Dear Mom

Dear Mom,

I’m writing this letter with with a heavy heart and weeping eyes. Memories are trying to drown me but I cling to this pen and it’s ink, as though they are life rafts. I grew up with the sea and the challenge it presents to all who enter it. I faced it’s currents, it’s storms, it’s waves, and in doing so I learned to swim. That’s what this was like to me, swimming, only there was no life guard on duty and no coastguard to rescue me. Thinking again it wasn’t swimming was it? It was drowning. No way to scream, no sunlight to escape to, just black water, just black. I know what it’s like to drown. I was six remember, and the life guards were changing shifts. It took them almost three minutes to revive me and the doctor said my heart had stopped for at least one of them. That’s how I know that this experience has been exactly like drowning.

It started quietly the way these things often do. I was young and I was foolish, so I drank maybe one, possibly two pints. I can’t even be certain what kind of alcohol was in those cups, I regret that now, but it was enough to cloud my judgment for one night. When you found me and her we were both tongue deep in the other’s mouth clueless to the our identical gender. I don’t regret that because it didn’t feel wrong, in fact in that moment I would have sworn that everything was exactly right.

You would not have. If the pitch of your scream was any indication you most definitely did not think that anything was right. I have scars on my arms from your fingernails as they dug into my skin when you ripped us off each other, a fading line by my ear where my head hit the floor. Did you even care that I needed stitches? No, never mind I already know the answer. You didn't care because in that moment I became a stranger to you, a pariah not worthy of your care. Never mind the sixteen years you were my mother, never mind the nine months you carried me in your womb, none of that mattered now. In that one action with that one girl I had ceased to be your daughter.

In the past year with grandma I’ve come to accept this, not to understand it, I don’t think that I will ever understand it, but to accept it. You probably don’t care but I want you to know that my girlfriend and I are going to the same law school, Harvard if you can believe it. I’m going to be lawyer Mom, just like we always talked about. I hope someday you'll see that I never changed, that I never grew horns and a tail, that I'm still your daughter... but I get the feeling that I shouldn't hold my breath. I hope you actually read this letter because foolishly I miss you.

Goodbye Mom.