I'm Glad My Mom Died

My mom didn’t deserve her pedestal. She was a narcissist. She refused to admit she had any problems, despite how destructive those problems were to our entire family. My mom emotional y, mental y, and physical y abused me in ways that wil forever impact me.

Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can’t we be honest about them?

Especial y moms. They’re the most romanticized of anyone.

Moms are saints. Angels by merely existing. NO ONE could possibly understand what it’s like to be a mom. Men wil never understand. Women with

no children wil never understand. No one but moms know the hardship of motherhood, and we non-moms must heap nothing but praise upon moms because we lowly, pitiful non-moms are mere peasants compared to the goddesses we cal mothers.

Maybe I feel this way now because I viewed my mom that way for so long. I had her up on a pedestal, and I know how detrimental that pedestal was to my wel -being and life. That pedestal kept me stuck, emotional y stunted, living in fear, dependent, in a near constant state of emotional pain and without the tools to even identify that pain let alone deal with it.

Typical y I wouldn’t expect a cal from her these days. We’ve drifted apart. It’s a sad reality for me in my late twenties. At the beginning of the decade, the people I was close to seemed like friends for life, people I could never imagine not seeing every day. But life happens. Love happens. Loss happens. Change and growth happen at di erent paces for di erent people, and sometimes the paces just don’t line up. It’s devastating if I think too much about it, so I usual y don’t.

“You don’t wanna be forty- ve at the o ce Christmas party, with three kids and a mortgage, sneaking into the bathroom to puke up the artichoke dip,” he’d said.Sure, I’m not forty- ve. And I don’t even like artichoke dip. But it is my twenty-sixth birthday. I am getting older.

I think of Mom. I don’t want to become her. I don’t want to live o Chewy granola bars and steamed vegetables. I don’t want to spend my life restricting and dog-earing Woman’s World fad diet pages. Mom didn’t get better. But I wil .

“The problem with this is that if we beat ourselves up after a mistake, we add shame onto the guilt and frustration that we already feel about our mistake.

That guilt and frustration can be helpful in moving us forward, but shame…

shame keeps us stuck. It’s a paralyzing emotion. When we get caught in a shame spiral, we tend to make more of the same kinds of mistakes that caused us shame in the rst place.”

We want you to neutralize food. It’s just a thing you eat, neither good nor bad. Regardless of whether it’s pineapple or pancakes.”

Regardless of why she didn’t tel us, she didn’t. That hurts me in and of itself.

This is the person who meant more to me than anyone or anything in the world. This is the person who was the center of my existence. Her dreams were my dreams, her happiness was my happiness. How could the person who I lived and breathed for have kept such a fundamental piece of my identity hidden from me?

My whole life, my entire existence has been oriented to the narrative that Mom wants what’s best for me, Mom does what’s best for me, Mom knows what’s best for me. Even in the past, when resentments started to creep in or wedges started to come between us, I have checked those resentments and wedges, I have curbed them so that I can move forward with this narrative intact, this narrative that feels essential to my survival

What is my identity, even? What the fuck is that? How would I know? I’ve pretended to be other people my whole life, my whole childhood and adolescence and young adulthood. The years that you’re supposed to spend nding yourself, I was spending pretending to be other people. The years that you’re supposed to spend building character, I was spending building characters.

I’m more convinced than ever that I need to quit acting. That it doesn’t serve my mental or emotional health. That it’s been destructive to both.

I know I’ve grown bitter. I know I’ve grown resentful. But I don’t fucking care. I feel like that show robbed me of my youth, of a normal adolescence where I could experience life without every little thing I did being critiqued, discussed, or ridiculed.

I started to thoroughly dislike fame by the time I turned sixteen, but now at twenty-one, I despise it.