Absence Makes the Hatred Grow Stronger

I have a complicated relationship with my mother. And by complicated, I mean that I mostly hate her, but like a heroin habit, can’t seem to shake her even when I think I have healed. When someone asked me today about when it all started, or had it always been like this, and I had a hard time putting my thoughts into words. Not just because of the challenges of translating my thoughts into Spanish can be harder than it needs to be, but because I just have never known a time when I didn’t dislike my mother. I’m pretty sure I came into this world despising her from the start. 

That’s hard to explain. It’s even harder to conceptualize that I was doomed to never have a proper mother-daughter relationship. How unfair is that? I’ve been contemplating this the longer I am in Guatemala. Especially lately, in the long spaces between when she tries to contact me because I believe in her mind she thinks I am unhappy not hearing from her. When the truth is I could go the rest of my life not hearing from her again and be fine. I don’t think daughters should cringe when their mother calls. 

I think I’ve always been at odds with my immediate family. La Llorona likes to claim that when I was little, I told her I should have been born into another family. She says it so often that I no longer can doubt the validity. I just believe it to be true. But I think she likes to bring it up to then throw in my face that no matter what I wished, that I picked her. That even if I could have had another life, that I chose her. If one were to follow the idea of reincarnation, which she likes to play with. That I was probably meant to be royalty, or rich (because of the things I liked when I was little) and that it is my comeuppance to have been born into a humble household. That seems like a pretty fucked up thing to tell your child. 

But that is what my childhood was like. La Llorona, taunting me with the knowledge that I could have had it better had I chosen someone other than her, and her glee at basically making sure that I suffered in this world because it would serve me right. Is it any wonder I never liked her? 

When I was little, I wasn’t close to my mother. She always struck me as someone I had to look at askance, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Usually because she would do something to me that I didn’t want. Like cut my hair. Or put me in clothes that I hated. Or enter me in beauty contests against my will to force me to humiliate myself for her satisfaction. But, time would pass, and she would not do terrible things for a while, and I would forget. Be lulled into complacency by the quiet times. 

And then she’d fuck shit up by traumatizing me, like sneaking up behind me and under the guise of combing my hair, instead chopping half of it off, then tell me that it was my fault if I thought I looked ugly. 

I’ve never liked my mother as a person. She always seemed pretty mean to me. Openly preferring my brother over me. Always touting his achievements, or his intelligence, when to me it seemed he hadn’t done anything especially wonderful requiring such praise. Not when he was younger than me, and I had done all of the same things already, and sometimes even more, to the notice of no one at all. Least of all her. 

When I was sixteen, I distinctly recall standing in her bedroom and telling her that she was fucking up the opportunity to cultivate a relationship with her daughter. That through her systematic abuse and dismissal of me as a person, she was killing any chance that I would ever want to get to know her, or ever want to spend time with her as I got older. That all she was doing was ensuring that I would hate her and never want to be close to her. I don’t remember her reaction; it was probably dismissal or disbelief. But I meant what I said then, and I still mean it today. 

I don’t willingly think of La Llorona. I try to forget she exists, except it is harder now that I am back in her original stomping grounds. At least daily, someone reminds me of her. Being back in this house is a daily reminder that she is a selfish and neglectful caretaker. It reminds me that she manipulates reality to suit her, meanwhile abusing those closest to her if it suits her. That she mistreats those things that are hers and then blames everyone else when no one else takes care of those things either. 

I would wonder how I came to be this age and not be more fucked up. I am amazed I managed to grow up halfway decently, despite her. Frankly, sometimes it feels that I only exist to spite her. I speak to a lot of older women since my move to this neighborhood, and they all refer to their mothers. Many of them seem to be somewhat well-adjusted, and I am jealous of their apparently healthy relationships with their siblings and their parental units, if they are still alive. 

I try to change the subject when they ask me questions, looking to commiserate. I don’t have sweet mother-daughter stories to share. Stop asking me. I didn’t get to be like this because of her. She isn’t proud of who I am; she doesn’t even know me. 

I do not enjoy when their curiosity turns to me because I’d rather not talk about my fucked up relationship with my mother, her fake face and the fake ass version that they know, and how the version that I grew up with is a wild aberrant version that sounds so terrible that it couldn’t possibly be real, right? 

I know most people can’t grasp the depths of her twisted, sick mind because they didn’t believe me when I was growing up. I was the unreliable witness, and was often told that I needed to be more respectful. That I needed to appreciate her more. All my life, that was what was told to me by her sisters, her brother, my great aunts and uncles. Literally everyone, except for the people on my father’s side who disliked her and used to talk shit about her. Which put me in an awkward position of defending her when she wasn’t around to stand up for herself because I had been so conditioned to think her emotional and physical abuse was normal that I didn’t want to hear them badmouthing her to me, because to me she wasn’t as bad as they made her out to be. 

Jokes on all of us because turns out she was actually worse. I didn’t think she could get more unhinged, but the older she got, the more broken she was. The more our relationship became this glass shard in my life. When I had children, it did not help things. Everything just got worse. She obsessed over my sons, over my relationship with them, how I was raising them. As if I was incapable of doing it right, and I needed to do things her way. I refused to listen to her, because when I became a mother, I had a long talk with myself and concluded that the best course of action would be to do the complete opposite of what she would do. 

Where most people would ask themselves what my mother would do, to follow suit as a guide through life. My totem was to think of what she would do, and then think, okay, I will absolutely not do that because that is obviously the wrong answer. My only goal was to prevent a future where my own children didn’t want to speak to me. Not because I don’t want them to actualize and not become their own people with their own lives, but because I didn’t want them to be in the situation I am in, being reminded of my mother, and wishing that she weren’t around for real. Not just removed by mileage, but by dimensions. Like she should be in the afterlife, so she could stop tormenting me in this actual life.  

Karmically, I hope she gets her comeuppance her next time around. Would serve her right, the bitch.