Thawing out: my mom

1000 Layers: Day 42/1000

My mom and I are really similar in a lot of ways,
but the ways we are not are the linchpin in why she’s not in my life.

Regardless of how many times people look at me with pity,
as in, “You poor dear, being so alone.”

Or disdain,
“But you’re blood. You must.”

Blood doesn’t make blood bleed. That’s insurance I have paid for, that I won’t pass down to my daughter.

My bleeding has been internal since I was a child, told
“You cannot be you here.”

Then intermittently, a shrug:

“Well, like this,
—but not like that.”

She doesn’t realize that you can’t remove someone’s art from within them.

She doesn’t recognize that the only reason I can draw, and paint, and write, is because
I had hours alone inside my own creation,
built from the absence of warmth.

It is hilarious, deadly irony.

That her claims about my art, being the thing worth noting, was both true and an open wound she didn’t see was bleeding.

But few do, and fewer still can recognize it in others.

Now, as an adult:

I won’t apologize for me.
She won’t apologize for disallowing me.

So, we’re at a stalemate.

I don’t regret my actions. Doors don’t close on people who treat me as an equal.

Blood or not.

I know she has not sat in the silence of my experience.
She doesn’t want to, but I didn’t either.
One is a choice; I was a child, and I am still hers. Age doesn’t deny that.

I only ever wanted to have her in my life. And my chest aches inside this,
that I still do.

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I have a fireplace in my apartment, and I swear, every time I turn it on, a piece of me warms up and slides off like I’m an iceberg. 1000 layers aren’t just built up; sometimes they’re the ones that need to be sluiced off.

My mom popped into my head just now as I thought about something she’d find funny that I wrote, and it made me realize all of this.