To my mom

I write letters to people when I can't say things to their face. I rarely give them to who they're intended for, sometimes just letting my thoughts escape onto the paper is enough.

To my mom,

While you've been settling into the mundane routine of work-home-repeat, you've forgotten about your little girl, who's not quite so little anymore.  She's not the immature and naive high school teenager that you still hold grudges against, after all these years, for staying out too late and talking back.  She's grown up a lot this past year while finding out who she is and where she's supposed to be.  Slowly but surely, and not in the most conventional of ways, she'll find her place and she will be okay.  Life has chewed her up and spit her back out and she's trying to piece herself back together, knowing that its all part of the process that's making her into the person she's proud to be.  She overcame one of the darkest periods of her life by letting God heal and rebuild her mind.  It's still a daily struggle, but she's filled with a Hope and a Love that shines into the darkness trapped inside.  She had her first real broken heart from someone she trusted with everything and considers herself lucky that she lived twenty-two years without knowing she could feel such pain and despair.  She's been betrayed and used and replaced, but she's going to make it to through this much stronger, wiser, and ready for the next phase.  She carries around the defeating truth that she will never have a healthy relationship with her own mother because she's never enough and never right.  She's tired of being put down, compared, and measured against standards she'll never meet.  She just wants to have a conversation, to talk about her day and her fears and her struggles like a normal mother and daugter.  She doesn't want to spill her thoughts with the fear that they'll be thrown in her face, or that she's just wasting her mother's time.  Greatest of all is the hurt she feels when her mother ridicules the God who's saved her from a life of self-destruction.  Time and time again, she's left with nothing and turns to God for meaning, purpose, signifigance.  When will she learn?  When will they learn?