Dear mother By: Samara Smith

Dear Mother,

I lost the love of my life. He left me and I was ripped from my center. Snipped at the root. Left untethered to float around a fiery hell of broken love. He was the love of my life. We were going to move to Germany together. We talked about having a house with a garden and what color we wanted to paint the walls in the kitchen. We would visit the farmers market every Sunday where he would buy fresh vegetables for pasta and I would go and smell every candle. I would wake up on a Monday morning to the smell of brewing coffee and a soft kiss on the cheek. Every Thursday we would visit our friends in the city and play games and laugh until there is nothing left. We talked about how we would divide holidays with our families and argued about whether to send our kids to private or public school. We built a future in a dream world with imaginary happiness and promises so tight I couldn’t breathe. I decided I would love him for the rest of my life. And after two years and a lifetime, he left me and he didn’t look back. And he went off to love again while I'm cursed with loving him forever alone. I don’t believe in the love of your life. I don't trust fate. I could have been happy. I made a decision to love and he left me. He decided otherwise. And I want to be angry, I want to shout and sometimes I wish he died. Or I died. So I could force him to love me in the end.

When I was a kid I used to love to play hide and seek. It was one of my favorite games and I had a favorite hiding spot in a dresser on the back porch. I loved the game because of the chase, sitting there in the dark waiting to be discovered. The seeker desperately wanting you to reveal yourself. In some ways, love is the same. As you switch off seeking and hiding, always sure to surprise each other when finally caught. I would smile as my cousins opened the door and the light would rush in. The game of hide and seek is more than it seems. It has a science to it, an art. As a hider you must know the layout of the place well, you have to know your map to know what the best places are to be unseen. More than that you must know your seeker. Know where they would look, where they could. You bring yourself into their body, into their world. This brings you closer.

These habits stick to you as you get older, the wanting and seeking. He was patient. He knew I had a lot of practice, and that I had learned to hide myself well. The game between us would always be triggered by the past and we would take on our respective roles once it commenced. One day I saw something that reminded me of what it felt like to be left, and I was pulled inside myself. So I opened his dresser and climbed in and I was ten year old me again. I was surprised I could fit and I was surprised it still felt so safe. Inside I sat surrounded by his hoodies and t-shirts cushioned by piles of jeans. I made myself as small as I could be. Hoping to disappear into him. When he returned to his room to find me gone it didn’t take long for him to assume his role. I was hearing him rustle around until eventually he opened the door and there I was. Except there was no smile, the light rushed in to reveal me scrunched and crying. I thought I would have more time.

When he found me I was prepared for him to think I was insane and to get upset or at least feel weird. But he didn't get upset, I don't even think he asked me what was wrong. He took all the clothes that were hanging up and placed them on the bed, and then climbed into the dresser and squatted across from me. Our knees tight against each other as we breathed each other in. My face was locked in my knees but I could still feel his gaze, filled with concern and bleeding of desperation. There he was and there I was, we were home. The role of the seeker is similar in some sense, your task requires patience and will and a certain responsibility to the hider that burdens you and yet pushes you forward as you look for something that does not want to be found. It is like chasing a shadow or carrying a cloud. I guess somewhere along the way he grew less patient and the game we once enjoyed felt more like breaking. All together maybe it was never a game at all. What felt like intimacy was really an unbecoming as we lost ourselves within one another. But what else is it to love if not to give yourself away? In one of our last conversations he promised me forever, I should have asked him what he meant. I could be mad. I could light up like fire and my friends wouldn’t blame me. They would embrace me even if they burned. But I could never sit in hate too long. I adjust for those around me because I’ll rather be loved. I’ll always choose love. Like how I chose him. And so the fire stays within as I burn myself slowly.

I hate it about myself and it is why people love me. They say it makes me warm. He made me feel small and crazy and disposable and I loved him anyway. I love him anyway. I would have loved him to the last beat. Until I couldn't anymore. Until it ate me raw. It is the thing I hate most, Mom. And I learned it fromyou, who taught me how to love anyways. In our house, I was meant to assume love. I sculpted love for myself from garnered instances of affection and frozen words of concern. As she scolded me for dishes I felt lucky to share a breath. When she slapped me for being smart-mouthed I longed for another touch. In some other world we talked it out and she was patient and understanding. In another world she would have sat down and introduced me to the birds and the bees before he did. or they did. She would tell me I'm not alone and share her own truth. But that was never her. She would never show herself that easily. I looked forward to when it was time to get my hair done. Crouched beside her bed as she braided my hair I found safety. Between each finger she carried her love. She would tell us stories of her childhood as we would watch her favorite shows. And that is how I always met my mother. As she reached I pulled her to me, and for a moment I held her heart. One day, when I was no older than eight or nine, I wrote a letter to my mom and told her I was running away. Only I did not run away, I went to hide in my favorite spot. And I hid there in the dark and cried, and cried until I went to sleep. I eventually was awakened when my aunt swung the doors open and shook me awake in a panic. Later I would learn that my mom called my aunt panicked and scared and my younger cousin would be the one who would tell them to check the dresser on the back porch where they would find me sleeping. I do not remember what my mom did to trigger such a response from me. I do not even remember ever talking about it with my mom at all. My aunt was the one who sat me down after and told me that I am loved and so I should not run away and that I hurt my mom’s feelings and I should never scare her like that. She told me my mom looked everywhere for me. Everywhere but my favorite hiding spot.

When I think of the relationship I have with my mother now I can only be grateful. I envy those with stories of neglect and abuse who can place their blame comfortably. How could I know hate? How could I truly know hate when she has given me her everything? How can I know hate when she lives within me? When she mentions me in her prayers at night. Dear god bless me with a daughter, dear god extend your reach, dear god help her where I can’t, help her where I failed, lift her above me, dear god hold her please, dear god she is yours. My mom was not an avid churchgoer, there were many times when I would go to church with my grandmother while my mom stayed home on Sundays. But when she did go to church it was a homecoming. I grew up in the same church, where she was a girl, and where she became a woman. I remember one day specifically when she got on the pulpit to testify. My mom was not a church leader or a leader in any sense really she preferred pulling the strings from behind tinted windows.

With leaders, you can usually feel a presentation of self that they engage when they get behind their podium. It is a specific artificial version of themselves that they’ve vetted to be displayed especially with God as witness. Their voice raises an octave or they move their eyes on cue, and you can tell they are performing. But seeing my mom on the pulpit that day she felt more real than I’ve ever seen her before. As if she was meeting herself for the first time. Then she laid herself bare as she testified about her feelings of loneliness and sorrow. And how she burst into tears when Sister Taylor gave her a hug this morning because she forgot what it felt like to be touched with such care. It was then that she filled me. I sobbed listening to her testimony and at how disgustingly human she had been all along. She told me I must always know God even when I don’t believe I must know God. She was pleading. It was her way of giving me the parts of herself I needed that were lost in the years of her own story. She was giving me air and throwing me into the sky. In knowing god I found you.

I lost the love of my life and I wish you would call me. I wish you would tell me I will be loved bigger. That I am loved. That being left doesn’t make it less real. It doesn't make me less. I wish you would tell me one day I’ll look back and be glad he left when he did. And those holes from the pieces of me that he still holds are only garden beds for new growth. I wish she was here in my bed to hold me while I cried. I wish she would hold me. I wish I could hate her. And be angry and scream. I wish she would love me in a way that fits. I would tell her she should feel awful for disappearing when she was needed most. That she isn’t allowed to be sad and be a mother. I wish I could make her hate herself as much as I hate me. And that she would love me anyway. Could she love me then? Could she love me through hate, how I’ve loved her?

By: Samara Smith

May 2023