5th
I was an accident too. I asked my dad once, out of curiosity, when I was around 14 or so. He didn’t want to tell me at first, but eventually he realized that that bit of information could help me understand why my relationship with my mother was so fucked up. And when he told me, it all made so much sense— my mother had me when she was 21, so in a sense, I robbed her of her youth. She had to raise a child, against her wishes, while other women her age were out having fun. She was raised in a really strict household so she never had the chance to rebel and do whatever she wanted, and when she finally found a way out of that, she had me. Pretty sucky situation to be in: She got pregnant by a man 20 years her senior and had to marry him and raise me.
No surprise my early childhood memories are mostly of my mother yelling at my father, and my father trying to calm her down. Their marriage didn’t work: My dad was always working late into the night,and my mother was trying to live this life of luxury that was out of our reach while raising a pair of kids she didn’t want in the first place.
Eventually they got divorced, when my mother figured out my dad was having an affair. My mother resented my dad from that moment on. I mean, she missed out on her youth, she had two kids, and she was like 26 and already divorced. Nobody wants to get with a 26-year-old divorced mother of two. She was angry, and I wouldn’t blame her. But she treated us like shit, as if we were to blame for what had happened to her. Maybe she thought that, were we out of the picture, it’d be easier for her to rebuild her life the way she wanted it to be in the first place.
The curious thing is that she treated me way more harshly than she treated my little brother. The best reason I can come up with for that is that I came first; I was the one who guaranteed her a life of motherhood and boredom and being stuck with my father. My little brother simply reiterated this, but he wasn’t the cause of the problem.
Knowing that bit of information was the last piece I needed to complete the puzzle and figure out why my mother treated me the way she did. Once I knew that and I could draw all of these conclusions, I understood why my mother acted the way she did towards me, even if there is absolutely no fucking way to justify it. And understanding her situation has helped me to forgive her for how she treated me when I was a child. We’ve been moving on, little by little, one step at a time. Last night, we talked on the phone and I was crying hysterically, and she was there to comfort me and she knew exactly what to say to make me feel better. And then of course, after I hang up, more waterworks came because I realized that was the first real mother-daughter moment we have ever shared.
I think that, if things keep on going this way, I might one day grow to love her. I’m not there yet, but I’m on my way.
