Happy Birthday

Today is my biological mother's fifty-seventh birthday.

Every year, this day holds a certain heaviness in my heart. I've been trying to let that heaviness go, but have found it extremely difficult.

I hope today is a good day for you... I don't quite know what to call you, because 'mom' doesn't seem fitting. A mom is someone who's there for their child through the good and bad times, who doesn't just turn and run when things get hard. Regardless, if you're out there somewhere, if you read this sometime down the line, I hope the start of your fifty-seventh year on this Earth is wonderful.

It's funny, despite my lack of a solid mother figure for so many years, how I gravitated towards spiritual preferences that centered around female deities. I've always found that to be particularly ironic, though I can't honestly say that I believe in much of anything deity-wise nowadays. I've more or less come to the conclusion that people hold the power to change their lives, that praying is a cop-out because the only person who's going to get you out of a bad situation is you. Maybe that stems from you- my mother- being unable to battle your demons. Sometimes I think that you were weak, so weak, and I promise myself that no matter how much I take after you, I won't let my weakness control me.

Despite that, I'm still constantly afraid. I'm terrified that anyone I get close to is going to see something in me that's broken, that they don't want to stick around to fix, and leave. Dad reiterated, for many years after you left, that it wasn't my fault. I knew that. I knew that I was too young to have been the direct cause of your alcoholism and your eventual departure. I was well aware of that. But beyond that, I'm still your daughter. I'm the product of a woman who couldn't beat her fear, and so I need to be hyper vigilant about my own fears controlling me. It's so difficult to do that, sometimes, and I occasionally wonder if this was how you must have felt. Like your world was spinning out of control, like everyone who cared didn't care about you enough.

I've allowed your legacy, this broken part of me, to affect my current relationship (or lack thereof, now). I scared a guy who really could have been 'the one' away. He's terrified of what would happen if we were to re-enter a romantic relationship, and I honestly can't blame him. I'm fucking scary. I get so afraid, so insecure, that I cling to him, I suffocate him. But then he does one thing, says one thing that upsets me so much that I push him as far away as I can. I try to make him hate me, because any critique from him comes across like a screaming LED sign that says I'm not good enough, and that hurts so much that I want to hurt him and show him what it's like to feel like this. We go around in circles, never solving anything, and really I don't hate him for it. I hate myself, sometimes. And somewhere in there, part of me wants to hate you for making me this way, or maybe for just making me in general, it's hard to discern the difference between the two feelings.

God, it's your birthday and I'm blathering on about myself. But... I've gotten a step closer to finding your family, Mom, and maybe to getting the answers I've been searching for. Your mother's address is on my phone, though I couldn't find a phone number, and I've written and re-written the same letter over and over again for the past few days, and I don't know when I'll send it to her, but I'll get there eventually. It's been an extremely difficult letter to write- asking someone 'are you my grandmother' isn't exactly something I ever imagined myself doing, much less in writing- but someday, I'll manage to send it. And maybe, if she responds, I can find out more about your roots, and by default more about mine.

It doesn't really seem appropriate to end this blog in the same way I've ended a few of the others. Suffice to say, today is probably going to be difficult, like it has been every year for the past fourteen of them. But I hope you're well, and I hope that you're reading this. I love you, mom.