You Never Knew Me

You never knew the real me. You only saw your own shattered dreams.

You never really knew me. There was a time, long ago, when I believed you knew my heart, and that our hearts beat in tandem—mother and daughter; the sun and its shadow. I wanted to believe that you were the mother I had constructed in my mind. I took all the best parts of you and molded them into the mother I wanted you to be. I threw out the discordant notes; the traits that were at odds with the mother I needed you to be. I ignored the darkness in you; that part of your heart that only saw the world as it related to you. I wanted it to be true—that image of you I had formed in my heart and held on to so tightly.

Sadly, you wanted a life that was all about you. You never really wanted to be a mother. It wasn’t in your plan—it was just something that happened to you. It took a long time for me to see you as you were. I didn’t want to see. You gave me to my grandmother and there I would have happily stayed had it not been for your next fateful choices. You had another baby, my sister, and you gave her away too—this time to strangers. Then you married and had yet another baby, my brother. Your new husband insisted that I should join the three of you. He wanted family, wanted children. He didn’t know either, that you never wanted to be a mother.

You told me once (in a fit of anger) when I was a small child that if people really knew me, they wouldn’t like me. But you were wrong. You were the one who never saw the real me. Others saw me for who I was. Some liked me and some didn’t, but at least they knew me—the real me. You were never able to; when you looked at me, you saw all your broken dreams and thwarted plans and that distorted your image of me. You were never able to see past that and therein lies the tragedy of your life, Mother. You should have looked deeper; you should have tried harder. You would have seen the heart of a child who worshipped her mother; a child who only wanted to be accepted. Your life could have been so different if you had been willing to see. If only you had seen the real me.

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