I Never Wanted to Write This

But I have to write this. Notes on beginnings and endings. Mothers.

This week, Mother’s Day week, my mom will be moving from a rehab facility to assisted living, into what will be her last home.

Beginnings and endings. So many of them.

My mother was, of course, my beginning. We have had a long journey together. Many peaks, many valleys. But we have come to the end of our road. Just maybe not in the way that you’d expect.

I have reached my end with her, even though she has not yet reached hers.

I don’t know how much longer my mom has; no one does. And this unknowable fact has kept me on this road with her. After all, I have stuck with it for a very long time. Why give up the ghost now?

That, and the fact that she brought me into this world, which dictates that I am to see her out.

This is the natural order. I am breaking life’s natural order. And this does not feel like a small thing.

I broke contact with her one other time.

This happened in the middle of lunch, some 20 years ago. The only way I can describe the trigger to each of these events is that it is like a lightning bolt piercing the top of my skull, splitting me open. But with the splitting-open comes crystalline clarity.

But the first time, even after the clarity, I returned to her.

This time is different.

This time it feels more like it’s her or me. This time my body is making the decision for me.

Four years ago we lost our eldest son. A year after that I had what I call my body collapse. My spine, my hips, my bones gave up the ghost on me. It has been a long road of recovery.

Last week, as I drove home from my aborted visit with my mom, I broke out all across the front of my neck and chest, in a raw, painful, blistering rash. The drive was six hours and by the time I got home I knew I was going to need to see a doctor.

The last time I made a break from my mom, there was no rash. There was only the feeling of her words having split-me-open, feeling myself spill out all over myself.

Maybe it is the rash. Maybe it’s that I finally understand what my body has been trying to tell me.

But last week will be the last time I see her. The last time I speak with her.

There is that expression about loving yourself ‘more.’ Most. This has not been in my vernacular.

I have always had to love her most. Above everyone. Above all else. My husband. My children. Myself.

There is much more I could say. I could justify, rationalize, explain. But this is not a litany of my mom’s issues with narcissism, triangulation, and more . . .

So this is the final reckoning of a daughter who has tried for five decades to be good enough, smart enough, to look good but not too good, to achieve, but never more so than she perceives herself to have achieved, and to always, always, always put her first.

In the end, and we are at the end, none of this really matters.

I won’t say more because after all, she is my mother. And while I love her, I do not like her.

Around her I am unable to be me. There is no other position when in the presence of the center of the universe.

I usually use humor to disarm heaviness, but trust me, I am not doing this lightly. It is ingrained in us that there is something tacitly wrong with cutting one’s mother out of her life. And while “ghosting” one’s family has become a thing, this is not that.

I once tried creating boundaries between us. That was the beginning of our end. The center of the universe is boundless; it suffers no boundaries.

What matters now is that I choose me. I choose my marriage, my family. Me.

So I won’t be saying Happy Mother’s Day to anyone this Sunday.

I will hear it from my own kids and that will be enough. It has taken me decades but I have finally chosen me.

I am a daughter. I am a mother. I am enough.