Co-existing
(by CJ Howard)
I don’t know if my mum would like me if she met me now. If we were strangers, passing on a street, what would she think of my hair, my nose, my clothes, my legs, the way I sat at my computer? I wonder if she would still make the comments she says out loud.
The sad thing is I don’t think I will ever fully understand what she is thinking. And it’s strange, I spend every summer with someone almost 40 years my senior, who has lived a whole life before I entered it. She was robbed of that, and it is my fault. She had a life, and then I was born and she became a mother. That is the fate of every daughter. Our mother looks at us and has to hate us a little because she knows what we are about to experience. A life full of freedom that was stolen from her by a child. And the child is a girl. Pity.