“Your mom seems like a good parent, you are just a teenager, you’ll eventually have a good relationship with her.” The words that enrage me. Except, the only person I can blame is myself. As someone who is full of love and empathy, I constantly defend the actions of anyone who has hurt me so that they can keep their good image. I am always the first to forgive everyone because I always try to find the good in them. Unfortunately, my mom is the first person to ever break my heart so horribly that I can’t find it in me to forgive her. Even though I never will receive one, no amount of apologies will ever give me the relationship with my mom that I have always longed for. The words she has told me throughout my lifetime have cut too deep and will forever be engraved in my mind. The sad truth is, nobody realizes how much of an impact words can have on someone until it is too late. Mom, you were supposed to be one there to help me through all the little things, like my boy drama and my first heartbreak, instead, you were my first heartbreak.

I’m thirteen years old and I am making my plate at the family cookout. From behind me I hear someone tell me: “Are you really going to eat all of that? You should take less, you've gained a lot of weight.” The words that always made my stomach drop. The words that no little girl should ever have to hear, especially from her mom. I walk to the patio table, set my food down, and grab my towel to cover my body. These words hurt, but at that age, I was able to brush it off and keep going on with my life. As I get older the words she says to me start to cut a little deeper. I start to change myself. At this point, everything I do is for my mom’s approval. All I want is to be good enough for her. As she compliments the changes she notices in my body, she starts to judge the changes that she notices in my personality. She never fails to make me feel bad about not always smiling at home and isolating myself so much. The thing she always failed to realize is that being in my room is the only time I don’t feel the need to be happy in order to protect the people around me. My mom is the one person in my life who will always judge me but will never just ask the simple words: “Are you ok?” She has never cared to truly get to know me as a person and I have finally come to the realization that she never will. 

It’s a Saturday afternoon at 1pm and I walk downstairs for the first time all day. After going on a tangent and telling me that I am lazy and have a sad life just because it was so late and I had been alone in my room all day, my mom finally moves on and tells me to unload the dishwasher. I unload the dishwasher as I am told, but I accidentally put a container in the wrong spot. That’s when my mom gets mad and aggressively says, “Why can you never do anything right? This is why you are never going to make it on your own after you graduate next year.” As I look around and start to stare at the kitchen floor tiles, counting each one to try and forget what I just heard, my ability to speak leaves for a solid 5 minutes. I sit there and listen to the sounds of the people talking on the TV and the faucet running in the background, the anger and sadness I feel starts to increase. It feels as if somebody just kept stabbing me in the heart repeatedly. Usually, I would just try to let her hurtful words slip my mind, but this time, it felt impossible. I walk into the living room and I speak my truth. I yell and I cry. I finally tell her how much the words she has told me growing up have affected me and made me feel as if I can never be good enough for her. As I tell her these things, I have false hope that maybe for once she will understand and show some sort of sympathy towards how she has made me feel all of my life. Instead, she says the words that will forever make me feel worthless. The words that I would never wish upon my worst enemy to hear from their mom. “You are an awful daughter and I might love you but I hate the person you are.” This is the heartbreaking moment that I realized, I never want to fix the broken relationship I have with my mom. 

As I look around, I see the relationship that all of my friends have with their moms. They talk about how they can tell their moms everything and how their mom is their “hero”. As I listen, you would think I would feel sad, but instead I feel happy. I feel happy that my friends do have someone that they can go to with all of their problems. It gives me a sense of relief that if I can’t be there for some reason, they have someone that they trust who can be there. Later on, when I am alone, I do start to get sad that I never will get the chance to have that type of bond with my mom. I feel guilty for being upset because I do realize that others have it worse and then I start to think that maybe my mom was right about me being selfish. I carry her hurtful words with me everywhere I go. When I look into the mirror or eat food I think about her calling me fat. When I get a bad grade I think about her telling me that I will never be successful. When I want to reach out for help when I am struggling, I wonder if everyone thinks I am selfish like she once said. I start to overthink what every person I know thinks about me and I sit and wonder if they hate who I am as a person just like my mom does. The worst part of these hurtful words she has said to me, is that to this day, I still believe every single one. 

After keeping these things my mom has told me all of my life a secret, in march of my junior year I finally told my bestfriend. It was the day after my mom had told me that she hated me as a person for probably the 5th time this year. As my bestfriend and I were having a deep conversation while we were procrastinating making our presentation on mental health, I finally decided to ask if what was said to me was normal. I started off telling her as a joke but then I started crying as I realized how deeply these words had affected me. My best friend, Sam, was in shock because I had never actually told her about my mom saying anything like that to me. This reaction made me realize that maybe I do have the right to be upset and hurt by the words said to me. The moment I had finally told someone about that for the first time, was the moment I almost felt a breath of relief. I didn’t feel relieved because now someone else knows who my mom really is. I felt relieved because as I was carrying the weight of those words in my head secretly, they had gotten so heavy that I had started to feel like my life wasn’t worth living anymore. After I had finally told someone, the pain I had been carrying in just my head alone had finally felt a little lighter, giving me the strength that I needed to keep going. 

The weight of those words have led me to struggle with body image and eating issues, at points, they have made me even lose hope in living. Thankfully, I have my amazing best friends who have saved me in so many ways without even realizing it. The points in my life that I thought I wasn’t going to make it through because I was struggling so bad, my mom wasn’t there, but my best friends were. At times, I wish I could thank my mom and tell everyone how she is my inspiration and the person I look up to like everyone else does, but I have learned to accept that will never be the case for me. Luckily, I am just as proud to tell people about my best friends and how much they have inspired me. I love talking about how my best friend Sam has inspired me to have a kind heart towards everyone I come across. I love talking about how my best friend Hannah has helped me to not care what others think about me. I love telling people how my best friend Rachel has inspired me to work hard in everything that I do. While it would be nice to have an emotionally present mom, I have recently realized that I can make it through my life without her. In other words, carrying the weight of wishing I had a relationship with my mom can be heavy, but being fortunate enough to have such great friends makes it a little more bearable. My hope is that after I graduate, when I can get away from the home that ruined me, I can finally allow myself to grow and heal in the ways that I can’t right now. I would never want people to think my mom is a bad person, but someday I want people to realize that sometimes the inside of a home can look a lot different than the outside.