Tethered

To know that you, of all people, feel the need to tell me that I am a failure
in all that I do,
in all that I am,
has been the deepest disappointment of my life.

I struggle, day after day with myself, inside and out,
because someone taught me that I wasn’t good enough.
That I wouldn’t be accepted as I am.
The way that I think.
The way that I look, talk, or express myself.

I was told not to grow up fat and ugly.
To be polite. Quiet.
Patient and humble.
Not to seek praise or believe it.
It would give me a “big head.”

I still have a hard time saying “thank you” when I’m complimented.
Instead, I smile and defer politely.

Now, when I reach for my dreams,
reshaped into something new and beautiful,
twenty years deferred,
those phantom messages hiss in my ears:

You aren’t good enough.
The field is too small.
You’ll never make it.
You need something more reasonable to fall back on.

Some of those voices aren’t ancient specters.
They haunt me every waking hour that I’m not plugged into something,
trying to drown out the sound of your doubts,
that are still pick,
 Pick
 PICKING
at my soul,
my being,
my creative essence,
which needs to flow.

It isn’t enough to grab me with your claws as I try to rise.
You dig in.
Snag me.
Pull me DOWN,
 Down,
 Down.

You tell me, “You hate me.”

How can you say something that cuts deeper than anything else?
After all that I do for you,
politely, quietly, patiently, humbly,
day after day,
just like you taught me?
Then I remind myself: you’re projecting.
“You hate me” really means
“I hate you.”

And then the voice of reason steps in
and tells me it isn’t really you speaking.
It’s the disease.

But still—

How did we end up here, Mom?
This strange reversal of fate
where I became the parent
and you became the child?

Your words cut me now like they did when I was a child,
but I have to pretend they don’t.
I have to love you through them.
I have to be bigger than them.

I volunteered to care for you.
I knew it would be hard.
I didn’t know I would lose so much of myself
as I lost so much of you.

Even as you fight me,
hate me,
forget me,
I will tend to you and
care for you as a mother should.

I mother you
not because I am lacking the love you didn’t give me
but because I learned how to love in spite of you.

And even as you remind me, again and again,
that I will never hold children of my own,
I give you the love I saved for them.
As I wish you would have loved me.

For as you so often remind me:
Who else would I give it to?