Last year, I wrote a letter to my father for Father's Day. In it, I acknowledged that he wasn't the best father—but I also recognized some of the ways he helped to make me who I am. A great deal of my trauma story has his name on it for one reason or another, and yet here I am. His daughter, nonetheless, with his body type and his face shape. And yes, sometimes his temper.
This year, I want to give the same recognition to my mom. She wasn't a great parent either; some of the worst, most painful moments of my life were directly orchestrated by her selfishness, influenced and driven by her own trauma. In many ways, she seemed simple: self-centered, entitled, bitter. Addicted. Manipulative. But she was also a mix of so many other things I understand more and more as I live my life...without her.
Dear Mom,
You know, sometimes I still cry. Six years later, it still stings knowing you're not here anymore. And sometimes I understand why those short months between your mother's death and your own were so few. You counted so much on her for safety, security, rescue. We all did.
And for just a moment, sometimes I look back and wonder why I could never count on you for those things. I think about the way you raised me, the people you exposed me to. The man you chose to step-parent your children. The things I saw, the things I was forced to endure. The horrible injustice I've been viscerally ashamed of for over thirty years even though I didn't know better and couldn't have stopped it...and the equally detestable injustice I did share with you, only to be called a liar.
I look at my beautiful daughters, and I wonder how you could be so physically present but I was as abandoned as if you'd walked away and never come back...and so many times, I wished you would. I think how sad it was for fourth-grade me to be so deeply heartbroken about leaving a children's group home. And how I hated you because you came and took me back from the first place I ever felt safe. Because you thought a dog would make it all better. Because of all the ways you stopped being a mom, but I was still stuck with you for a mother.
I think about your body on the kitchen floor, and the marks of your teeth in my hand. A fifteen year old girl staring down in fear and desperation at a mother who would choose to abandon her own child in such a way. And I think, with a twinge of horrified guilt, of the split-second hesitation before I picked up the phone to call 911. What would my life have been like if I had waited? Or if you hadn't come to scream at me one last time before you poured those pills out? What if you had chewed them before swallowing? What if the ambulance hadn't come in time? What if the stomach pump hadn't worked?
What if you'd never done that at all? What if you hadn't wanted so much to give up? What if you had looked at me and thought it would be worth it to do better, to keep trying?
But then I think of society back then, and the rest of our family, the people we came from. The people you should have been able to count on, who told you that you deserved everything that had happened, that you asked for it. That you should have known better. The people who blamed you for being a single mom even while you worked multiple jobs trying to keep us fed. The people who called you crazy rather than coaching you with compassion. The ones who said PTSD is only for war-torn warriors in uniform, never acknowledging the weight of the war you fought every day in the place you called "home," even though it never felt like one.
I can only imagine the fear you must have felt with his hands at your throat and your daughter looking on. The shock and fury that must have filled you as you waited to see if your only son would recover from that BB-gun shot to the eye. The sheer stubborn courage you had to muster up from the pits of nowhere to stand in front of his truck—and take that devasting vehicular blow—to keep your monster of a second husband from killing his own child.
Why would you give so much to protect his child...but you let him do what he did to yours? Mom, you did so many things wrong, and those things can never be excused. From mother to mother, you did a piss-poor job of loving your babies.
But I'm a mom now too, and I know the guilt. The shame. The way every mistake weighs on your heart and every dirty dish feels like proof of failure. I know the fear of confrontation, the broken dream of the perfect family, and the desperate hunger of untreated trauma. And from woman to woman...
I'm so sorry you didn't have someone to hold your hand when you needed it. To tell you that your children would remember yoo-hoos and scratch-off tickets and beanie-weenies just as deeply as we remember violence and pain. I'm sorry you were made to feel like you had to hide inside yourself, and you were never given the grace to truly heal. I'm sorry the shame was so deep and so painful that you had to lie even to yourself to avoid being crushed by it. I'm sorry for the ways you felt too irredeemable to seek and accept help.
And I'm proud of the way you never wore a uniform but you were a warrior anyway. From you, I learned to stand in the face of horrible things and still find reasons to laugh, glimmers of joy, and strength to keep going. I can't even see a cup of coffee without thinking of you, and I treasure every one of the sentimental mementos you managed to hold onto. My baby book, my baptism certificate. Those books of photos you gathered so carefully in the early days...before everything went to shit.
I keep memories of you everywhere. You're in the angel wings on my dining room wall, the vase of flowers in my bedroom. You're in the postcard you kept just because it was pretty...and now I keep it framed because it was yours. And you're in the color of my eyes and the wrinkles on my face and all the reasons I tried so hard to be a different kind of mom. I find you still, in the scent of the river current and the flash of red cardinal wings and the rustle of a Doritos bag.
I wish you were here to see yourself in my writing. To see the ways I want to change the world for women like you, because of you. I wish you could see that the weakness you were so ashamed of birthed a legacy of determination.
Mostly...on this day, I wish there were phones in Heaven.
*****
I didn’t set out to write a novel about my mother, but somewhere between the lines of grief and memory, that’s what I did. My mother did have the opportunity to read the first edition of FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, but I wish she could have been around to see the second edition—which released on May 8th, which is both her birthday and the anniversary of her passing. I think she would have loved that I chose her day to honor her memory, because as broken as our story was, it was still ours. And in some way, maybe this book is my attempt to give us both a better ending, one shaped by empathy, legacy, and stubborn refusal to be defined by pain.
Because trauma doesn't have to be the last chapter, and beauty can still come from the ashes of moments that nearly destroyed you.
Maybe the greatest way to honor her now is to write stories that are honest and brave. Stories that hold both sorrow and strength in the same trembling breath. And by remembering her, not just as the mother who failed me, but as the woman who taught me in so many ways that it's worth it to...