~Untitled

Dear Mother,

Our family is one that does not like birthday cards. My brother, my father and I have exchanged the performative bare minimum back and forth—swapping $3 generically captioned bits of cardboard to maintain a pretense. We do this for your benefit. You are the odd one out. You like the price tags removed and the signatures on the envelopes and the effort of the handwriting. I understand this, even if I do not share your opinion.

I used to write you cards every year, at least three times, often more. There was Mother’s Day and Christmas and your birthday. I learned to use the software you recommended—printed the cards and folded them neatly, with a page or two of sentiment stuffed in between the covers. I remember one of the sign-offs I used once; ‘You’re the best Mum ever, and not just because I only have the one (pause for laughter). I love you to the moon and back.’
A little cliche, true, but to be fair I was about eleven at the time. I at least managed to fit the correct ‘you’re’ in, which is a problem my father and brother are guilty of having well beyond the age of eleven. I would sometimes read their cards to you. The pair of them were less eloquent.

I don’t print cards anymore. I haven’t done that for a few years now. I tripped over an inflection point in our relationship, you see, when it became clear that my experiences were very far removed from your account of our relationship. It was hard to be the rock for your disappointments with my father, and harder still to accept that as a reasonable thing for you to force upon me at a frighteningly young age. I picked up the slack because nobody else wanted to. No kind words came from my brother or father to soothe over conflict or appropriately manage your mood. Birthday cards as vacuous and checked out as they both were. You would’ve said it was my mistake for finding all that tension intolerable.

I fear that somewhere around there, compounded by a hundred different things, was when a page and a half of loving sentiment began to feel like a rote obligation, and a fraudulent one at that. So instead of a card formatted in Microsoft Publisher (is this still a program?), you get melodramatic letters written on a website you likely will never read, and representation in my conversations with a few therapists. This feels more sustainable to me, because you don’t have to be there to respond.

It is a heavy thing to properly give yourself credit for your own experiences. I was comfortable being told what was what in my life—authority figures are a great comfort to many—and I couldn’t tell you what broke me out of that little bubble, to realise the weight on my shoulders was set there by you and to trust my senses more than I trusted how you told me to feel. You told me once it was my fault for being such a perfectionist. What child naturally punishes themselves so egregiously for their own failure if they have not been told how unacceptable it is to try and not succeed? I misbehaved once and you said you wouldn’t be my friend. Are parents supposed to be friends with their kids? Are they at least supposed to be friendly? These are the kinds of questions I would’ve asked you, if I thought the answers would do me any good. Somewhere around that period I just started answering my own questions instead.

I learnt an important lesson the last time we had a serious conversation. It was the value of divorcing my expectations of a response from the necessity of the expression. I came to that conversation prepared and rehearsed, and sat you down to say my piece. We got into a shouting match whilst my father watched the F1 a couple doors down. I’m not even sure if he knew I was in the building. In amongst it all, I said to you what I’d come there to say, and despite being there to dress you down with all the unmet needs, expectations, things that had caused me grief, I still hoped for recognition from you. I wanted you to say what every hurt party wants their offender to say—I’m sorry, I see you, I want to make this better. Rather than grovelling, or vindication, I just wanted to be seen. And it took me running halfway out the door, tears streaming down my cheeks, for you to offer me a token gesture, a half-hearted and disingenuous apology pointed at my back, purely to prevent me slamming the door in your face and refusing to talk with you again, because you hate rejection more than the absence of anything meaningful inside our relationship.

Ah, it’s not too bad. We talk about recipes and TV shows. You recommended that show with Steve Carell—the one where he plays a therapist who gets held hostage by an insane person and eventually confronted with how godawful a parent he’d been. I thought that might be a self-aware nod, some kind of contrition you didn’t have the words to voice out loud or something. No, you just liked the show. Again, I am the fool here, if I’d kept my expectations at zero, I would not have been once again let down. To be fair, it was a great watch. I just didn’t count on being so grumpy for a week after. If I can avoid thinking about being disappointed, I endeavour to.

This is why we’re having this conversation in my head, instead of real life. I have learnt how to tend to myself. I have had it pointed out to me that it is unwise to displace the responsibility for my emotions onto others, least of all you. It’s nicer to be independent. I don’t need you to acknowledge a thing, which is why this sentiment will never reach you in the first place. It’s an adult milestone to go put together a support system, find other people that are kind and charitable and wonderfully lovely to me. None of them have to be so nice to me, they choose to, which I think is what love feels like. I wouldn’t actually know for sure—you did a pretty good job of bastardising the concept.

It’s been a long walk here for a short drink of water. Another white dude with mommy issues—not exactly a groundbreaking concept. I think it’s precisely because of how unoriginal this all is that it has some kind of value. You did a service to me at the least. You taught me to be independent. You gave me the opportunity to raise myself into the kind of man I want to be. You were kind enough to allow me to find out that I would be entirely okay, after the pain and the burning disappointment and the embarrassment of expecting the bare minimum from someone all finally faded. And they do go away. I could have penned these words with plenty of venom and vitriol, and instead there is neither of these in my heart. I don’t have anger to throw around anymore. It just is what it is. The point of it all is to learn something, to grow and change. I believe in changing, because it shows that things can always get better. For some reason, I still have hope, and the hope has only grown bolder and more potent over the years. Things will always get better, time heals all wounds, yada yada.

This optimism is hopefully infectious. I just want to prop up the people I love in the way they’re there for me. The way I always wanted you to be there for me. If I was ever going to have a family, I always wanted it to be you. But wanting something is an expectation that it might come to pass, and I know better than that now. I have love in my life, and that deserves more of my attention than the voice in my head that I wish belonged to you.