Inevitable consequence

You are not a bad person for not being there.

You are a person who was not given a loving foundation as a child. Your mother never expected you to hold her accountable. Your father enjoyed his lifetime of atrocities.

The pain of it does not get smaller the more you think about it. It actually gets more painful as you parent. The same woman who was absent in every way that mattered, was so consumed by her own world that her child grew up in the same house as her while feeling completely alone.

She’s old and now she expects you to show up.

The script has flipped. She has had a lifetime to portray a victim. She has well thought out her character and appears softer in the way people sometimes get when the power dynamic of old age shifts.

There are relatives and flying monkeys murmuring about family and loyalty and her being your only mother. There is possibly a performance of vulnerability in your future, that looks nothing like the woman you grew up with, because the woman you grew up with did not need anything from you except blind loyalty and parentified behaviors and she made sure that you knew it.

You cannot opt out of a child's entire emotional landscape, leave her open to abuse, leave you to raise yourself and expect a hug when you show back up.

The relationship you have in someone's adulthood is built from everything that came before it. You do not get to skip relationship building and parental guidance and then weakly show up for the benefits.

The victim narrative in this specific situation is nauseating. This victimization requires a complete erasure her complicity and negative support. It requires her to position your absence now as something that is happening to her, rather than the inevitable consequence of what she did to you. Poor her. And there are people around her who buy it, who never saw what happened behind closed doors. They weren’t around.

She now lives for the performance of motherhood she puts on for a new audience. Those people will have opinions. I say fuck them.

Natalie Mosley Klenotic