and nail to an idea she has of me; and instead accepts that I will become someone else and eventually leave, and we would have been friends, or she would have been the parent of an adult.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if my mother never had any of us. Who would she be if she be outside of her family? who would she have become had she been given the chance to be anything other than mother?

Being a mother is something so integral to her identity that the answer to that question is an infinite plethora of possibilities that I would like to know the answer to probably more than the first hypothetical if given the choice.

My mother is a mother. That is all she knows to be. She says it’s all she’s ever wanted but how can she know that when it’s all she’s ever known?

And then there is the issue of me and who I am.

I have only recently learned to be a separate entity from my mother and not have the consideration of her feelings bleed into everything I am and every decision I make.

I learned to consider my mother before I learned to read.

I learned, in many ways, that I need to heal my mother before I start living. That not only do I need to heal her retroactive wounds of the past and the present, but also any future wounds caused by my leaving and living and loving outside of her.

I’m asked a lot if I want children, and told a lot that I do or I will, sometimes by my mother, and I always say no.

but “no" feels complex and vague.

I think deeper than not wanting to be a mother, I don’t want to be a daughter anymore. I love my mother deeply and our souls will always be connected but I think I want to be allowed to move on from being mothered.

I wish I could ask my future child if they want to exist, if they want to be my child.

If i were to raise them in an environment where the door was open to not only enter but to exit (a door I have struggled to reach my whole life), would it be different.

But even then, they did not ask to exist.

I wish I could reach into the future and talk to them. Or even ask myself if I am capable of any more raising, any more healing, any more altruism and giving with no reception in return.

I think more than anything throughout my life I’ve been taught resentment, resentment that bleeds into everything.

Further than all of this exists the issue of my queerness. Less of a wall and more of a window with reflective glass. I see all that’s happening, and she doesn’t see anything but herself in me.

But that is not the only thing, that is one thing.

The issue of coming out is a highly imposed concept because it’s never just that. But in the relationship between my mother and I where she really does think she knows me for who I am and reaches into my soul it just feels ironic.

Queerness is a minimal thing and still it is a monumental divergence between my own life and my life alongside my mother.

But it is essentially a moot point.

Now that I am older and wiser, and I have learned more compassion, compassion I am trying to exercise in parenting my mother more gently and guiding her more acceptingly and less resentfully, I am learning (as I always have since I could) the language to corral her emotions more effectively.

When I was twenty-two, my younger sister went through her first break up with her first boyfriend. My mother tried to control how my sister was feeling and center herself as she does (well-intentioned but nonetheless). she had her volatile emotions that needed to be expressed through the control of my sister’s.

It was an example of how I could guide my mother better and control her emotions and help her deal with the emotions of others, I think me and my mother are alike in that way where we are uncomfortable with negative emotions of others, though for different reasons, and on different paths.

I, of course, had gone through my first break up three years prior and hid the fact because it was a woman.

I used to resent my sister because of this. I used to resent her the ability to be so open with our mother while myself and identity and (marginally) my queerness left me to lie about things I don’t even need to be lying about other than the things that I do.

It’s not like I have worked to achieve this level of acceptance and resentment I have just detached.

Do we as a culture even allow women to form identities beyond the pseudo-identities, we give them based on the roles and provision they supply that are or should be secondary or even tertiary to their identities as people? But where do we even derive our identity from if it’s not relational?

In the end, I keep looking for open arms to go home to. A “mother" in many senses except traditional. or my mother rather, in some ways.

I look into my mother’s eyes sometimes and I see exactly what she’s saying

“I love you so much, but I don’t know how.

Please let me try.”