18 Years of God Damn Bullshit: A Memoir

First Forgiveness

((TW:// Mentions of - Sexual Trauma, Substance Abuse, Mental Illness))

Have you ever had a purpose? Maybe it was something you excelled in, or in the very
least were passionate about. Maybe you always knew, and maybe you only discovered it after changing your major in college 5 times. Maybe you only knew what it was the moment you looked into your child’s eyes for the first time. Whatever the case, one’s purpose is the essence of a being. A reason to wake up in the morning, a reason to go on. And fundamentally, it should
be chosen for oneself.

I must’ve been under 10 years old the first time someone told me the reason I was put on
this earth was to take care of my mother. They were always someone my mother talked to with her arm around my shoulder and mother of the year act. A distant relative, a friend, a lot of times strangers she had hours long conversations with in public for no reason but to talk to another human being. And they always said it with a heartfelt smile and well intentions, as if they hadn’t
just told me the only thing I was good for was to drag my mother from the floor to the couch
every night just to do it again the next day. And after hearing it so many times, I believed it.

I had been separated from my mother since February 2017 by the time I spoke to her again. I had been through 2 long term places, and several temporary ones. It was January 2020,
and my life was beginning again… again. I had been living in a shelter as a ward of the state for a month at that point, and according to memory, she had been in jail for close to a year. I had meant to talk to her before then, but convincing both my guardians for permission and myself to go through with it proved too exhausting. I had more important things to do than wasting my time
trying to gain an apology out of her.

My first letter had been sent through my uncle (as I didn’t have the means to get stamps).
I told her how I had lost faith that she was still the person she was in my distant memories of
lullabies and yogurt cups in the morning. I told her how she had to get out of there, and make
something of herself, not just for my sake, but to prove to my little brother that she was someone
worth knowing. Of course, I told her I loved her. Because I did, despite everything.

It had been a month before I got my first response in the form of crumpled letters my
uncle slid to me during our visits. I had been sure to hide them in the side of my undershirt so they wouldn’t fall out during the after-visit pat down. Once dinner was eaten, and lights out was called, I rushed to open them once I was safely away in my room. As soon as I unfolded the sheets of thin lined paper, I could tell immediately that they were indeed written by her. One
could never mistake her scrawl of sloppy cursive. Was it my eyes playing tricks on me, or had it
gotten neater? I cringed at seeing my old name in her greeting, “Dear ____,” no one had called
me that in years. Not since I started going by my middle name because every time I had heard my first, I couldn’t help but hear it being screamed in her voice, and could never ease my racing heart once it started.

She sounded upbeat. She talked about life in jail, how she made friends with some people, and didn’t with others. She talked about how she gained “healthy” weight, hard to imagine for my mother. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her at a healthy weight before. She was always “before surgery ____” close to 300 lbs after my little brother was born, and “after surgery ____” emaciated and stick thin except for the excess skin that fell from her bones like shriveled rose petals.

It was like someone told me I could breathe again. Ever since I’d left her, I’d felt nothing
but guilt for doing so, despite logic telling me I had no reason to.

Who was going to make her
something to eat when she felt sick? Who was going to make sure she could breathe as she slept? And hearing she had gone to jail made it no better. If only I had been there, I could’ve kept her safe. I spent countless nights worrying if she was receiving proper medical care where she was. Was she lonely? Did she hate me?