In relation

Part of how we individuate as adolescents is to cast ourselves against our parents. My parents were devoutly religious. So I believed in nothing. I had an active death wish as a teen. I was self loathing. Riddled with shame. Contemptuous of everything. Desperate for some truth. Just tell me the truth. What is the truth?

When my grandmother was dying last year, my mother texted me for the first time and said, “Your grandmother loves you more than you know, and so do I.”

I suspect it was one of those moments where my mother hoped all would be forgiven. We’ve had our differences, but look — DEATH! — let’s just get along. Life is so short.

It is. Life is so short. Too short to tolerate assholes.

And now the hard thing. I will tell you the hard thing. I have watched friends lose mothers. I have watched good mothers die. I have clung to every mother who has ever tried to love me. I have wanted a mother more desperately than I have ever wanted anything else.

But I won’t take this one. This one is no mother of mine.

Yet I believe in grace. I do. I believe in grace. So how can both of these things exist? A mother you won’t forgive and a belief in grace?

I take no arms against her. I have no agenda to destroy her. Most of the time I’m surprised to remember I still have parents. To run into them in the city where we all live. I have no ill will toward them; I just don’t associate with them at all. I have cut them out of my life the way I would cut a tumor. The cancer of their hatred. Their wrathful god.

I could argue it’s self preservation, but that’s not true. I have survived them just fine. If I have scars they’re so much like my skin now I can’t tell the difference. I separated myself from them because my wife and child are too important for me to tolerate polite condemnation. There is no space in my life for people who pretend I’m play-acting a family.

As adolescents, we kill kings. But I am no child. I have become the mother I wished for. In relation to my own mother, I am not her pole. Neither the dark half nor the light one. It doesn’t work like that. The only thing I divorced myself from is her shame.