the last time I’ll go for lunch with my mother

what life looks like before and after abuse

I swing from thoughts to a deep sense of presence,
to lavender skies and emerald water,
I ride my bike near the coast of Cascais, 
and I get it. 
this is how life is, 
romantic.
when nature isn’t something you just see on a Sunday,
when it’s part of you,
all one consciousness. 
but I snap out of this memory because 
today, 
is one day further away from my childhood. 

I can see my true nature slipping away. 
I can see the memories getting blurry,
like smoke in the air, twirling with the wind. 
I try to catch the sparks that are left,
little pieces of hope, 
of joy, resistant like sea shells washed up by the shore, 
but I know I lost most along the way.

the thing is people learn different lessons from pain. 
some learn compassion, others learn resentment. 
some hurt others, some hurt themselves. or both. 
and I’ve been a victim of someone who learnt the wrong lesson. 
and who made their own version of justice, 
which was to take every last bit of sunshine a person has left. 

so they pass down hopelessness like a mantra. like a folk song. 
and you sing it with your subconscious. you walk to its rhythm. it’s as comforting as a bedtime story. 

and sooner than later you believe that’s who you are. hopeless.

I don’t know if today will be the last day I’ll go for lunch with my mother, 
but if it is, 
it’s probably for the better. 

All that is keeping me complacient is guilt.
guilt that she fostered in me.
so that when she says she's sad and she misses me, 
there would be a part of me that somehow believes if I did everything she wanted, 
if I really gave up on myself, 
she would finally get off the sofa. 

but the truth is no matter how close I get to the idea of perfection that she has in her head, 
I will never be as submissive as when I was a little girl. 
and that's what she misses. that's what she means when she says she misses me. 
and if her happiness really is tied to the possibility of those memories repeating again, 
then I'll have to understand that she might never be happy. 
and I guess 
in some way 
that's okay.

one of the things that still makes me feel shame nowadays is how present she is in my life. even when she's living by a different sea. when flying is required to be physically near her, there she is, like a fly buzzing next to my ear. 
I wrote countless of journal entries on theories on how I should act with her so she wouldn’t be mad. 
on theories on how she might have become the person she is today. 
I’ve asked every single piece of nature what to do and I was never in a place to open up to its wisdom because I didn't even know what wisdom looked like. 
all I’ve done is circle around.
using overthinking as an strategy not to feel miserable
knowing that I will never get to have a healthy loving mum. 

I wish people around me had the capacity to understand me.
to see who I am, under all these layers of self-doubt and insecurity. 
that I've always been an intelligent, curious person. 
reading books about everything; polar bears, stars, whatever it was. 
it sounds ridiculous but now I can't get myself to finish one book. I'm so tired I can't focus on something like that anymore. 

I used to have the most energy to run around and now I find it hard to think that used to be me. someone with energy. 
I wish people saw who I am under all the disappointment I've gone through. 
that I used to write songs even when I didn't know what writing a song meant. 
that I was always painting and daydreaming and didn't care if anything I did was bad. I didn't have the concept of bad. I just knew art. that was it. 
I was so good at having fun. 
and was very sociable too, always going up to everyone in the cafe. I loved everyone. 
Now I can barely trust anyone. 

society glorifies motherhood. and I get it. 
but for me it was the worst thing society could have ever told me. 
she’s been through a lot
she’s doing her best 
she loves you more than anything in the world. 
but I’ve been through a lot and I make mistakes but I would never treat someone like that. 
doing your best sometimes is not enough.
and understanding where someone’s pain comes from is useful until you use it as an excuse for their behaviour.

and love, 
well,
that’s not love. 
attachment, maybe. 
but I have grown to hate how people use this word carelessly. 

love is sweet like a pastry. 
it’s magical. it makes everything meaningful. even when it’s mundane, is like fairy dust falling on top of every boring task.
the grass looks different. the trees look alive. the universe loves you. 
it feels like the water and the sky in cascais. 
it’s romantic. it’s elegant like black and it smells of lemon and rosemary.
it feels lilac sometimes. 

I don’t know. 

it doesn't exist to excuse abusive behaviour. 
it's not meant to be used to confuse people, to make them think they are gonna get flowers and chocolate and instead they get feeling like an absolute loser. 

and do I love her? 
a lot of people think I do. 
I'm actually not really sure.
maybe I love her in the way that a victim loves their abuser. 
in the way that her voice is in my head, present in my days,
and it tells me 
don’t wear that 
don’t hang out with them 
don’t sing, you’re out of tune 
don’t write songs, that’s embarrassing 
don’t keep going, honesty you might as well give up you’re so lazy
do I love her?
I'm not sure. 
maybe I love her in the sense that I love all humans and deep down I have empathy for everyone. 

but “I love you” is such a conflicting sentence for me.
and it has been used to guilt-trip me. 
it has worked. 
I love love. and in some weird way I do love my mother. 
and that is why I put myself aside to please her so I could at least witness her feeling something other than absolute dread and misery. 
I was gonna say I would like to see her happy, 
but I would actually just wish to see her calm,
at peace with the mistakes she's made and ready to live again.
I do want the best for her, 
maybe that's love in someone's language.

to every single person that has misunderstood me and thought I was a “complicated daughter”:

no, I’m not a rebel. and if I am, I am a rebel in the best sense of the word. I challenge everything I ever hear and reflect on it like my soul depends on it. I create art, I want the best for every single person in the world no matter where they come from, which apparently nowadays is being rebellious too. but I am not a rebel like you think, I am not a complicated person, I am not less intelligent than others, I am not lost or directionless, I know what I want but my mother, the one you love and admire so much, has gotten in my way all my life. Every time I’ve taken a step forward, she’s pulled be backwards, back into misery. and when she’s not around, I do it to myself, I sabotage myself, that’s what safety means to me now. so next time you ask me to give my mum another chance or to be more empathetic, know that I don't know if I will ever stop giving her chances, that my goal now is to do it in the most manageable way possible, in a different continent if that can be arranged. but that I have given and she has taken. and that has been our relationship in the past thirteen years.

to be honest,  I think she wants me to fulfill the prophecy that this family is fucked.
and doesn’t want me to be an exception.  
I guess what would that say about her right?  
why can I be happy and not her?  

growing up for me has meant realising that my mother is not this precious untouchable well-meaning being. instead she’s actually quite manipulative, abusive and kinda wants her family to be miserable too. and I have been trying to accept this for months and still avoid it.

that my mum’s ego is bigger than her love for me
that she cares more about how much I might suffer when she’s gone,  than about our relationship. 
and at the end of the day I've kept who I was quiet,  
I tried to be less me so there would be less of me she could judge, and now I'm finding it hard to live in this world  with radical trust in myself.   

I find myself in this place in my life where I don't have a lot of friends too.  
I gravitated towards hurt people. and then hurt people became pretty strange and selfish and now not even our pain is enough to keep us together. 
because when you’re a teenager and you’ve experienced this kind of pain,  talking about surface level things like movies and boys make you feel so shitty and unseen.  and funnily enough I’m trying to bring that back into my life, 
talking about light, fun topics. 
and understand that I didn’t fit in because happiness became a very unachievable thing for me.

I swing from thoughts to a deep sense of presence,
to wet grass, and trees that are such good huggers. 
I lay on my back and look at the moon in the daylight
and I get it. 
this is how life is, 
breath-taking. 
I ask the sea, 
could you take care of me?
she teaches me that beauty still exists.

I am excited and that means a lot to me. trusting again. coming back to myself. holding onto those memories because it's who I am, it's my essence before it was taken away. 

and sometimes I don't know how I manage but I'm not angry, not as much as I used to be, because I know when I learn to really live on my own terms, I will never ever hesitate. 

This is a very deeply personal poem. With it, I don’t seek pity or compassion. All is well. But I really needed to get this out of my chest, the ugly side of things sometimes feels very vulnerable to share in a poem. I like poems that talk about beautiful things like waterfalls and flowers, so it really feels like a lot to share this and I totally understand if it’s too much. The idea behind this poem is just to explore what it’s like to be in this world before and after abuse, how your view on the world and your perception of yourself changes, how you get tired, look sparkless, how you stop finding it fun to dream about your future. I feel for everyone who has experienced this and for a moment here we are not gonna “hold space” for mothers when they display abusive behaviours, we are just gonna be here for the daughters and the sons.

This is my previous poem. Ever since I wrote this I’ve had a pretty amazing week, just feeling very deserving of happiness. It feels like I was born again hahahaha