Breaking up with “The Mother”

Sept 6, 2019

A card is drawn. “Tell someone something you’ve always wanted to tell them.”

You call me while I’m on the way to work in the rain on a Friday and ask me again and again how much I made from the show last weekend. I tell you I do not know but for some reason you need to know how many people came and when I say 30 you say 30,000 when the theatre only holds 89 seats and I am getting frustrated being on the phone with you it has already been 2 minutes and i really don’t like repeating myself when you ask me for the third time if we made any money from the show.

I cross the road annoyed with your questions.

Arlo asks me now while he’s on the tablet, “don’t you wish the sky was this color everyday? And no one was fighting and there were no bad guys?”

I am nannying this week because the robotics job did not have any work for me. I contemplate this exchange between jobs, some days I teach, some days I nanny, some days I’m in the kitchen, some days I’m with the girl scouts, some days I’m in theatre…and later on in September I will be a licensed realtor. Right now I do not make enough to pay off the creepy credit cards, or to keep Benji the one year old toy maltese in my life, or buy flying lotus tickets for me and Cameron. But i do get to make my own schedule and sleep in with Micah until noon if I want, and go to the gym, and yoga on the roof, and make music when I am brave enough to sit myself down and finish a song, or go out running at midnight and not have to worry about the next day or if i have enough money to do laundry, or get myself to the work that sustains the life that I have made for myself. That my dad and the woman he married have helped pay my way through two masters degrees by sacrificing their happiness, the role that I now play to reinvent certain systems, the reason behind these cards in the face of monetary transactions and the abstraction of capitalistic transactions leaving both parties alienated from each other as we shift gears into operation Auto Pilot.

I tell you none of this on the phone. As I pull up to the school gate, I project an imagination where we are emotionally stable enough to sustain a conversation long enough for me to say “sorry, I’m on the phone with my mom.” and not feel weird when I say “my mom” because the woman I have referred to as “Mom” was not really my mom even though she raised me more than you did. I want to say so much “My mom and I” in so many instances, I want to be able to be sad when you die, I want to experience a type of fear that comes with love and losing when it comes to you, and I want it to hurt less when I think about you or speak to you on the phone.

You ask me why I am so angry when i am on the phone with you and as I’m at the stop light I yell because this relationship has been damaged for 28 years and you are asking for a lot of access to my life in this moment.

I realize the road attendant and some parents are looking at me. It is difficult to cure the roots when they are deep. Excavation is necessary. I want to change the thought patterns surrounding our interactions. Surrounding our relationship. Why can’t you just get yourself together and take care of what you need to take care of so that it will be easier for me to be in your life? Why does it need to be this difficult?

I want you to actually be my mom and have you mean something more to me than you currently do. Have you hold place in my life in a way that grows love and abundance and tenderness. To not feel weird when other women touch me because I am learning all the idiosyncrasies that come with showing affection to female bodies and trusting them in general.

I want to tell you about my recent heartbreaks without you asking me about a thousand other things and knowing too much about my life in a way where I feel exposed. Yet you were the one who gave me life. Or decided to push this entity out from your body. I am breaking up with this idea of you as my mother and all the hidden expectations that have been woven into the fabric of our association. Without the placenta between us, we are tied through blood, DNA, spirit and a bond that will stay with me for life. Some facts will never change. To purge the heart of this issue is to dive into the sticky sweetness of this human experience. I choose how I engage with you. I choose to love myself throughout the failure. It is this idea of you as my mother that haunts me. Maybe if I approached you as a woman on the street I might care more. Yet I do without you being anything more than the woman who gave birth to me.

I release. I feel no guilt. I am free.