2003-02-19 - 5:11 a.m.

I realized something quite sad. I’m not happy that my mom is here. I felt no excitement as I smiled my big smile when I found out she was coming – I actually felt a twinge of dread. I’m not sorry she came, I just don’t feel anything positive about her arrival either. Truth be told, I’m actually waiting for her to go home.

She doesn’t belong here. She is the jarring point sticking out, pulling my present reality down, twisting it in painful knots. With her here, I suddenly find myself closing in on my thoughts, unable to translate them into words that can make some sense to the people who are willing to read them.

In this place, I felt as if I've expanded my senses, that I’ve sunk deeper into my skin while stretching my skin further out. I felt like I’ve grown to fill the space inside me, even as the space itself has grown. But when I saw her, and heard her, it seemed like I’ve contracted again, and it’s a sickening feeling to collect your expansion abruptly, without preparation, without any perceptible reason, except the knowledge that you will not be understood otherwise.

So I must suddenly hide the way I’ve changed, take a few steps back to the past and the way I was, regress, so that I can connect with her and play the role of daughter, just as she is used to, just as I’ve always done. The really sad part is, it’s a role I am starting to loathe. It’s a role I take only under obligation. Because she is my mother, and I must love her.

And so I do. It isn’t hard, because she isn’t hard to love, but I sometimes wonder why I must do it. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a deeper, more compelling reason hiding just beneath the surface.

But love for her has always rendered me afraid to look. I am afraid to know that underneath it all, there is only the fact that she is my mother. I am afraid that underneath it all, the truth that will confront me is that it is what I must do because the world says it, nothing more.

I am afraid because I love her, and if that is all that there is underneath, I will not know how to love her still.

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