I Heart Mom

I've struggled to write about my mom.  Its harder than Dad, because that relationship is so easy, so natural, so straightforward.  But mother/daughter?  Its complicated.  It goes up and it goes down.  Emotions run high and the temper I hate that I have was not inherited from Dad.  I can match her scream for scream, and did on many teenage occasions.  I can pick her apart and say, not going to be like THAT.  But in all the ways I feel that she doesn't get me, she also DOES get me.  We are different, yes, so much more different than my mom and sister.  And then there are days like today.  When she really sees me all the way through to my very inner most places, and she loves and accepts what is there.  We are not alike; I want to just hold it all inside and make it disappear.  But she doesn't give up on me, she keeps coming again and again.  Not like an attacking army.  Like a persistent tug.  She comes again and again, until I am ready, until I can no longer keep it in. 

I didn't want to say it out loud.  That would make it real, and I have tried so hard for so long to make it not real.  I didn't want to deal with it, to face all that it would mean.  My mom gets that, she lets me hold on to it.  She doesn't rip it from my hands, because forcing it out would be just as traumatic as it happening in the first place.  But she remembers me.  And this is what the shy child, the quiet one, needs most in a mother.  Someone who accepts the silence but doesn't forget what is not being said.  In all the real ways, the ways that truly matter in a lifetime, I have the best mother.  One time she forgot that I don't like baked beans, and I felt so frustrated.  Why couldn't she remember the very specific taste preferences that were mine and not her own?  And why do I still remember that?  Ultimately, how deep of a betrayal is that?  When you consider the burdens she has carried for me, the difficult decisions she has made and the stressful conversations she has had on my behalf?

Thank you Mom, for never giving up, for never forgetting, for always being ready to hear, even when I wasn't ready to say.