Of Dreams And Madness

Inherited Trauma

They say I have a smile like my mother does
And I would say, "That's because she taught me how to."

They say I have her eyes, her nose, and sometimes her attitude, 
Well duh, where you think I get those from? 

They say I wrote excessively that only my mother would read it;
They say that I act out too often that only my mother would put up with me;
They say I yell too violently that even my mother would scorn me;
They say that I am too much of my mother sometimes they feel seeing ghosts. 

Makes sense, for there are times when I feel like the ghost of her lives in me;
That even through years of trying to break her passed-down trauma, I was still haunted. 
That even through gritted teeth I could still feel the bite of everything she wanted me to become but I couldn't. 
I wouldn't.

There was a time when I put my pen aside,
When I got fed up of writing, 
Of people saying that I was walking on my mother's footstep,
That her words reflects in my poems.
I wanted to  be known for more than just a dead writer's daughter. 
A damage carrier; the seed of two people who should not have flirted with life;
Who sees the soil they've planted me on as burial grounds of promises they couldn't keep.

When I say I lived in a graveyard,
I do not mean with coffins, and tombstone, and some haunted story.
I mean, I live in a barren place where, even through so much cultivating, no flower did grow;
I mean, I was born into a house that chose to be haunted;
That my story was a tragedy and not a horror-fiction.  

They say I wrote excessively that only my mother would read it;
She never knew I inherited her love for literature;
She was always full of headaches and house bills to notice her daughter was scrawling broken words in the back of it. 

They say that I act out too often that only my mother would put up with me;
Well, they didn't know about the bruises, now, don't they?
They don't know that my mother put up with my father's fists but not my loud mouth when I talk to her the way I heard my father do. 

They say I yell too violently that even my mother would scorn me;
The first time I yelled back my mother was astounded, shocked, 
Her prim perfect daughter was not so perfect after all. 
The second-time I yelled back, she called me a disappointment - 
That she did not raise me to talk back to adults
And I rebuffed that she did not raise me at all. 

On the 9th grade, when I stood up to my bully for the first time,
He yelled, "You punch like a girl!"
I was confused. 
How dare he compared my punch to a girl when I've never known how to be a girl, 
I knocked him the way my father's hard, manly knuckles collides with my mother's cheek after an argument. 

On high school, I grabbed that haughty cheerleader's hair after she called me a whore the way my father did when he wanted a hard fuck and my mother was yelling "stop!"

On college, I slapped my ex-boyfriend's cheek after I caught him with the same cheerleader who was now a campus slut thinking to myself if I did that because I was hurt or because the ghost of my mother pushed me to.
That, in that small way, I would avenge her years of being trapped in an abusive relationship reasoning it was because of me she stayed.

And now, I did not know who to offer this eulogy, 
To my mother who died after being hit too hard,
To my father who I inherited my deathly punch from,
Or to myself, who never felt alive. 

 _ _

Madame_Thoughts^^