I Botched Mother’s Day Again

A yearly tradition of mental torture, guilt, and grief for the parentified daughter

For Elizabeth Ann Devine, Mother’s Day is the opposite of celebratory. Photo by Marah Bashir on Unsplash

There’s a cold beer beside me. It’s just past noon. I’ve already smoked three bowls today. I’ve got another packed where a keyboard would usually go on my tiny rolling desk, just waiting.

Just waiting to cook and shrink my brain.

Mother’s Day was a disaster because I could barely stand to spend it with my mom. Dustin, my younger brother, is the same way. I don’t think she realizes that she’s very emotionally draining, and that guilt-tripping and other forms of emotional manipulation just give her less of the closeness she wants.

For example, it was the first conversation of the day by the time she reminded me of a terrible thing my father had done.

I don’t think I get to go a day or have gone a day my whole life without hearing one. I end up drained and retreating to my room or office, not coming out for hours and barely able to get anything done.

Then there’s the expectations.

I wish holidays could be more casual: us spending a few hours together saying our piece and spending our time.

But approaches like that leave her sad and empty. Every approach leaves her sad and empty in a way that takes a little bit from us. There’s literally no way to please her. Dad would make her breakfast and clean the kitchen and all she would focus on were the things he hadn’t done, like when he didn’t buy her a gift because he could only afford to cook, or didn’t take her out because he could only afford a gift. He could surprise her with antique wooden chests or a lizard with tank and full setup, and something sad would come of it.

There’s a fucking curse around every holiday, some suspended breath, brace for impact, especially with anything that revolves around her.

Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe we didn’t try at first and the hurt just reverberated?

No, this came from her family ignoring and abusing her.

I really wish she’d talk to a fucking therapist about it.

I really wish she wouldn’t instead talk to me. But if I don’t want to talk about it, she’ll make it clear that she considers that “silencing” and then won’t talk to anyone about it, and it will all be my fault.

I don’t think she realizes that she kills me with her sheer expectation of being loved the way she defines love.

I don’t know what to do. There are three beer bottles on my little writing desk. It’s twelve-thirty-ish. Luckily two are from last night, but I don’t want to bring them up despite the gnats that fly because then as soon as I walk in the kitchen, much less if I take a moment in it to make myself some food or do something I need, Oz, Mom’s Pomeranian, will come trotting in and my mother shortly behind, and she’ll draw me into a conversation about Dustin’s needs, or hers, or some terrible deed my father did, or something I could do to help them, or something we all have to figure out together…

How did I escape this by moving out and then find myself right back in the pit of it with her moving in after Dad died?

It’s like all the parts of home I ran away from have come to follow me at thirty-one. She’s nowhere near disabled enough to do this. She needs to get out of the house and not put her health on me as if she’s my pet and it’s my job to take her to the vet.

What is she doing to me?

(Did this dilemma kill dad?)

I remember seeing him drained by it. I remember being so grateful I got to run away. Now there’s nowhere to run and I feel undone.

Realistically, Dad smoking since he was a teenager probably killed Dad.

But I doubt being trapped like this helped.

Why the performance?

I did what I did, and it’s done. Can I just call it won now?

Can I just say it’s passed and start over again each moment, slowly pushing her to be herself instead of relying on me?

And what about Dustin? He has such a hard time communicating emotionally, and I know he’s frustrated, too. Do I give him more time when he doesn’t seem to even want it, or do I give it to Mom knowing it will accomplish nothing? Do I hog it to myself and watch them both fade away while I rise?

What the fuck do I do, Dad, and why did you have to ditch so soon? I love you. I miss you. We all do. I wanted to get through this with you, not without you.

What the fuck do I do?

I live in such comfort in my big log house that it’s hardly fair for me to despair, to complain at all, really. If there’s one thing I learned from losing you, it’s that one day I’ll pray to have this all back.

How could I have been so selfish? How can I be now?

How can I live with being continuously emotionally manipulated and not being able to trust that I’m not doing the same thing?

Why hasn’t someone pulled her aside and had a conversation with her about not treating her kids like her therapists?

Not kids. Kid. Me.

She dreamt me up as a kid and I came true, so now she’s convinced she has a best friend.

It would be a hell of a lot easier to be so now if she hadn’t treated me like one then. Or if she had least done so consistently, instead of switching and sometimes treating me like an enemy, or like a third parent that no child was meant to be.

Was a child supposed to be equipped to be an adult woman's best friend? Should I have listened to her critique her sex life with my two dads without squirming at twelve? Was I supposed to make some of the decisions, tell her how to straighten her life, at thirteen? Was I supposed to get anything but paranoia and guilt from the childhood trauma that has haunted me all of mine?

How am I going to move on and be a real adult if she won’t? Ironic that she felt like the adult once and then my child of a father grew up.

What the fuck am I supposed to do still stuck in this rut dug before I was born?

No say for me sometimes, it seems.

Putting up with putting down and being pulled around on a fucking leash.

I don’t want to be me sometimes.

But at the same time, I want to really be me.

I want to live my truth, but how do I do that when my mother, as my friend River put it, “uses the fuck out of you.”

“Yeah…yeah, she does,” was all I could answer.

But she gave a lot, too.

It would be a lot easier to remember and appreciate that if she didn’t remind me of the happiness she sacrificed for me every single day.

How do I unravel this mess, and can a stranger really show me the way?

Therapy—not denying I need it, just wondering how effective it is when I still have to be the one doing so much of the work to maintain it.

Like everyone around me doesn’t ask me to do so much for them already. When am I fucking going to have time to do anything for me?

When they’re all dead. When I feel like the worst asshole on the planet just for writing this, just for having feelings that it’s all too much to put on me.

In reality, the women were the heads of the households.

And I’m sick of it.

I don’t want to be stuck in a house and told to take care of it and the people in it. I don’t want to be told my responsibilities. I love this house, I love this family, not in that order, but they do not define me.

The house may stand longer than I do. My family may not. I don’t know what will happen to them, or me. I don’t know what our fate is to be. I just know that I need them, but I really need them to need less of me.

It’s night before I know it, another day having passed in mostly dissociation. In between the name game blame still going on in my head, I roll up my shame and pain to make my way up the steps, only to face the deep knife in my chest every time I pass the cherrywood box of ashes on the mantel place to say goodnight.

It gets better, and it gets worse.

Welcome to the neighborhood.

Elizabeth Ann Devine’s poetry, creative non-fiction, and formal essays have been published in numerous online and print magazines and anthologies, including Breath and Shadow, Page & Spine Magazine, OC87 Recovery Diaries, and many more. They were one of ten authors chosen for the anthology You Are Not Alone: Stories from the Frontlines of Womanhood. Links to more of their work can be found on their website: eadevine.com.