Nightmares about the woman who is supposed to be “my mother”.
I came into the world through her vessel, but she is not my mother.
In many ways, I was her mother. Inappropriately.
She was a vessel I uncomfortably and hurriedly passed through to come into this world.
(According to her)
She’s someone whose words I never trust. Whose embrace was never truly safe. Someone who unfortunately shaped my entire sense of self and sense of my place in the world.
Filled me with doubt. Shame. Someone I don’t think is worthy of being a mother.
Someone who’s always made me feel trapped, limited. Judged. Helped strategically. Abandoned regularly. Assaulted systematically. Put down repeatedly. Built up occasionally (when it suits her) and only to be put down again later, harder, harsher, more violently, more permanently.
Someone who made me feel a constant sense of confusion and inner conflict about who I am. If what I know about myself is true. Someone who gave me my birth date as a guess with a nonchalant laugh of ‘who knows’. Her grimace, terrifying. Her smile, cunning.
Someone who would annihilate my NO’s and underwhelm my yes’s. Someone who’d take credit for everything about me that managed to survive despite of her.
Someone so ugly on the inside, it’s hard to look. Someone I am disgusted by.
A mother who wasn’t a mother is only a vessel from which you came to be.