A Letter to a Bad Mother

You were neglectful and abusive from even my most early of memories. You were too young to have children. You had already had one and given her up for adoption. You had an abortion in between that child and myself. You were too young and dumb to know what was good for you, or me.

I remember the nights in the house on the corner of Albert Street. Some of those nights were amazing. I remember watching Flick, a movie about a chocolate lab. I remember coming and bugging you for late night snacks- usually cheese puffs. I remember getting a hamster as a Christmas gift, I named him Hammy and had him for four years. He's all I had left of you when you left. I could not have been older than three or four. Those are my earliest, happiest memories. Those were honestly the only good ones of you being in my life.

I remember that old house and whenever I drive past it I refer to it as the house on Nightmare Street, because I still have nightmares to this day. I remember the fights you had with your husband. I remember the day he knocked the Christmas tree over and it nearly landed on my kitten. I remember being a dramatic toddler about it and screaming and crying that he had nearly killed my cat. I remember that fight spilling into the streets. I stood behind you as you two screamed at each other from either side of the street.

I remember sharing a bedroom with my baby sister, my diamond in the rough, my anchor. I remember that you used to tie our bedroom door knob to another door down the hall, I think it was a linen closet. You tied the door knobs together so that I couldn't leave my room and disturb you while you got high in the basement. I remember the day I heard my sister crying in her bed for food. I remember using all my strength to snap that tie and yank our bedroom door open. I stood in the kitchen and looked around, but I was too small to reach the cereal. I called your grandparents and begged them to come help us. I told them you weren't home, because why else would you ignore the cries of your two young daughters? But you were home, weren't you, Mom? You came up those stairs and made me call them back and tell them not to come help us. You made me feel like asking for help was a crime, and sent us to bed again. I don't even think you bothered to feed us.

I know when I was six years old your husband killed himself. I don't remember the night that it happened, but I remember what happened afterwards. Only a few short weeks after he died, you took my little sister and my two little brothers away from me. You left me with your grandparents, as we had been investigated by Child Protective Services and I had been placed in their care. I have always told you, to this day, that I understand why you left. His family blamed you for his death and labelled you a murderer. You went years believing you drove your own husband to suicide. I would want to escape that too. I will never blame you for wanting to get away from it all.

What I do blame you for, however? I blame you for never coming back. I blame you for leaving me and taking my little siblings you asked me to protect. I blame you for not being able to keep yourself together for their sake. As soon as you got where you were going, a thousand miles away from me, you started doing crack. You screwed up and you lost your babies. They got sent to live with their father's parents. Those little kids needed you. The only good grandparent they had, their grandfather, died not long after the kids came back. I blame you for letting them get placed in the care of their wretched grandmother and I blame you for every single damn thing that happened to them when you left me. I read the files. I have spent every moment of my life protecting my little sister and you let so much harm befall her it makes my stomach squirm.

I blame you for going to prison out there. I blame you for every phone call you made to me while you were in jail. It crushed me and everytime you hung up I would ask the grandparents when you were coming back for me. I was only eight or nine, I didn't understand that you would never come back. I'd get so excited about you that on my show and tell days I would bring in my little eagle necklace you sent me through your prison mail and tell all my classmates that you called this week from jail. I never understood why the teachers looked so horrified. I was so innocent and I just missed you so much.

I blame you for falling off the face of the earth when you got out of jail. I started to hate you. I felt like you had abandoned me. One night, when I was thirteen, your grandmother was so upset that I was crying over you that she broke the eagle necklace you bought me and threw it away. I felt like you had left me for dead each time your grandparents abused me. I wanted to forget you. One of the very first lies I ever told was to my Dad's girlfriend. She had never asked my dad about you, but one day, she asked me: " Where is your mom?". Do you know what I told her, Mom? I told her: " She's dead."

And so I wrote you off for years to come. I adopted my best friend's mom as my new mom. To this day I still visit with her and call her Mom, because she did a hell of a lot better at raising me than you did- because you didn't raise me at all. She taught me about boys, and makeup, and she dyed my hair for me because she was a hair dresser. I was a socialite in high school. I was skinny and I was popular and I had one heck of a reputation going for myself. I was smart, too, although I always bagged off class to hang out with boys. It didn't take you long for you to rear your ugly head though, did it?

I was sixteen. It had been ten years since you left me when you sent me a friend request on Facebook. I had seen a counselor for years because of the damage you had done in leaving me. She encouraged me to form a relationship with you because deep down, I needed a Mom. Not my best friend's Mom, my own. So, for a year I had you saved in my phone as Amy so my Dad never found out. For a year we talked. You made promises of coming back- but you never came back. My Dad found out about you and got understandably angry, but I just got angry at him. I hated not being able to live with either one of you. I hated my life. But we kept it up, didn't we? Talking, texting, calling, like you really were a Mom. It was killing me. Literally. I have enough suicide attempts on my belt and I have no explanation as to why I'm sitting here today. I shouldn't be. I tried so hard not to be here.

You came here when I was ninteen for a week and a half, just to visit. We saw each other, we cried. I remember when my little sister took my phone and texted my boyfriend so I smacked her over the head- gently. Rough housing as siblings do. I remember when your response was to slap me across the face as hard as you could and I stood tall but in reality you nearly knocked my lights out. I won't forgive you for that. You made a horrible impression of yourself and made me believe you were the same person you were when you left, no matter how much you insisted that you had changed. Still, we went to the beach together. We drank, we smoked pot... and then you left me to go back. You left me, again.

When you left, you killed me. I broke up with that boyfriend you had met and I turned to drugs. I started doing heroin with a new boy who would come to ruin my self-esteem entirely. I need you to know that everytime I got high, I thought of you right before I did and forgot all about you once it hit. You killed me. Thank God for the friend you had, Becky. She stayed in touch after you introduced me to her. I was homeless and an addict. She let me stay in her bed when she worked night shift as long as I promised not to bring that junk around her son- which I never did. She saw the cold sweats whenever she came home. She saw how dead I was, and she even lied to my Dad's girlfriend when she came around asking if I was on drugs. Becky is the reason I am clean now. I don't think you know I was a junkie. I don't think you would even care.

This started a horrible chain reaction. I dated horrible, abusive men. I starved myself. I wanted nothing more than to die. You would constantly fight with me when we talked. You'd call me every name under the sun- but I can't blame you entirely. I was angsty and confrontational- I have always been that way. I think I got that personality trait from you.

Now four years later, you're back.

You are home.

You want to live with me.

You want to help me live a normal life, because you've realized how far down the rabbit hole depression has dragged me. You tell me I'm an adult and I can no longer blame you. You are right. The actions I chose to take after the age of eighteen are my responsiblity. However, Mom, your unwillingness to admit that your absence had influence in my choices, is irresponsible. You were a non-existant parent, and now you want to come back and redeem yourself.

It's the reason I blame you.

It's the reason I can love you but still hate you.