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Holly’s focus remained on the floor as she swept another handful of pancakes into her mouth. Her voice wavered as she spoke. “I’ve known him since I was twelve.”
“The boyfriend?” Jamie asked. “If you even want to refer to him in that way.”
“Yeah. Him. Mom met him online… on one of those dating sites. It didn’t take long before he moved in with us.” She brushed her feet against the floor, holding a fork of pancake right above the plate. She let out a choked breath. “My mom… she loves him more than she needs me. But I’ve already learned to accept that.”
The dam holding her tears back broke. Everything rushed forward. I could feel her pain in my solar plexus, tears threatening to escape my own eyes. I personally didn’t know that kind of pain–having a mother bring an abusive man into the picture. But I could feel the abandonment issues surfacing at the very core of her being. I could hear the pain in the shakiness of her voice. Could relate and connect to a young woman who quite obviously didn’t know who she could lean on… if she couldn’t lean on her own damn parents.
“Maybe your mother is just…” Jamie started to say, but then he bit his lip. I wasn’t sure what he intended to say. Had he been searching for some excuse? To try to prepare a version that sounded better? To try to make Holly’s motherseembetter? Failing because there is never an excuse to make for a mother who puts her child in harm’s way.
Or even a mother who cares so little for you, she only cares about what the rest of the world thinks about her.
“I know how you feel,” I choked out. “Even though our circumstances are so incredibly different.”
You’re grieving over four people.Jamie’s words from IKEA echoed in my mind, almost as if I had just heard him. I saw my mother, decked in her designer clothing and Prada glasses. The way she walked through a room as though her status meant more to her than anything else. The way she stepped ahead of me at Jamie’s funeral, working the room even then during a time of mourning.
I recounted all the times she’d said, “Jemma, you need to do this because it will look bad to other people if you don’t.” Long before Dad died, I remembered hearing her say the same things to him, too.
While most daughters shared some sort of bond with their mother, I grew up with my dad teaching me how to play ball, sharing his love of literature, and his passion for the written word. Any time Mom ever tried to drag me on her shopping trips as a kid, or even as a teenager, I grew bored so quickly. Not caring about the latest fashion trends or how the fuck I did my hair. I had a habit of biting my nails and wearing whatever clothing felt the most comfortable. Not my mom’s ideal daughter.
Eventually, she simply… did her own thing.
The first time I ran home crying because some kid called me ugly, Dad was the one to hug me and tell me that other kid was stupid. While Mom waited for my tears to dry upstairs as she reapplied her makeup.
The truth was, I realized only now that I, too, knew what it was like to feel a mother’s abandonment. My mom had pretty much abandoned me my whole life.
And that realization… something so stale crept over me, like I’d received the most horrifying wake-up call of my life.
Jamie’s thumb grazed mine, and I jumped. When I looked up, he mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.”
It only took two words for me to understand what he really meant to say. We’ll talk about this later, that was what he truly meant.We’ll talk about your mother later.
Then, he mouthed, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I mouthed back, returning my focus to Holly. Her head remained dipped to the floor.
Somehow, by watching her, I finally understood so much more.
Iamgrieving a fourth person.
The relationship I always tried to excuse away, as if my mother wasn’t so bad, as if my mother had only grown distant after the death of my dad. But that wasn’t true.
I was grieving the relationship that never was.
The relationship I always should have had with a real mother.
I understood needing someone so badly. Because they’re your only link to your past. Your only link to the family you once had that is now broken all apart. And that one person, my own mother, couldn’t even be bothered to listen to me. All those years after Dad died, she never once asked me how I was doing. Never suggested therapy. Never even wanted to talk about what had happened.
I dealt with it on my own, alone in my room. Crying myself to sleep for the rest of the summer after it happened. It was only when I tried to kill myself a couple years later that Mom finally “stepped” up. And stepping up meant calling me to make sure I consistently took my medication. Calling me to make sure I got up. Urging me to make sure a part of me was still alive. Like, as long as the medication kept me under control, and I woke up and lived my life the way she felt I should… everything was perfectly okay.
No, that didn’t make anything okay.
So, yeah. I understood Holly. Beyond the bruises covering her face.
Sometimes abuse ran deeper than the physical marks people leave. We think we love these people, and yet they end up leaving us.
“My mom hasn’t said she loved me since I was a little girl.” Holly let out a sniffle, glancing at Jamie now as if her statement addressed what he almost said earlier. Obviously not realizing her statement also seemed to be a response to what I had been thinking about my own mother. Holly continued, “She tells Steve she loves him even when they’re yelling at each other. Even after he hits me.”
“I’m… sorry,” she whimpered.
