Don’t Speak

Over the years, a few of my friendships have ended because of one counterintuitive reason: the friend would have preferred if I would have not talked.

This manifests when I ask them to listen to me and they find themselves incapable.

It happens quickly: the relationship is instantly over because they are no longer getting what they want out of me and I, empty and resentful, check out of the rapport right along with them.

I’ll then spend a period of time digesting, looking back at something which has now become newly quite flawed, inadequate and stunningly superficial. And I hate being had: I loathe wasting my time with someone who can’t stop talking while they simultaneously struggle to listen to even the most short sentences I try to sneak in.

I find myself in these rapports because I had been initially charmed and then build a history with the person which I then use as the excuse to continue the connection. Until I simply cannot take it anymore.

My not talking, my not being heard, is a theme in my life I have had trouble solving. It is one reason why I write: no one interrupts me when I talk on paper. It is also a reason why I speak to myself all the time when I am alone, a lifelong habit, a habit which I suspect may be universal.

As a little girl, I talked to myself constantly because although I got yelled at all the time, no one really talked to me or with me. At night, when I sat up in my bed after I had been tucked in, I finally had conversations by the low hazy glow of an amber nightlight. I finally spoke. Using first person narrative, I told invisible people what I thought about things, what I had done for the day, what I thought was unfair. I wasn’t alone because I was listening to me, I was being heard.

I am good listener, perhaps to a fault if there is such a thing. Even with strangers: many times, I find myself on the receiving end of a monologue streaming out of a person I just met as they ramble on to me, freely, endlessly, about their personal life, family history, internal struggles; the only place or role for me somehow becomes witness and audience. My presence has no worth other than my paying attention and not speaking myself.

I never know how to politely extradite myself from this type of situation, other than enduring it, smiling, being supportive and positive and waiting for it to be over, so I can get away, so I don’t have to stand at attention and give 100% of myself to a person who could not care less about me in any way; my being used, being had, ends when the conversation ends. I could be rude: I could walk away; I could abruptly interrupt; it’s not like I don’t have autonomy and personal freedom in these moments. But still, usually, I just stand there and listen, observing the scene, like live-stream sociology: I watch, uncaged but somehow trapped.

*

One friendship died as my mother did.

I had known Abigail for six years. We had met via Queens social media, through our active and percolating community; our connection was geography, many of my newer rapports grew organically out of my love for my adopted borough and neighborhood.

I wanted to have a closeness with Abigail because I thought a foundation was there for it, so I assumed an intimacy which wasn’t necessarily there simply because I liked her and she acted like she liked me back. But through that half decade, there were indications of disconnection and signs of trouble: the biggest sign was the time when Abigail had offered to be with me when my mother had fallen into unconsciousness one afternoon during a hospital stay just after Halloween in 2015, the day after my mom had undergone a simple surgery and some ten month’s before my mother’s eventual death.

I had spoken to my mother on the phone earlier that morning but when I arrived later to visit, I found her unresponsive as she lay convulsing on her bed. Her head lolled unsteadily to each side and, between long breaths, she moaned gravely, guttural, raw gasps. Her arms, legs, feet and hands trembled and flexed: her body vibrated, never ceasing to quiver.

I ran to the nurse’s station and pulled a Terms of Endearment: “What is the matter with my mother?!?” I hollered.

People in white jackets came to stand around my mother’s bed.

“I’ve never seen a reaction like this,” one said.

“Is she dying?” I wailed.

“I don’t know, I don’t think so,” was what I heard.

“Well then what is the matter with her? Why is she doing this?”

They took my mother’s vitals: her heart was fine; her body showed no symptoms of impending failure as it writhed and shuddered.

“So, what’s the matter with her? Is she dying?” I tried again.

“I don’t think so, maybe it’s a reaction to the anesthesia. Give it time, let her rest.”

There wasn’t anything more the medical professionals could tell me, there was nothing they could do so they left, instructing me not to worry.

Alone with my mother in her hospital room, I begged her to wake up: “don’t go, don’t leave me, please,” I whispered in her ear as she twitched, possessed and lost in her unconsciousness. I was not convinced she wasn’t dying.

I called my family members. They should know what was going on.

“But is she dying?” They all asked.

It was a good question.

“I don’t know!” I squeaked, watching my mother, our mother, flay about in her light blue hospital gown. “I don’t know! Nobody knows!”

My Californian sister-in-law Leslie called from Los Angeles and asked to be put on speakerphone so she could say goodbye to my mom, just in case. I held the phone near my mother’s face where her nose jerked to the sky at the sound of her son David’s wife’s voice, she always delighted in hearing Leslie, but her eyes still remained shut.

“I know she heard you,” I told Leslie after I put the phone back to my ear. I was raw witnessing this farewell; my sister-in-law, not a crier, was choked up as she told my mother how much she had loved her. It was a primal, intimate and wrenching moment, facilitated by modern technology: a bicoastal deathbed parting and, to me, a haunting foreshadowing of the lonely, disconnected deaths by covid19 in 2020.

I could not believe my mother might be dying, I couldn’t believe it was happening so quickly; she had just been speaking, totally lucid, that morning. What was making her not wake up? What was making her shake?

Hanging up the phone, I texted my friends. I was alone. I received texts back with support, with love, with “hang in theres” but Abigail had texted back: did I want her to come up here, to the Upper East Side near the hospital where my mother lay? Did I want company? Did I want to grab a drink?

I looked down at my phone and had one of those moments where I pretended I was a normal person who was cared for like this all the time, like it was an everyday thing for someone to offer to be there for me. Here was this one “I’ll come up” text which was like gold to me that day. I was thrilled Abigail was turning out to be this person for me, someone who would show up when I was alone, someone who would be there for me. What a gift. How much I needed it.

“I would love that!” I texted back. I was relieved, I was lifted, I felt lighter. I wasn’t going to be alone; it was so amazing; someone was going to be there for me. As I waited for Abigail to make her way uptown, I sat by mother’s bed, on a low stool, leaning into her ear, asking her to come back, telling her to please not leave: but now I had felt stronger, I felt loved, like it was all going to work out simply because I wasn’t going to be alone soon.

“Come back, Mummy. It’s not time yet. Come back,” I murmured to my mother as she spasmed, as low breathy grunts came out of her mouth.

The text “I’m here” from Abigail 45 minutes later excited me but, as I turned to behold my mother again, as I readied myself for an exit, I wondered if I would ever see her alive again. I was scared to leave her: if I left, would she die? But I couldn’t wait to see my friend, I couldn’t wait to be unalone.

My mother’s ivory white arms and legs fluttered. Her eyes seemed to be rapidly moving behind their shut-tight lids. Her mouth stayed open, the gentle sound of deep breath peppered by grumbles, clicks and soft yelps. This is death?

“Come back, Mummy. I’m going out for a few minutes but you need to wake up, you need to come back,” I said next to her cheek, bending down, my coat on. “I’ll be back soon. Wake up.”

Out the door of the hospital, heading up to the corner where Abigail waited, I was more happy to see her than I was scared that my mom might not make it. My mom’s health had been declining for years, she was in her late 80s; my siblings and I had been in this situation before, so I was resolved about my mother’s future. What I did not expect was that this would be the way my mother would have expired: in a coma, twitching on a hospital bed, garbled cackles burbling from the back of her throat.

I was thinking I had already lost her. I didn’t even bother saying goodbye, despite my having been right next to her, because I wasted none of my words on “goodbye” and spent all of them on “come back.” I wasn’t going to say goodbye until she was gone.

I finally saw Abigail across the street as I ambled up to our designated meeting spot. When she saw me and we made eye contact, I was so relieved, so happy to not be alone, to see a familiar face, that I started to cry.

What happened next explains our relationship and why it ultimately failed.

As I released the tears out of my eyes at the sight of Abigail crossing the street to meet me, I witnessed a look of horror on her face.

Abigail seemed appalled, shocked and troubled by my crying, as if my emotional response was not something she had quite bargained for when she offered to hang out with me on the occasion of my elderly mother being unconscious, convulsing on a hospital bed and potentially expiring. It’s like she hadn’t counted on my tears.

I stopped crying instinctively. I knew instantly I was in the presence of someone who did not want me to cry, a place I unfortunately knew too well.

The thought “why the hell even offer to come and be with someone whose parent is dying if sobbing appalls you?” was quickly pushed aside as I decided that it was much more important in the moment to make Abigail feel comfortable than it was for me to express my feelings.

That moment when I suppressed my tears, when I vigorously pushed my friend’s needs way in front of mine, when I felt guilty and ashamed that my own grief somehow made my friend feel uncomfortable, is a moment now seared into my psyche.

The memory of the expression on Abigail’s face, a combination of disgust and fear, is secondary to the memory of my kneejerk response to want to make her feel better, my pattern of Stockholm syndrome, my need to soothe people who are dismissive of, or even abusive to, me.

Abigail’s horror confirmed my lack of deserving. Of course, she was perturbed: I had a need. I should never have needs: I should never need people; people should never be there for me just on my merit alone. I am not good enough for that.

This was not a moment where she was there, unconditionally, to make me feel better: this was now a moment where I had to be there for Abigail unconditionally. Her need was her discomfort and I had to get rid of that discomfort immediately.

The closest restaurant was half a block away: we sat at the bar.

“Thank you so much for coming up! I appreciate it so much! Order whatever you want! Thank you for being here, it’s so nice of you!” I made myself happy and upbeat. I was here to destroy Abigail’s horror while I tried not to think about my mother twitching five blocks away, I tried to pretend I was a normal person, which I will never be, which I certainly wasn’t that night. I thanked my friend profusely for her time and bought us an artisan pizza, which arrived on its own elegant metal stand, along a parade of many Italian beers.

Abigail talked for two and half hours straight: I listened to the full story of her relationship, a charming story, deserving of its length, a unique and enduring love. Hospital visiting hours were to end at 9pm and as that time drew near, I could no longer pay full attention to Abigail’s tale. I started to feel guilty that I wanted to get away from this incredibly generous person, who had come all the way up to the Upper East Side, to be in my physical presence, but I started to fathom with a thudding heaviness that my mother may no longer be breathing and that I may not even be allowed back into the hospital for the day even if she was.

How do I end this conversation when I am not even participating in it? Is it rude for me to announce I’d like to get back to my dying mother? Is there any polite way to stop a person from talking?

I did finally pipe up with the whole closing hospital aspect and asked the bartender for the check; I was glad to be the one paying, I would have hated to have ended the conversation as I had, so suddenly, with her then picking up the check; she was doing me a favor, after all. She didn’t need to be here, she had better things to do with her time, I was so lucky she had distracted me for a few hours, got my mind off things.

But now, I was back to primal and raw, distracted as the clock ticked into 9pm and beyond. Gotta go, gotta go, echoed in my head. I yanked on my coat, tried to make Abigail not worry about what was going on with me, I’ll be fine and thanks thanks thanks thanks gosh thank you so much, signed my credit card receipt and hugged her outside.

“Thank you so much!” I exclaimed. “You made me feel so much better!” I wanted her to know how grateful I was, how important her time was, how nice it was to not be alone.

But at that point, I had to leave, it was 9:05pm and I had to see my mother. I ran away from her and back to the hospital.

“Visiting hours over,” the security guard announced at the entrance.

“My mother is in Room 1145: she’s dying, she may already be dead, she…” I started.

“Go ahead,” he waved me past and I took an empty elevator up to my mother’s room.

*

She was alive, thankfully, but her condition had not changed: her limbs flapped, her eyeballs tick-tocked rapidly behind closed lids and her thin cheeks stretched in grimaces. I sank back into the short stool and resumed my perch at her ear: “Come back, come back to me.”

She made more noise. Could she hear me?

“It’s not your time, Mummy. Don’t go.”

My siblings texted asking for updates. I had none, I’d let them know if anything changed.

Just before 11pm, two nurses came in to give my mother a sponge bath and change her gown.

“She’ll be okay,” one said to me about my mother and, unalone, I started to cry.

The nurses had rolled my mother onto her side, facing away from me.

“Hey!” They both looked at me. “Her eyes are open!”

I flew around the foot of the bed to my mother’s side.

“You’re awake!” I put my face close to hers, those blue eyes finally open. She had the semblance of a freshly hatched chick, blinking and soft: new with life.

“Hi, dear,” she uttered, using her oft-employed term of endearment, proof of life: she was back. It was extraordinary. She was alive, she came back: I begged her to come back and she came back. It was a moment I had wanted so badly and was overjoyed it had happened. She came back.

It wasn’t until the next day, when my siblings began to gather in our mother’s hospital room, when it wasn’t just me, that we found out she had most likely experienced a delayed reaction to Dilaudid, a narcotic, administered for pain during her surgery. The dose had been small but still overwhelming to our mother’s tiny 90lb body: unlike many of her ilk and generation, she neither drank nor smoked so her system was uncommonly clean. An opioid withdrawal had shivered through her bones, muscles and organs as the Dilaudid worked its way through her frame. That’s most likely why she was unconscious, a doctor told us, that’s why she convulsed.

Around my mother’s hospital bed, my siblings, all older than I, wondered, as they always did, if I had overreacted in thinking our mother was dying. I didn’t know what else to do other than be with my mother and let my family know what was going on. I hadn’t known what else to do other than act the way I had. Maybe it seemed unbelievable to them that she had been in the condition she was, now that she was so easily back to herself.

I didn’t care what they thought and how they always viewed me as being irrational or dramatic. After all, I was the one who had been there: all by myself. I did all that I could and that I knew to do. I did all that I could fathom to do. I didn’t care that I was “wrong” about her dying. It was a drug withdrawal; it was a medical event and thankfully she survived it. She didn’t die.

“I heard you,” my mother took a moment to grasp my hand, her light eyes on mine, not her usual style, her small, warm palm gripping my fingers tightly, squeezing for emphasis. “I heard every word you said.”

I held her eyes.

“I told you to come back.”

“I know,” she nodded. “I heard you.”

“And you came back,” I told her. “We are all so lucky: you came back.”

*

In eight months, my mother will die. She will die a slow and quite painless death, the death of a healthy body which succumbs to age, like that rare elderly person like during Civil War times, who fades away on a pillowed bed, giving in to an eventual continual sleep; the demise of a disease-free body, no cancers, no infections or flus, a gradual collapse. My mother will die during the night following the hottest day of the summer, when it had felt like 113 degrees with the heat index: my mother had always hated the heat.

There will no calling her back when her time finally arrives, when there will be nothing left in her body, when she will barely have the energy to eat, when her physical being finally fails. My sister Helen, who lived with and cared for our mother as she died, felt I didn’t help her out enough and believed I purposefully provoked my mother into fights as she reclined on her deathbed. After my mother had snapped at me to “get out!” one afternoon when she had been acting grouchy, Helen then forbade me from seeing my mother ever again, save one more session to say goodbye, stating I was harmful to our mother, maybe even dangerous. Although my brothers expressed to Helen that I most likely would not murder our mother, they agreed it was best I stay away; my sister did not want me there, who were they to disagree?

I was commanded to deliver a farewell to my mother on a date during a 30-minute time slot which had been determined by my sister: Helen sat in my mother’s bedroom with us as I spent the last half hour I had been allowed by my family to be with my mom. My sister fumed quietly, playing sudoku on her phone, her socked feet protectively tucked on the side of our mother’s bed. She checked the time frequently, looking at her phone and craning her neck towards the ticking clock on my mother’s night table, making sure I did not steal any unjustified time. She needed to be in the room with me to prevent me from harming or killing our dying mother.

Like I had waited all this time to finally do in my mom.

I was unalone in that room as the minutes flew. I awkwardly stood behind the chair where my sister sat at my mother’s bedside, trying to narrow my body between my sister’s steamingly angry torso and my mother’s nightstand. My mother pressed my hand onto her chest, I felt skin on skin, I tried to memorize it as she lifted my hand up to her lips to kiss it: she didn’t understand this was our final goodbye but I was lucky she was at least conscious for it. At that stage in her decline, she wasn’t awake for long periods of time and although she was sporadically talkative, she was no longer lucid; she was lost in a place of memories, she slid further and deeper into sleep.

“It’s time,” my sister barked. “Say goodbye.”

I did, in my mother’s ear. I kissed her cheek, I squeezed her tiny forearm, I smelled her, I breathed her in, I couldn’t believe that would be the last time I would see my mother, but it was.

For next almost month and a half, I tracked how many miles stood between me and my mother’s beating heart. The days I temped at a midtown hedge fund, her heart was two and a half miles away. When I sat on the waterfront in Queens staring at Manhattan’s panorama, her heart was three and a half miles away. Her heart still beat but I couldn’t see her, couldn’t touch her hand or cheek, couldn’t tell her anything in her ear. I was already dead to her but she wasn’t dead to me. Because she wasn’t dead. Until she was.

*

My sister found my mother dead on that sultry summer morning around 8:30am. She announced the death on Facebook at 10:30am. I wasn’t told until 2:30pm that day when my brother David called me and asked me if I was ok. I was on the street at the time, in front of a sidewalk café.

“I’m fine,” I chirped. I was running errands, I had just bought ice cream, I was heading home on a summer Sunday afternoon .

“Do not tell me that no one told you, do not tell me this,” my brother repeated over and over, in agony.

I knew what he was talking about immediately. Every time my phone rang during those five weeks, I wondered if it was news that mother had passed away. I had thought it, fleetingly, just then, in fact, when I saw it was a sibling calling me but didn’t catch on immediately. I didn’t realize she was dead until I heard David say, “don’t tell me, don’t tell me you don’t know, don’t tell me, do not tell me no one told you.”

No one had told him either: his friend saw the Facebook post and raced to the green where my brother had been golfing to let him know. David found out on a golf course and I found out standing on the street on 34th Avenue in Long Island City, Queens outside of Gastroteca Astoria, steps away from where people were eating brunch.

My mother wasn’t coming back.

*

I hold the night of calling my mother back from her coma in the hospital as a good memory, an extraordinary gift, a second chance. I did not experience many tender or nice moments with my mother, the way I would have wanted, the way I saw her have with her other children, with other people, sometimes even strangers, her easy charm, the shine of her light. For one night, after she woke up, after I had infested her ear, we had connected: we had a moment, a moment I will never forget. A moment that worked: where a dream came true. And I hadn’t really saved her, she really wasn’t going to die that night but it had been a pinpoint for us to connect, a primal flash of need; I was reduced to nothing but need, nothing but a child in need, my helplessness at its height. It was a story with a happy ending.

But that night was also when I saw Abigail’s horror and when I internalized it and made it my fault for being too emotional. That was the night I blamed myself for offending my friend with who I was.

I have retold the story of that night many times since: the sympathetic tale of Abigail’s heroic effort to spend time with me, as the night when she had happily distracted me from my pesky, inconvenient and discomfort-inducing sorrow. I created a narrative that Abigail had saved me that night with her describing the 10-year saga of her relationship to me, and that it had been so much more normal for us to talk about her and her past than it would have been for us to have discussed me and my present at that time. I praised her often for how much she had given me that night. I did this because I wanted the friendship, I wanted to compensate for it, I wanted to validate it. Maybe because she had texted to ask if she should come up and that text, the promise of someone actually attempting to be there for me, meant more to me than the reality of a friend who talked her head off and couldn’t handle my grief.

This past year for my birthday, I spent another evening with Abigail. I had been so eager to share with her, to talk to her, about what I was writing, about work I wanted to do but despite it being my birthday, our conversation never turned to me.

Because our conversations never turned to me.

My mother had been dead for over two years and the “conversations” Abigail and I engaged in were still completely imbalanced. They were Abigail’s monologues, punctuated by my questions.

I realized that birthday night that I had finally had it. Abigail’s look of horror from that night with my mother had defined our relationship, had cemented my pattern of Stockholm syndrome responses, my desperation to not be alone.

But I was more alone with Abigail than when I was physically alone. All I did was listen and it was, at last, too draining to bear anymore: all I did was serve. I had no worth at all unless I was attending, hearing, nodding, agreeing, supporting, doting, affirming, validating and witnessing.

When I was with Abigail, I was there but I wasn’t really. I was the audience. And because I hadn’t wanted to ever see her look of horror ever again, I literally changed myself when I was around her to make sure that look would never cross her face again. I changed who I was and what I needed so to suit her, protect her, maintain our connection. It was all about her because I allowed it to be all about her.

The night of my birthday, for the first time in my friendship with her, I couldn’t wait to get away from Abigail; I couldn’t wait for the evening to end. I felt so alone, I just wanted to be alone.

She could tell and we end up talking about it, talking together for the very last time, a few days later.

She confessed then that she had talked a lot to distract me; she didn’t know exactly why she did it, she didn’t consider herself to be a real talker, per se, but it just sort of happened whenever she was around me. It wasn’t that she didn’t want me to express myself, she insisted; but she couldn’t come up with any reason for why she did what she did with me.

She did, however, come up with many reasons why it was most likely my fault that she talked so much around me.

“You’re too good of a listener,” Abigail dully explained at the Astoria bar where we had met that last time. “You ask too many questions,” she delivered.

My jaw fell.

“Are you kidding me?” I piped, maybe too loudly because in the corner of the happy hour bar where we sat, she shushed me.

“You can ask questions, too, you know, Abbi: no one is stopping you. This is ridiculous logic.” I strained my neck and flexed my fingers in frustration. The concrete stone of the bar looked dangerously tempting: I was so upset, I wanted to smash my forehead into its grey smooth hardness.

Abigail, embarrassed by my anger and frustration, snapped at me to sit up and gather myself together: she didn’t want the bartenders to see her with an emotional person. I replied the bartenders probably didn’t care and won’t remember us by tomorrow, but she didn’t believe me. I said we could move to a table to talk but she relayed that would draw even more attention to us. Nothing I did was right or valid.

And I was too good of a listener who asked too many questions.

I didn’t know who this person was all of a sudden: this Abigail who cared more about bartenders; who didn’t feel bad that I was hurt; who blamed me for the things she did.

I didn’t know who this person was because I had been pretending that she didn’t exist. From that night with my mother and seeing that look of horror on Abigail’s face, I had made her and our friendship into entities they weren’t because I wanted the friendship. I wanted it to be a friendship which served me: I even often cited that very night as the ultimate example of Abigail’s affection towards me: I created a narrative to demonstrate Abigail’s selflessness and it wasn’t fully the truth.

In all fairness, Abigail most likely did the best she could that night. She’s not an emotive person and for whatever reasons, my grief and emotion were too much for her to handle. But that doesn’t mean her effort didn’t mean something: it was a good thing for her to do, she did mean well, it still means something to me that she made this effort and she did it the only way she knew how to, by talking about herself.

And I have to take responsibility for my own desperation, my own ability to let a lie thrive somehow, because it’s attractive, because I want it, because I covet what it means.

I so desperately want to be cared for that I will take care in any form it comes and I will create a story to make it sound more care-y: I have to take responsibility for the inherent dishonesty which comes with that desperation. I have to manage my own easy slide into doing the other person’s work: I might be denying myself more satisfying rapports because I spend so much time and energy on cardboard flat relationships I am too desperate to leave.

*

Abigail and I parted ways on the sidewalk outside the bar: we had already made tentative plans for that following weekend; we said to each other that we would reach out and firm up those plans but we never did.

She may have felt it was my place to reach out to her and, of course, I certainly felt like if she really cared, it was high time she actually make some effort. But no one, between the two of us, ever made an effort again.

I replayed moments from our friendship as the next weeks passed: I mourned a friendship I knew was dying and instead of sadness, I felt anger for a couple of months. And after that anger eased, the sadness never came; instead, I felt distance, clarity and relief, a full detachment. I even felt gratitude: Abigail and I had had fun times and even though that was not enough to sustain the connection for me, those times still happened, we still enjoyed each other, there was still something there.

But it wasn’t enough, not for me.

And I am too good of a listener and I do ask too many questions so it’s a gift to recognize how much of a doormat I can be and to forgive anyone who takes too much advantage of that. My lesson is to be honest with myself, to not make excuses for other people, to carry my own load, not carry the load of both parties in the rapport. To open my mouth. To ask, even to demand. To see what is there, not what I want to be there.

I am my own best friend but that only goes so far. Part of my self-love, especially now that my charming, abusive and neglectful Mummy is gone, is cultivating a better support system. To maybe one day get a text from someone who really wants to be there for me and who would just listen to me; to feel more normal by love, the way I think other people are, people like Abigail, partnered people, people seeming to be surrounded by large circles of other people, typical people, people whose mothers easily loved them. I define myself as not normal: maybe that is a defense mechanism, maybe no one is really that normal. Maybe with relationships, it is more about fit, more about deep comfort, than it is about anything else.

I had a lousy teacher in all this: my mother. Her narcissistic personality disorder mired her maternal strategies. She was competitive, manipulative, subtly domineering, withholding, playing favorites, thinking solely of herself. She knew no better. She didn’t understand relationships, it was all about control for her; it was all about keeping the attention of all the people around her. It was about fighting, complaining, purposefully not feeling joy, purposefully denying joy to those around her.

She fought with me the most: it is likely she loved me the least.

And yet I was the one who called her back that night when I told her hundreds of times not to leave, to come back to me.

It was love I felt. But it was also severe attachment. And fear. It was safe to love my mother even though her love for me was conditional and sporadic: it was still all I knew and all I wanted. It was almost intoxicating when it arrived and disappointingly familiar when it flew away again, as it always did. It was all a game to my mother, a beautiful and beloved woman: she had more than enough love around her, she couldn’t spare more my way, I needed it. It was a deliberate game to deny it to me.

I don’t see it immediately, when someone uses me, when a charismatic and gregarious person takes me under their wing; sometimes I get enchanted too quickly, I conceive of something which isn’t there, because I am charmed by the idea of appearing attractive to someone else. I don’t know how to parse that all out because I did that every day with every situation with my mother: I just wanted her to like me and there was a power she held over me because she did not fully like me. She even joked that she loved me but didn’t like me.

*

I know this much: if someone loves me, they’ll want to listen to me. If someone likes me, they’ll want to listen to me.

My ache to be normal can no longer blind me from my pattern of picking people who prefer my silence. My own silence is no longer acceptable to me when I am in the company of other people. My solitude and independence are separate from my silence: just because I am good at being alone, good at listening, good at asking questions, doesn’t mean I don’t want or need to express myself to other people. To be needy, to ask, to talk, to talk a lot. To be brave in my abbynormality: to be finally speaking about it.