The words drained from my pen, dripping sadly onto the page. As the ink slowly seeped into the warmth of the paper, my hands stopped shaking. My racing heart started to ease. My breath regained a composed, melodic rhythm.

I remember the day she moved out of our house. My mother fixed the room in one last look and hugged me tight. I could smell her. It wasn’t perfume—just the smell of mom. I inhaled one more sniff from her hair and tried to remember what I felt when I hugged her as a child. That innocent love. A sharp pain of anger simmered in my chest when I retreated and saw her face. The same eyes that lied to me. The conflicting stimuli perplexed my mind. I could smell the nostalgic memory of my nurturer, yet I saw the reality of my mother’s face pleading with the same deceptive expression.

The divorce became official. A couple of months passed and I attempted to reach out. She made attempts, invited me over, but I had made excuses. My dad encouraged me to initiate a get-together. He tried to be delicate about the situation.

“You don’t have to worry about hurting my feelings. You’re eighteen. You can stay at whichever place you want to,” he would often say.

I decided to spend the night at her house. Looking into the doorway, I stopped at the threshold I was about to cross. A new beginning? The moment was fleeting, the threshold tainted by anger and shadows of the past. My foot crossed the chasmic divide into the house which loomed foreign, like a new neighbor’s home. Some furniture from our old house littered the space, awkward and out of place. It wasn’t at home. I wasn’t at home. I tried to imagine how my life would make new memories from these wooden floors but I came up blank. I didn’t tell my mother this.

We went to Valle Luna and ordered our usual lunch. Pollo Fundido and Green Chille Enchiladas. Some of the salsa ran down my chin and I wiped it away. A flicker of a smile playfully twisted her face. Even with the smile, she seemed distant. I wondered if she was sick, she barely touched her food.

“Are you okay?” I asked, watching her push her beans with a chip repeatedly across her plate.

“My stomach is a little bleh today. But don’t worry. I’ll be fine,” she said, a whiny tone to her voice. I couldn’t place it. It made me feel bad that she was queasy, but I felt like she was trying too hard to make me feel bad for her. She liked to play victim. I couldn’t help but wonder if she sat through the lunch because she knew I loved Mexican food, or because she wanted to appear to be trying.

“How is the new job, Mom?” I asked, desiring only a brief answer.

With that question she heaved a sigh, “Ugh, I am already worried about this one. I thought it would work out well but my boss can be b****y and I already have a ton of patient files to work on. I’m gonna call in sick tomorrow, I think.”

I knew she wanted some sympathetic response about how her job sucked or how it must be tough working so much and being on her own. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of saying much, though.

“Oh. That’s a bummer. I’ll pray for it to work out,” I managed to say, with an undertone of fatigue.

I saw her hesitate, wondering if she should go on about her job. Instead she asked, “How’s school?”

“Good, actually. I have a choir concert coming up soon. Next Friday at seven.”

I started to hope that she would want to come.

“Oh honey, I think I need to stay late that Friday. We are getting audits from the big corporate guys and they’re cracking down on us to organize all these files. Don’t make mommy feel bad for not going.”

I choked down my disappointment, hot as the jalapeño seeds in my salsa.

“Don’t worry about it. I know it’s not your thing. Maybe the last concert you can go,” I said. I tried to smile to reassure her it wasn’t that big of a deal. It hurt a bit, but I was used to the response. Desensitized. Even though I was conflicted by our awkward situation, it felt somewhat nice to just be together.

In silence, we munched on the food and savored the normalcy of having lunch. It was slightly contrived, yet the simplicity of being in our usual lunch spot dissipated the bad memories, for a moment.

Then on our way back in the car she looked at me with diamond eyes. A rainbow of colors danced in them—the same eyes that dazzled me with lies many times before. I couldn’t trust the beauty behind them.

“Will your dad take me back?” she pleaded meekly.

I sighed, seeing where the conversation was going. Straight down a black hole neither one of us had energy to climb out of.

“No, Mom. C’mon, we’ve talked about this. What do you expect to happen? He’s with someone else now,” I muttered. “Seriously, I don’t even understand, I thought you were lesbian,” I retorted with bitterness.

“I still love your father though. I just—I don’t want to be alone. I mean what the hell does she have that I don’t?” she snarled.

“I don’t know, Mom. Can we stop talking about this? He’s starting to be happy again, just let him be.”

We had just pulled into the driveway when the argument started to intensify. Like a light switch, her eyes flamed and the tears steamed from her face. My glare matched her angry eyes—the ones I inherited. We walked into the house and the screaming match began.

“Why should he be happy and I can’t? You all gave me s*** when your father never was that great either,” she fumed.

“Don’t you dare bring dad in this. You always try to twist it when you were the one who cheated. Why would you do that? You had a whole other life practically!”

My words were like daggers, cutting down her sacred motherhood.
As soon as the odium left my lips, tears streamed down my own face.

“I’m sorry…I—I didn’t mean to scream so much,” I squeaked between the hot, salty tears.

“You don’t even understand what I went through. Your dad was no saint,” she spit back. Her retorts were defensive and childish. Anger and disbelief boiled in me.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I mumbled walking away from her. The back and forth tug-o-war subsided when I left the room. She wouldn’t back down. My mother justified her disappointment with her choice because she wasn’t getting love at home while we were still a family. I couldn’t believe she defended her actions.

Leaving her in the kitchen, I retreated to my journal. Through the written words I began to look on our situation with clarity. We were battling feelings of inadequacy. I felt worthless in my own way. Abandoned by a mother who chose her own life over our family. She felt worthless, infected by a disease of guilt for cheating, yet justified in her own pain and confusion. My fingers slowly de-clawed the pen. In a trance, my body moved away from the paper and to my mother.

I walked into her room and told her I forgave her. In my head I listed all the things I would let go: cheating, stealing money from my dad, lying to me to see her girlfriend. I tasted the sweet flavor of relief as the words glided across my tongue. The illness of the grudge left my body and I felt healed. I watched her eyes dull back to the calm, truthful ones I remembered as a child. She finally said, “I’m sorry.” I still do not know if she was sorry for her decision or the situation. It didn’t matter; it was my journey toward forgiveness that would spark the progress of my own healing and empowerment. My mom understood that I loved her and her soul began the process of revitalizing itself.

Today I continue to wonder what caused her to cheat. When I had first found out that she was gay, my mind reeled with judgment. Not that it was wrong to be gay, but that she would choose anyone over my dad and my younger brother and me. We had tried to wrap our family life into a neat, crisp package with an iridescent bow glittering on top. All we could manage was a knock off brand gift clumsily wrapped, with our imperfections scratching at the surface. I wanted to think that it was all her fault. To make it easier. But who was I kidding? She had made a choice because things were broken to begin with.

Talking to her about the problems in her marriage transformed my innocence, or rather naiveté, into a cold knowledge. I was no longer a child, praying at night for God to stop the lying games, but a young woman trying to analyze the actions of my confused mom. My conception of forgiveness renewed. Like a diamond pressed from coal, I demolished the stony hindrance of my childhood pain and found something more valuable. It didn’t matter whether or not she actually spoke the words, “I’m sorry.”

In Sunday school we were taught to forgive, but it was superficial and void of real pain. Saying sorry then was more a matter of avoiding time out. Now, I understand how valuable forgiveness is. It is beyond accepting words. It brings release.

Some anger or grief still rises as I mourn the life I once had. But it stings less. The forgiveness I gave altered my view of her and of my situation. I felt empathy for her. I wanted to understand rather than sit in my own pity. This diamond of forgiveness is much different from those diamond eyes. It is beautiful and valuable, but not deceptive.

I believe in forgiveness because it heals the soul of the forgiver from the degenerative illness of pain. Within all of our souls lies loneliness. My mom’s loneliness led to her choices. Withholding forgiveness gnaws at your being until your soul cannot fathom being happy. The forgiveness I gave my mom released me from the rampant virus leeching off my happiness. Now when I smell my mother, I smell her just as I did when I was a child. She smells like mom.