#mother problems

i can partially clean my room JUST enough to where im exhausted and she doesnt care, all she says is “you did NOTHING!!!!” and pointing out everything i did wrong and she tries to say SHE IS THE RIGHT ONE IN THE SITUATION?

Like my mother

Like my mother

I need to be beautiful like my mother.

She's the most beautiful woman to have ever lived. But no one knows that except me because no one else has the same wounds as her like I do which can carry the entire truth of her existence. No one else has cried when she cried, bled when she bled, died when she died.

No one else has inherited her rage.

No one else has inherited her grief.

No one else has inherited her bloodlust.

Except me

So I need to be beautiful like her too.

I'll paint my lips to hide the crimson stains of spitting my own blood.

I'll darken my eyes to hide the bruises from nights spent with mania instead of rest.

I'll pluck out every imperfection in my brow until it no longer furrows for men who do not deserve it.

I'll put kajal on my waterline so whoever makes me cry has to see me in all my horrifying anger.

I'll powder up my cheeks to hide the tears my father never dried and put lotion on the skin that holds the scars from wounds I was too young to heal.

Like my mother did.

Because I need to be beautiful like my mother.

Even if it leaves me lifeless.

It is bitterness and pride.

She nods along to homilies about the nuclear family- how one mommy and one daddy is what makes the world go round. Never mind I have a scar on my right arm given to me from her as a late eighth birthday present.

Instead of hymns, she listens constantly to internet pundits calling “transgenderism” butchery and evilness incarnate. She sneers at women with short hair and men with painted nails. There is no compassion- no humanity- for those that do not conform.

She scorns the person she crosses who wears a mask, laughing to me about their stupidity and is uncaring about possible health concerns they could have. She is not bothered by the homeless mother on the street but is horrified to come across a man with a high pitched voice who could possibly be gay.

She wasn’t always like this. I look at pictures from when she was my age. She worked in charity at her church, spending all her free time volunteering. There’s a picture of her I found- a carbon copy of me in 1995- wearing an ugly yellow shirt with “Saint Thomas ministries” scrawled across it. Her arm is looped around a boy wearing the same t-shirt in a half hug.

What is strange about him is his painted nails and blue lipstick, along with two dangly earrings. He wouldn’t look too much out of place on my campus, but I cannot imagine how it was in 1995.

“My friend, Benedict,” she told me when I asked, and her eyes teared up. “He died a few months after that photo. They found him dead in a forest. I always prayed he didn’t kill himself.”

I lost the religion I grew up with, to trial and vexation, and finding a new path. And I don’t know if she’s realized it yet- but my mother has lost hers too.

The girl she was is dead, and she says no more novenas. The prayers she cries are for things to stay exactly how they were- with men and women in enforced gender roles and perfect families.

And i look at her, wondering what Bible she is reading where the world is her against everyone and everything. Where her love has gone.

I hope one day I will understand her. But I pray even harder that I will never become her.

“why?”

i dream of being someone you don't hate, someone who didn't rob you of your youth, your job you loved so dearly

please, save the comments

the slander

the low-hitting compliments.

I am no longer attached to her by the hip,

but my heart aches for the feeling to be loved

cherished

held by her again.

so what do you want?

to love me?

cherish me?

hold me?