i find myself falling back into the past instead of hoping for the future.

[ this piece is actually from 2020 and i posted an edited version of it on another platform last year. ]

my mother and i were never each others to begin with.

mother’s day: i’m not sure what to think of it anymore. it can be joyful, full of love but not for everyone, not for those who have lost mothers, whose mothers are not there and never have been, for those who have never known their mothers.

love or wishing is mixed with hurt, anger, or loss.

mother’s day is not just cards, flower bouquets, and gifts. it’s slammed doors, words thrown like daggers, silence. writing a card where the spaces between the gratitude speaks.

thank you for always being there for me.
but what about all the times you weren’t. for those years when everything was falling around me and i had no one to hold onto.

thank you for caring for me.
but what can i do with the hurt you’ve left me with also? where am i to put that?

thank you for putting up with me.
but all those times you didn’t. the promises you didn’t keep, the skeletons in the closet of your family history.

i’ve never known my birth mother. i haven’t seen her in a child’s lifetime and i am no longer a child. mother’s day brings the truth that i see someone else’s daughter when i look in the mirror. i will never see myself in someone else’s face, will never have a photograph when everything else is gone.

this loss is generational.

mother’s day is love. not only for biological mothers, the ones who are supposed to love you, supposed to be there. it’s for the women who are there. for the mothers of adopted children, the relatives acting as mothers, the women who love you as a mother would. despite how complicated relationships are, pain is not the only thing that speaks between the spaces of my card.

they are words that can’t be figured out. despite the confusion i have about gratitude between birth parents and adopted parents, that being happy and content feels like betrayal, about the guilt my birth could have left i know this: i love my mother, i know she loves me. we aren’t perfect and our relationship will never be “perfect”.

sometimes today feels like betrayal and i drown in it but the mother who raised me – i wouldn’t want to imagine a life without.

we were not each other’s to begin with but we are now. and for that i can be grateful.

❤

~ ming