connection

“You’ll Miss Me When I’m Dead”: A Mother’s Lament

I am filled with an idle sense of ongoing grief over my relationship with my parents. The worst part about growth and perspective is the people you leave behind in the process. For me, two of those people were always going to be my parents.

“I don’t need therapy, I’m going to die like this.” I’ve heard this from my mother multiple times in the last few years. Not only is that a bold assertion that between now and your death, you do not intend to grow, but it’s also the sharpest dagger you could wield against someone you claim to love. To their face, you are telling them you do not want to be better for them. You are telling them they are not worth the difficulty in initiating change.

One of my mother’s favorite things to tell us is: “You’ll miss me when I’m dead.”

The truth is, I miss her now. I, so distinctly, feel the absence of the intimate connection you are designed to have with your mother. When I need comfort, I turn to myself. I turn to my dog. I turn to a hug from my nephew. I turn to a FaceTime with my best friend.

This is the ongoing state of grief. Physically, she is present. Financially, she pops up for help when she can. Emotionally, I have never been able to depend on her. The cost of this absence was the building blocks to every opportunity for intimacy I sabotaged between high school and now. The cost of this absence was the people I chose who mistreated and devalued me. The cost of this absence was the deeply rooted belief “you are too much and no one will understand you.” Letting go of the idea that I can only depend on myself has been an ongoing ordeal. Like her, I have participated in the self-abandonment necessary to believe I am better off alone.

I have allowed myself to eat crumbs off the floor to feel the validation I should have been instilled with from the beginning. With my mother, it is not a question of whether she will hurt me but when. Most conversations are laid with hidden mines of triggers. The worst part is always the few times we truly can have deep conversations because it perpetuates the illusion of intimacy. She’s right, when she’s dead, I’ll miss her. I will grieve her loss. I will also grieve the relationship I always wanted but could never get.

I want to meet you,
With love in my heart.
I want to meet you,
With a shard of who I am.
This fractured bit,
I saved for this moment.
Which train did you catch?
Did you book a one way?
You’re further out to horizon,
Pushing farther and farther.
Say you’ll hop off and walk.
Slip out the back with an excuse.
Just say you’ll walk back to me,
So I can meet you with love.

I have endeavored to learn everything I could about mental health and trauma to better understand not just myself but also my family. My mother laments the sour edges of our relationship, but she will take no action to improve it.

The worst lie I ever told myself was that I can live with less because someone else can’t provide more. The truth I’ve had to accept is that I allowed this mindset to permeate my life for too long. The connections I want now are deep and real. I am valuable, important, and worthy of effort. You can always choose to pivot. There is always opportunity to change. You can admit that you want more from life than what you have witnessed around you. There is no reward without risk. Admitting your vulnerabilities, your wants, and your desires is powerful and necessary. Healing from trauma is a gift you give to yourself and the world around you.

I never like to give power to my trauma. I am not grateful for it. I am grateful for how I took control of my interiority and how I have grown from it. So is it a tragedy or a flex that no one has or will ever break my heart like my own mother has before?

Crash Out and Level Up; the Argument for Tears

When I was a kid, I had big emotions which I struggled to control. Like many of us, I did not have parents who had the capacity to help me regulate my emotions. Instead, my mother would tell me I needed to toughen up. She saw my despair as inherently dangerous to my survival and so tried to stifle it the only way she knew how. Of course, with time and perspective, I understood her aggressive stance to be her way of showing she loves me by trying to prevent me from feeling the inevitable pain that comes with living. However, I was passionate. I raged and I hollered on about not wanting to live like her. I know I must have hurt her sometimes by directly rejecting the “help” she offered and therefore rejecting her. To her, she was offering me an oar in an ocean. To me, I felt her attempt to hammer a nail into my coffin.

I could not imagine a world where I closed myself off to everything to mitigate the possibility of pain. To this day, I see a deep strength in me and all of us who choose to remain soft. There is only isolation and loneliness in the path suggested by my mother. So many people see softness, tears, and vulnerability as a weakness. I see it as constant little acts of courage and rebellion. The same broken systems we are trapped in thrive when we close ourselves off to each other and even worse, ourselves. When we deny ourselves the opportunities to be vulnerable with the people we like and come into contact with; we are in turn depriving ourselves of true intimacy and connection. I do think there’s an inherent beauty in allowing yourself to “crashout” and close in on yourself when the eventuality is that you turn around and once again open up and smile at someone.

“Right now you may not want to feel anything… We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste! (…) How you live your life is your business just remember our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once and before you know it your hearts worn out and as for your body there comes a point when no one looks at it much less wants to come near it. Right now there’s sorrow, pain, don’t kill it and with it the joy you felt.”

Mr. Perlman (Elio’s Father, Call Me By Your Name)


I watched Where the Wild Things Are (2009) recently with one of my nephews. We both connected deeply with the film, meaning we were both lying in bed crying at the end, probably for similar reasons of seeing ourselves (or my younger self) in the protagonist. Later, he confessed he sometimes feels lonely and depressed like Max does. I told him, I understand, I often felt that way when I was a kid too. Sometimes speaking to him is so hard because when I see him vulnerable and hurting, I hurt too. Except, in those moments, I can’t just lose myself and cry it out because I need to be the adult that I needed when I was going through the same thing.

I told him films like the one we watched were very important to me as a child. I often read books or watched movies where I connected very deeply to the characters. I told him that seeing characters experience the same emotions made me feel less alone because I knew that meant I wasn’t alone at all. I knew when I saw these characters struggle and feel out of place that I wasn’t alone in how I felt. I knew other people felt this way too. I knew we were all connected by this.

Art and its parallel existence to defining our humanity is something that saved me growing up. Literature, film, and music were the true oars in a vast ocean.

“I think that’s whats wrong with the world. No one says what they feel, they always hold it inside. They’re sad, but they don’t cry. They’re happy, but they don’t dance or sing. They’re angry, but they don’t scream. Because if they do, they feel ashamed. And that’s the worst feeling in the world. So everyone walks with their heads down and no one sees how beautiful the sky is.”

Louise Fitzhugh (Author of Harriet the Spy)

When I was a kid, I had big emotions. Now, I’m an adult and I still have big emotions. I accept and love this about myself. What my mother tried, with good intentions (maybe), to weed out of me is one of the things I now find most beautiful about myself. I experience big and UGLY emotions, ones that most of my life made me want to hide myself away so as not to be rejected for being “too much.” Except, by consistently allowing myself to experience this, I have also taught myself the many necessary tools of self-regulation. These are tools I discuss with my friends, my sister, and my nephew on a regular basis.

If I had not given myself the gift of experiencing something I once deemed so ugly and unattractive about myself; I would not be able, now, to turn around and share that gift with the people I love and cherish. Experiencing, regulating, and not suppressing my emotions has opened the door to sharing with my friends and family in true community. If I had never allowed myself to be hurt. If I had shut myself off from things that once scared me. I would never have had these beautiful moments of true connection in mutual humanity with my loved ones.

I am so grateful to feel so strongly. I am so proud of myself for being brave and facing myself day in and day out. When I was a kid, a teenager, a young adult, I would look in the mirror and struggle to find my value because I felt broken. The truth is though, I have shown myself time and time again, true resilience is moving forward knowing there’s a storm ahead and knowing it will be hard to weather it but that it is worth it to get where I am going.