Back then I didn't know why, Why you were misunderstood

I am very angry with my mother. The mere thought of her contacting me makes my skin boil and my eyes darken.
It wasn’t always that way. For a long time I always had a soft spot for my mother, she was after all the women who gave birth to me and she was so good at spinning words, ideas, and dreams in my head that it was hard for me to not believe her when she would tell me things were going to be better. No I didn’t always hold such anger and resentment towards her, in fact she was often the one I sought comfort in.

When I was 10 and seemed to have sat in something that caused my white pants to be stained in red. My sister asked me if I had started my period and she asked me in a way that made me think that a period was bad. Something forbidden like reading dirty magazines or thinking about sex. I remember holding back tears, running into my mother’s room leaving my friends who had spent the night behind and crawling into her arms to cry softly.

I was horrified and I remember sobbing and telling my mother I was sorry and that I didn’t mean to. She held me in her arms petting my hair and wiping my tears explaining to me that a period was not a bad thing and that it was something all women would experience. Her eyes filled with tears as she told me that her baby was growing up and becoming a woman. She told me when she got her first period she had laid on basement floor crying, convinced she was dying. I can still smell the Smokey smell of her skin and hair from her 2-pack a day habit. I remember her raspy laugh when I apologized and the way she was able to comfort my fears and ease my tears. I remember laying there in her arms and feeling safe, feeling okay.

For being such a smart kid I’m not sure why I never caught on to the fact that my mother was sick and truly needed help. I just knew I wanted to believe her and so I did. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that the rose colored glasses finally came off and I finally saw my mother for what she was to me. Even in her sickness I still cannot find it in my heart to forgive her. I began to resent her for fighting to keep my siblings and I when we could have been placed in better homes. I resented her for using my grandparents instead of raising us. I resented the lies she fed us. More so now than then I resented the lack of structure and the constant state of moving. It has left me so completely lost in myself and insecure of stability.

I began to feel anger and hatred for her actions and started blaming her for the way I was and the person I was becoming. Maybe if she would have loved us more and wasn’t so selfish we wouldn’t be such a broken family. I would not be such a broken person. It is very hard for me to not dwell on these ideas as many of my friends are getting engaged and my own sister talks of marriage and with my grandmothers passing, I find myself now more than ever wanting a mother. Because I listen to my friends talk about mother daughter situations and I see how the kids I nanny for interact with their mother and I find my soul searching for that same bond.

So perhaps it's reasons like when I pass by that diamond shaped bottle filled with its amber liquid I instinctively pluck it from the counter and inhale it. It has the power to take me back to the times when my mother was a beautiful person and things would be good. The irony being that the smell of her perfume always meant she was going somewhere and would be gone for awhile one and two days at time. My brother Michael and I knew the cue as we sat in our living room fighting over what to watch that anytime the wavering scent of Tresor By Lancome came into the room we would both instinctively stop what we were doing and shout “Where are you going mom? Are you coming home tonight?” Because we knew that regardless she would be spending Sunday in bed sleeping after an extensive night of alcohol and drugs.

And yet still, even knowing what her weekends entailed, the aroma of Tresor still is innocent to me and I miss the mother who held me in her arms and calmed my fears.