Young Writers Society

I've been thinking about motherhood a lot lately. Maybe it's because I want to do something better than my own mother. Just once I want to be able to say, "I told you so." I know that I would leave her in the dust with that. She would no longer be able to say that she accomplished something that I could never do. I'll save my daughter when she asks, I'll be there for my daughter through both the good times and the bad. I won't put a lock on my bedroom door and go there when things seem to go south. I'll keep my head above water longer than she ever could, I'll scale the mountains faster, and love like she never knew how to. My daughter won't feel like a stranger in her own home; I won't be a stranger to my daughter. I'll tell her anything she wants to know; her period, sex, friends, enemies, family, my life, boys, girls, love, hate. Whatever she wants to know, I'll tell my daugher. I won't forget my daughter's birthday and then pretend that I remembered by going to the "grocery store" to get her one present that still has the tag on it that reads "$4". I won't let my daugher become the victim of a sexually frustrated man. I won't let my daughter become a prisoner in her own mind, in her own housem in her own life.

I think that if I take her mistakes and do the complete opposite, I'll be off to a pretty good start. I don't want to hide things from my children unless it's completely necessary.

I understand that my mother was trying to protect me from herself. She was a grenade waiting to go off. At any given moment she could explode and you could never be sure when that moment was going to present itself. She would hide away in her room, door locked, and cry loud enough to create a full show for the neighbors that lived a mile away to hear. A few more hours in that room and we would have been treading in the Nile. Ashes left her window but she promised me that she quit that habit years ago. Needles discarded by the bed when she fell asleep too quickly to clean them up. I was only 12 and I had already seen more than my eyes should have allowed. No, more than my mother should have allowed. But, I'm almost 18 now and it's out of her hands. I've already been tainted by her lies, by her secrets, and by her joke of a marriage. I used to hear the wedding gown and white veil. I used to sit up at night thinking of how my mother's wedding gown and veil were all lies, her pretending to live the "perfect" life. Behind the virgin dress and secret-coated lace that draped over her face, there was an addicted woman, a cancerous woman, a lier, a cheater, a trap door, a woman who beat her daughter, a woman who neglected her daughter and marriage, a woman whose husband would rather sleep with someone of the same sex, and a woman with far too many fake smiles. She had gotten good at that. She was the entertainer. When I was a child, I imagined that I lived with a traveling circus. My mother was the woman who tamed the lions and pretended not to be afraid of their sharp claws, my step father was the very lion that she was trying so desperate to tame, my father was the human smoke machine, and I was the little girl without a tongue.

Welcome to my circus, my life.