The Mother Grief

Content Warning: Suicide Attempt, Illness, Discussion of Weight

I haven’t talked to my mother since October.

above: Photo of me in 1996. Mom’s handwriting on the back reads “Nice Mohawk, Li! Good job, Daddy!”

She and I have always had the strangest relationship. In high school she was both my equal enemy (I always felt as though in the realm of teenager vs. parent we were on an even playing field of screaming and crying) and a surrogate mother to my closest friends when they needed an escape from their own homes. But high school was short lived. I spent the last two years away in Michigan dorms. I for all intents and purposes moved out of the house when I was 16. I never returned to living with my parents.

I want to talk about our relationship when I was a child but I fear that this part of the story is currently clouded. I have learned new things about my mother in the last few months. I have had to reframe memories in the context of her intentions at the time, in the context of the harm being done to others around her that I was too young to see or know. How do I talk about a past with a person whom I’m unsure existed?