This Is Bullshit

I am angry.

There. I said it.

I have spent so much time trying to approach this loss with grace. Trying to understand. Trying to forgive. Trying to examine my own mistakes and take responsibility for the things I wish I had done differently.

And there are things I would do differently.

I made mistakes.

I struggled. I became addicted to drugs during one of the darkest periods of my life. I was not always the version of myself that I wanted my daughters to see. I understand why people were frightened. I understand why trust may have been damaged.

But understanding my failures does not mean I have to accept the idea that I should disappear.

I am still their mother.

Years have passed without conversations, without ordinary moments, without the opportunity to know the young women my little girls are becoming.

And today, I am not peaceful about that.

I am pissed off.

I am angry that silence has somehow become an acceptable substitute for resolution. I am angry that estrangement can continue year after year without anyone apparently stopping to ask whether permanently removing a mother is truly the healthiest answer to pain.

Because silence does not resolve pain.

Avoidance does not teach forgiveness.

Erasing someone does not teach boundaries.

And refusing to speak about something does not make what happened disappear.

I would understand boundaries.

I would understand anger.

I would understand hearing, “Mom, this hurt me.”

I would understand needing time.

I would sit across from my daughters and listen to things that might absolutely devastate me if it meant they finally had the opportunity to tell me their truth.

I don’t require them to agree with my version of our history.

I don’t require them to absolve me.

I don’t even require them to understand me yet.

I just wish there were room for a relationship to exist alongside everything that happened.

And perhaps what makes me angriest is remembering that these girls came from a love I once believed was permanent.

Their father once loved me.

We created three human beings together.

Whatever happened between us afterward, I cannot understand how two people can once share that kind of intimacy and eventually become people who seemingly cannot recognize each other’s humanity.

I am angry about what happened during our separation.

I am angry about the conversations that occurred with people I loved.

I am angry that people who knew me could hear things about me during the worst period of my life and apparently decide that the worst things I had ever done were the truest things about me.

Maybe some of them were afraid.

Maybe some believed they were protecting my girls.

Maybe there are parts of their experience I still don’t understand.

But I know something about myself that nobody else gets to rewrite:

I love my daughters.

Imperfectly.

Ferociously.

Permanently.

No other woman can replace me as their mother, just as I cannot replace anyone else who matters to them. Love does not have to be a competition for territory.

There should be room for all of us.

And yes, I am angry with their father.

Sometimes enormously angry.

Because somewhere beneath that anger is a question I still cannot answer:

How did someone who once loved me become someone I experience as participating in my disappearance?

How did we get here?

But underneath even that anger is something much simpler.

I miss my girls.

I miss them so badly that sometimes grief comes out wearing anger because anger is easier to carry.

Anger says, This is bullshit.

Grief says, Please come back.

And the second one hurts much more.

So I will allow myself to be angry today.

But I will not let anger decide what kind of mother I become.

If my daughters ever turn toward me again, I don’t want them to find a woman consumed by hatred for their father.

I want them to find their mother.

A woman who survived.

A woman who examined herself.

A woman who changed what needed changing.

A woman who continued building a life even while a piece of her heart remained somewhere else.

And a woman who, after all those silent years, can still look at each of her daughters and say:

You don’t owe me agreement.

You don’t owe me a rewritten childhood.

You don’t even owe me forgiveness on my timeline.

But there has never been a single day when I stopped being your mother.

And there has never been a single day when I stopped loving you.