Words

"I've really grown to like my dark hair," I said, enjoying a brief moment of peace about my appearance.

"Just wait till it turns gray," you replied.

When I told Dad what you'd said, he came back with an appropriately parental response: "Your hair will be beautiful no matter color it is," he said.

The difference between you two is striking. He imparts confidence; you plague with fear. He shows fatherly partiality; you speak out of your own insecurities.

You speak with hints of jealousy, as you always have.

I don't know how I knew. I guess I felt it even as a young child. I couldn't have been more than 4 years old when I walked down the steps that day in my frilly dress. You were at the window, watching us leave. Somehow I felt your jealousy then, I felt your eyes follow me through the window, taking the sunshine out of that happy moment as a young princess with her doting father.

I have no idea if the memory is merely a projected vision of perceived reality, or if it really happened. I will have no way of knowing because I wouldn't dream of bringing this up with you.

I wouldn't dream of it because I already tried to talk to you about other things.

I tried to process with you the origin of my eating disorder. "You were so insecure," you told me, "I didn't know what to say to you."

You said that everyone talks about bodies.

But not everyone talks like you do. "She has big hands and big feet," you said, describing one of your piano students. "She is going to be a big girl."

You say "big girl" so emphatically that I feel the shame you are heaping upon your poor piano student. You talk about someone's being "big-boned" as if it were a disease.

"Do I look fatter to you, Mom?" I asked after gaining a little weight.

"Well, you do have a pooch where you didn't before," you said.

Maybe you were glad I was finally less intimidating to you. And maybe I'm being unfair. In any case, you said exactly the wrong thing.

You have a knack for that, you know - saying the wrong thing.

Your words have cut me to the quick so many times. When I told you once how your vitriolic tirades had hurt me so deeply, you looked surprised. "Oh!" you said, "I just thought my words would roll off of you like water on a duck's back."

Who are you? What mother in her right mind thinks that verbal abuse won't affect her very sensitive daughter?

Ah, yes, that's right - I forgot. You're not in your right mind. You never were, and you don't get it. You certainly didn't get it a couple months ago when you made that comment about my hair.

You don't understand how to be a mother with your words. The sooner I can learn that, the better.