forgive my mom

i would tell you that he broke my heart…
if only you could understand
i would walk in the park with you…
if only you could walk
i would tell you that i didn’t blame you…
if only you could hear me
i would sing you the song i wrote…
if only you could understand the words
i’d show you the things i sketched
if only i wasn’t scared too

i’m scared…

there too many ‘if’s’

I felt sad this weekend – the sadness of loss – that I never had the mother I needed and it seemed like so many other people were celebrating their mothers. I know it’s better for me – at least, right now – to keep my distance. It just hurts.

From the beginning my mom has never been there for me or my sister. When I was 2 weeks old she left me with a babysitter for supposebly 2 hours but never came back. Two months later the babysitter took me to my grandparents and they eventually adopted me and my sister. My mom has been a drug addict for 23 years. She never made the said or made an effort to quit. She never calls, never comes around. She doesnt even acknowledge that I’m her daughter. My sister and I ran in to her about 2 years ago and she was with a friend of hers and my mother is like oh.. meet my daughter, Jessica.. never did she even mention me …till my sister said something. (i wasnt hiding I was in clear view!) when I was 8 my mom disappered and we didnt see her for 3 years… she called and said meet me here, so we did and she told us she just got married. She picked drugs and men over her own kids. She tells me every year that she has me a b-day present or a christmas gift but they are never to be seen! At times I think i have moved on, then something happens, or i get another flashback and all those feelings of anger and hatred all come back again. She’s like a cronic disease..always there you just have to live with it! I got to the point to where I told her how i felt . how angry i was and How I didnt like her for the things she’s done but she said nothing. And that just made me madder. That was like 5 years ago. I’ll be 20 years old the 16th of this month and she doesnt even realize that she’s missed 15 years of my life! I told myself I was too good for her and now I spend all my time trying to prove to myself and everyone else that I am better then her. I wont even take pain meds, not even midol because I’m afraid the “addiction” gene is hereditary!

I’ve come to realize in my growing up years that this anger is only hurting myself. I truely believe it doesnt matter to her, wheather it does or not! So with the Lord’s help I want to forgive her..i DONT want a relationship with her, I just want to let her know that in my heart I have forgiven her..But unfortunately i cant do that yet!

I just decided to write my mom a letter. I have not started the letter yet but I think this is how i am going to communicate it to her

I really just want to get this out, maybe to help myself work on the forgiving or just to have someone who may actually understand how I feel.
When I was six years old, I walked in on my mother cheatig on my dad with a man she worked with. I had no idea what was going on, and honestly I still don’t want to think about it, but that is the day I knew it would never be the same. My father found out soon after and the fighting began, it was a scary time in my life. My father who is not usually a violent man, raised his hand to her but thankfully he hit the wall instead but in that instant I knew there was more. My brother and I were sitting on the stairs watching the whole thing. We cried and I swore I would hate her for doing this to us.
That wasnt the worse though, the next day when we woke up she dropped us off at school and said goodbye. And she disappeared for three years. We never heard from her. She came back shortly when her mother passed away, stayed for two weeks then left again.
This is what I cant forgive her for. She has missed, 12 birthdays and christmas’, my high school graduation, senior prom. But the thing that has really bothered me most is that I missed having a mother to talk to when I needed to. And even today, we talk once a month for 5 minutes and I still am not over it, and I cannot bring myself to forgive her… not yet anyways.

My husband suggested I write down everything my mom does to piss me off. The past events wouldn’t matter so much, except she still brings them up and makes me relive them. Well, here goes:

1. She interrupts constantly.
2. When I do get to speak, she’s only thinking about what she wants to say.
3. She makes things up and uses them in arguments.
4. She yells at me in public.
5. She doesn’t let up when I tell her my heart rate is going up (I’m pregnant).
6. She slanders my husband based on her judgment that he doesn’t exhibit good manners.
7. She’s been bad-mouthing my dad since I was little, going as far as to say I betray her for loving her enemies (my dad’s family).
8. She talks about how great of a mother she is and how sacrificial she’s always been.
9. She refers to her 2nd mercedes as the car she bought me for my graduation… but it’s in her name and I’m only allowed to use it when I visit her… and she drives it everyday.
10. Slanders my in-laws for buying a new house instead of buying one for my husband and I (when they’ve opened up their home to her for when she visits)... when we need a new car and she won’t give me “my” mercedes.
11. Still says terrible things about my paternal grandma, the woman who raised me, three years after she died.
12. The night I got the call Gramma died, I was in Vegas visiting Mom. She spent the next six hours screaming at me.
13. She disowned me the day of my high school graduation and refers to it as one of the worst days of her life because I made her feel unwelcome.
14. She did not attend my graduation, but was less than a mile away (having dinner with her ex-husband, found out he had cheated her when they were married, and called me crying the next day. I was late for work going to comfort her.)
15. She slapped me when I was 3 years old and denied it until I was 12. She said she was justified because I was being disrespectful to Chinese.
16. When she had custody, my dad flew to Vegas to visit me nine times in six months. She didn’t let him see me, then told me she couldn’t get him to come visit me and it was because he didn’t love me.
17. When my Po-Po (Chinese grandma) died, Mom said the only thing Po-Po ever wanted was for me to come back to Vegas to live.
18. She constantly bad-mouths her older brother’s parenting and says how terrible his son is. I’m very close to my cousin. He’s an incredible person of only eighteen.
19. She slapped my gramma right in front of me when I was 6 for being at the doctor’s office with me. Even though assault charges were filed against her, she told me gramma slapped her until the year after she died.
20. She took me with her to help trash my dad’s office (he cheated on her).
21. She claims to this day that she was a good mom for protecting me from all the drama of dad cheating.
22. She always brings up how dad left us when I was 3.
23. He borrowed over $100,000 in custody trials until he got me back.
24. When I found out I had a half brother and sister, I couldn’t keep it from her. She’s been using it against me ever since, saying that I don’t really have a dad because I have to share him.
25. She yelled at me in a casino on the way to and from the bathroom about my husband when we went to visit her last week. She said things like, “He needs to act like an adult! He got you pregnant, afterall!” Everyone turned and looked at my belly. She was mad because she said Patrick was being rude…
26. She denies saying or doing anything wrong right after she says or does it.
27. When she saw my belly, she would not stop calling me fat. Then later she’d tell me even pregnant I look beautiful and sexy. At each meal after the first couple of bites, she would tell me not to overeat. As a result, I felt self-conscious eating more than two meals a day (I’m supposed to eat five small meals).
28. Since I was an adolescent, she told me how much skinnier she was than me at that age, how ugly my nose was, how big my feet are, etc. Coupled with “You’re so beautiful!”
29. I can’t mention any part of my life that has to do with my best friend or siblings, then I get criticized for not allowing her to get to know me.
30. I’m not allowed to speak to/see my friends when I’m in Vegas visiting her or when she’s in Oklahoma visiting me.
31. I drove around with her until 2 am my sophomore year of college the night before classes because she couldn’t yell at me in front of my roommate (my best friend) and I was too spineless to just let her leave.
32. She scares me.

I have so much bottled-up hostility against my mother. I am not angry at her for her mental disorder that ripped her away as my mother for so long when I was so young. I am not angry at her for the thoughts that went through her mind at that time. I know she couldn’t help it.

I AM angry that she can’t let go of the past, and move PAST her illness. We all know that she is capable of functioning normally now. She uses her illness as a crutch. She falls back on it when she doesn’t want to do something…wants to be lazy. She hasn’t worked in over 20 years. Calls herself a stay-at-home-Mom, yet her youngest is old enough to stay home alone. She doesn’t cook, doesn’t clean, has a shopping addiction…

She spends all of daddy’s money, and doesn’t do a damn thing to earn it.

She constantly picks fights with me. CONSTANTLY.

She is constantly sighing, whining, and being a generally pessimistic person.

She tells more information than I’d like to MY friends…tells them all about her illness, etc. Those are MY friends, and I want to be able to choose how much I tell them.

Dad drives the kids to their activities and picks them up. Mom is completely unreliable for anything like that. I can’t tell you how many times I remember sitting in the nurse’s office all day with a high fever because mom wouldn’t answer the phone—-even if she was home. Or she’d be out shopping AGAIN. She buys the most expensive brand new cell phones and fancy plans, but NEVER answers it.

I can’t tell you how it felt when I was sitting in the hospital, had just been told my sister had DIED, had to be the one to call my daddy and tell him, and couldn’t find her anywhere. She didn’t answer her phone. She wasn’t at home. Someone finally tracked her down (she had been shopping), and got her to the hospital just in time to see my sister before they needed to take her away because she was a donor.

I can’t tell you how disgusting it is to me that my mother cannot respect mine and the rest of the family/friends’ wishes to leave my sister’s room alone, because SHE wants another craft room (she already has one, plus a shed for storage, and another storage closet—-all for her crap).

She has this thing with only doing things when it makes her look good. For instance, I asked her to fill in for me (I do daycare) for an hour so that I could go to the doctor. My reason was that I’d been having some extreme symptoms, and was afraid that I had endometriosis. When I looked up the symptoms I’d been having online, everything said “see your doctor immediately.” I told her how worried I was, and asked her if she could pick a day during that week, any day, any hour, and I’d find a doctor to see during that time. She didn’t. Why? Because she was going to help her friend get ready for her daughter’s graduation party the following weekend.

Well, my aunt was as concerned as I was, and so she took off work to cover for me so that I could go to the doctor. I called home right before my appointment to leave a message for my father. You know who answered? Mom. She was napping. Napping was apparently far more important than the possibility of my not being able to have her grandbabies, along with having some very concerning bleeding.

Despite all this, I want to forgive my mother. I want to let go. I want to let her be who she is, disassociate…detach if it’s necessary,...do what I need to do for the future, but for right now, I just want to let go of the effect she has had on my past. I can never truely be happy until I can live freely, and I can’t live freely until I cut the binding—-and escape the anger.

Since Mom is Chinese, and I was raised American, she’ll send me her correspondences between her and her superiors at work for me to proofread/edit. I suspect she takes her attitude displayed with me into all areas of her life because while she’s been very successful, she’s made plenty of enemies in her career. Always claiming to be the one to be backstabbed, it’s hard to advise her because each property she works for gives her the same grief… but it’s never her fault. Well she’s got another email to write to explain herself to her company’s VP, so I edited it for her. Mostly, I replaced the hostility with carefully worded script to still get her point across without making more powerful enemies that could potentially blacklist her – much worse than getting fired.

She called me yesterday to tell me how her interrogation went and told me, “I used everything you wrote in the email, baby. And they told me it was a big misunderstanding. I said everything you said and it went really well. I still need to pray just in case, but I think it’s over.”

So this validation is good, because she makes herself vulnerable to me. It’s times like these when she’s happy, less stressed, and understands I really care about her. I just hope that other shoe doesn’t drop.

Of course, this is not likely. Let me introduce you to my mom. She is very beautiful. Gorgeous, in fact. She’s always told me how lucky she is to have a beautiful, smart daughter in me. She sometimes calls me “Baby mommy” because of the times I’ve comforted her and was so dependable to never let things get in the way of being there for her. Out of all the people in the world, she trusts me the most. Which is why the following things are so hard to swallow.

In the course of my childhood, I have endured my mother’s tendency to go over the edge far too quickly. I have my own theories about what triggers her verbally and psychologically violent behavior. She was the product of an abusive home, which caused her to become a very bitter adult. These attitudes she took into her marriage with my dad. As a result, he cheated on her several times which made her more cruel towards others. She’s always convinced people are out to sabotage her and lashes out at extreme levels. I have always tried to be there to comfort her in these times, but unfortunately I usually get the short end of the stick because she also creates reasons to lash out at people… especially me. Those who are hurt and insecure tend to push away those that love them most, to see if they come back. And I always do.

I won’t go into detail about what I’ve endured since my childhood, because I’m not trying to shame her. Even as I type that, I question my motives because of how angry I’ve become with her over the years. I recently got married and we’re expecting in November. I’m not worried about repeating a cycle with my child, because I’ve tried to be careful not to discredit all my mom’s parenting. She did a lot of good things. However, I don’t want Liam to grow up being taught to make enemies of family my mother doesn’t like. I can’t control or change my mom, only God can, but I can forgive her which would be best for me and my family. I just don’t know how to let go of 23 years of struggle and forgive someone that isn’t admittedly sorry. How do I do that? It seems like I would be being the bigger person, and frankly, I’m tired of being “baby mommy.”