Separation

"Just a crumb, just a little crumb is all I ask," you said, choking back tears.

I hate the memory. I hate what you did to me that night. I hate that you said one more time, "I give, and I give, and I give, and you just don't give back."

I hate it because you made me feel small. You made me feel like being different from you was a crime, like having my own ideas was a misdemeanor to be squashed.

I didn't want to look at a map of where we'd been that day. I felt like you were expecting me to take pleasure in sharing the experience with you, and I knew you wanted me to enjoy it. You knew I didn't want to, but you wouldn't let me say no without a fight.

You'd arranged a night for us at a bed and breakfast and then a matinee performance of Showboat. It was lovely. I'd competed against the soprano star of the show in the Met Opera Auditions, and her voice was one of those that allowed me to relax into her free and effortless sound.

Afterwards, we must have driven back a different way because when we got home, you wanted to look at that map. I still wish I'd said yes so I could have avoided your outburst.

I still wish I could say yes when I think of that memory, but I can't. I don't want to look at the map. I'm tired of being around you, and I feel unsafe. I need space. I need to breathe, but you won't let me.

You tell me I'm ungrateful. You mock me: "You say, 'Thanks, Mom,' when I buy you things or give you things, but then when we get home, you're nasty."

I don't mean to be nasty. I don't mean to be anything but grateful, but I can hardly take being with you another moment. You suck the life out of me, you expect me to read your mind. You smother me and then shut me out without telling me why. Your shrug and neck twitch still give me anxiety. How will she respond today, I wonder. How can I make myself invisible so that she won't see me?

If I put the dishes into the dishwasher too loudly, I get the evil eye. If I put the dishes in wrong, I get a lecture. If I'm happy, I'm annoying. I should be sad like you. I should irritable like you are with Dad.  But I'm not allowed to be irritable - only you are.

I wonder if anorexia was my attempt not only to avoid becoming a woman by starving my period right out of me, but also my attempt to become invisible. Though I do remember wanting to be special, reasoning that if I couldn't pretty, I'd at least be smart and skinny, I also wanted to disappear. I was 13. What awkward, nerdy 13-year-old doesn't want to disappear at some point?

No, it was more than a desire to erase myself from the awareness of others. I wanted to win a small piece of emotional turf for myself. I chose food, or the lack thereof, as my battle ground, and I won. For a few solid months at least, I had no period. I could go back to being a child, not a woman. Not like you.

"You need me," you said in your emphatic way. It was the summer after I'd graduated college.

Something within me felt smothered again, but I gave in like a charmed victim about to be devoured by a witch. "Yes," I remember saying. "I do need you."

I wish I'd never said it. I wish I could have stood up for myself. I wish I could have told you no.

Instead, I gave in. I cut away the emotional boundaries I'd tried to have at college. I gave myself completely to you in that moment. I was afraid of something, though I don't remember what it was. I was afraid, and you took advantage of it.

Instead of encouraging my independence, you sought after it and crushed it. You needed me to need you. You didn't know what to do as an empty-nester. You floundered as a person without someone to call you Mom. 

While I still call you Mom to your face, I don't think of you as Mom anymore. At least, I try not to. I try to think of you by your first name, and I even stored your number in my phone like everyone else's: last name, first name.

That's I want you to be to me. Just like everyone else. You've hurt me as no one else has, and you've probably shaped me as no one else has. But I now ask that you let me create emotional distance from you, that you let me be me.

I'm going to do my best not to worry that you'll commit suicide if I don't show you the emotional warmth you'd like. And I sure hope you don't ask me, as you always seem to do, if you've done anything to offend me.

I ask that you learn to take care of yourself and live with yourself not as a mother, but as a person.

I choose to view myself as a person separate from you. I don't need you in the way you said I did. I don't have to tell you yes when it makes me uncomfortable to capitulate.

I choose to respect you as an older woman and in the respect to show love to you, but I probably won't show love in the way you wish I would. I can't.

Despite my anxiety at the thought of disappointing you, I choose to ignore the lump in my throat and the tears in my eyes.

I choose separation.