It was hard, you know, leaving. 

I love her, but she wounds me. She puts me down and apologizes, and she puts me down again and apologizes once more, and repeat. It is confusing at times, and I even feel guilty about it. How could I ever think poorly of my own mother? I beat myself up if I even think of it, for she remains my mother. We are supposed to be family.

But.

I am her daughter, isn’t she supposed to wish only the best for me? In theory, yes. But in practice, she was never really good at it. I was never owed a break or encouraging words. Every damn mistake I made felt like the end of the world. And God forbid I was not perfect like the others, I would never hear the end of it. She made me feel ugly, worthless, useless. She made me think that I had to earn her love, and her standards were high, unattainable. 

The house was always filled with screaming, fighting and hostility, so I had to learn to depend on myself. I spent most of my days in my room when I was not in school, listening to music to drown out any of my thoughts or their screams.

She is probably cursed with her own trauma, generational trauma. And she refused to do something about it. She kept making the same mistakes so many people before her had made. I know that it is so ingrained in her head that she doesn’t even realize it sometimes. My heart aches for her because she hasn’t found a way out of it. 

I could no longer stay and try to heal her when I had so many traumas of my own to deal with, undoing generations and generations worth of trauma. I could not have her in my life; I had to leave. It was the only way to guarantee that at least one of us could do something about it. It was the only way to guarantee that it ended with me.