I am not normally the person who requires acknowledgement for something good. I tend to listen much more to all the things that I have done wrong. Where I have failed. And to how simply contact with me, seemed to be a poison that took so much away from those around me.
Living knowing that your simply having come into being tends to make you wonder why you are still here... and the hardest part is knowing that the desire for your life to be erased was so strong in your mother that she often wished she could end your life. I am not sure why my father was so blessed to have me as his daughter, and my mother set out on a path to make sure that I knew that I had ruined her life and plans for the future. And yet, how did I do that?
In having one day tracked down a notebook, because of course you couldn't start anything new, until the old ones were all used up... I came across my mother's journal from when I was 4. And at the time... I had read the whole page before what it said became so clear to me. My creation by God had driven my mother away from her desire to pursue God all the time and bask in learning more and more about Him. I trapped her in a world of feedings and diapers to start and created the worries on how to provide for my needs. And in that process of just being a mother and being concerned with providing... I changed everything.
She lost the hours of time that she could spend with my father seeking God. Learning from him about this God who is difficult to describe in words. Instead, she was nailed to the house and told to mold into this role of mother. And this role was not something she ever really wanted. I often think she would have preferred to be the one working and have left my father at home with us. And that idea was reinforced each and every time she threatened to walk out the door and leave us all behind. And it is honestly not a blame that I have carried with me easily.
Perfection was the demand on me, her first born... I was pushed to read, write, draw, and just about everything that I did... I saw the bar of perfection. And I could also see each and everything that I did wrong to keep that bar just out of my reach. I didn't know how to fix the mistakes. I just knew that enough of them and it was like living in a war zone. Dinner would be thrown... words would be screamed... and then it would be the we would all be better off without her. And to this day, I don't know why.
Okay I could have liked not constantly living in fear of the next look of disapproval in my mother's eyes. The why did you let the world into our world look. The you know if they keep poking in our family you will never see us all again... She made it sound like I would be relocated to the other side of the world. And maybe it wouldn't have been bad for me, but then who would be the buffer for my brother? And so, I would bite my tongue... make everything all better... and plant this smile on my face that made me feel like I was going to vomit. And joined all the clubs and activities that my mother desired. And somehow, despite her great desire for me to be smart, funny, popular, and just the all around perfect daughter, sister, student... I never could reach the bar. It became this dream that each time I got one step closer... I could feel the weight of even more demands on what perfect was creating even further for me to go.
Friends were okay, but you didn't share about your life. We would pick up and move... and it was like life just disappeared. No connections to the old life... just pick up and start over. You see friends didn't matter, only family did. And each time the bubble around our family grew tighter. And by the time I was in high school, I probably didn't help this fact because I began to seek control... Causing enough pain with cutting to prove that I was alive. Stuff feelings and memories into box after box in a way to avoid remembering. And even controlling each and every thing that I ate... I wanted control and stability. And what I got was isolation and disappointment. And the lecture of hurry up and get fixed so we don't have to send you to talk to someone. And don't tell that someone what is really going on... just make yourself better!
You see, needing help was the biggest mistake I could have ever made... because it brought strangers into the walls of our world. And strangers always wanted to destroy families, because well behaved children are worth something to them... worth enough that they will take them away never to see their parents again. And while I learned how to make myself appear better... some things didn't change. I stopped eating much at all... and I bought clothes that defied my mother's idea of modesty... and in the end I can still hear her telling me that I was a tramp... she could see the top of my chest. And if I was going to dress like I was asking for something and look like a street walker... Don't come crying to her when someone calls me on that and things happen...
And in my spring semester of my freshman year of college... That line was taken from me. Not by choice, but by force. And true to her word... Not a word was spoken about what happened my whole life. The wall went up and even as she was dying... the demands for perfection kept that wall erect. And left me wondering why poison to her, was the very thing she relied on all these years later to provide the help so that she could remain in her house till just before the end? Or did my help become the poison that took her from this world, like I had taken so many others from her in the course of my life? Did I love too much? Or was I some kind of death magnet... I might never know.
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