How devastatingly horrible it is to be your daughter
How devastatingly horrible it is to imagine what it's like to be in your inner psyche

The rushing streams of my hatred for you runs just as deep and thick and strong and authentic as my love for you

I like to believe and fantasize that you did your best in raising me
It's farther from the truth but it's more digestible for me to believe

But it was also not enough for me

I grieve everyday
Whether I am conscious of it or not
And I worry I will forever have this lingering depression like many generations worth of women before me

You do not know love

How to receive give or radiate it's nature
It did not make a home in your bones

For that I cry rivers
Rivers for the little girls that we once were and yet still are

You exert power and harm and control and call it love
All while having eyes of hatred pin-pointed sharply at my averted shy gaze as you utter it
For that's what it was packaged to you all your life

You do not know of a gentle yet fierce love
It is foreign to you
Thus you do not know how to pour into others what was never poured into you

You show me glimpses of it
So quick and fleeting in color that I question whether I experienced it or not

These glimpses of a motherly love are authentic and true
Just as your rage and violence and pain

I hold onto to those tender yet scarce memories as I child clings to their mother's leg when they start kindergarten and are afraid to be abandoned and explore the world separate from what they understand at the time is to be their life source

I do not know how to categorize you
Mostly good or mostly bad
Maybe that's not even the point
But I'd like to believe that we exist in another dimension where we do not have oceans of harm between us
Where we speak the same primary language
Where you weren't traumatized beyond what you were capable with your two hands to heal from so you could tend to me as a mother should
Where we go on tea dates because we both don't prefer it to coffee and I can come to you for comfort and cry in your arms as you stroke my hair softly
Where silence is a source of peace rather than an activation of my sympathetic nervous system
Where I never come to know you as my first bully
Where your eyes never show hatred towards me
Where we live in a dynamic ebb and flow as natural and soft and smooth and light as our breaths and bellies are when one meditates
I love you
And I mourn my relationship with you in every time I mutter those three words

Happy Mother's Day