Unsaid Words

I sat quietly, sitting in the middle of a scene from which I was inadvertently excluded. My mother was telling a joke that she clearly found hilarious, as she dissolved into peals of laughter before she'd arrived at the punch line. I watched my brothers roll their eyes in amusement and knew that if I could see myself an indulgent smile would be playing over my lips. I looked at my mother, still mid-laugh but pretending to be grumpy that none of us were laughing as uproariously as she was. Clearly, our senses of humor weren't sophisticated enough for her caliber of joke. I had something I needed to tell her. And I worried that after we talked, she would never look like this again. Happy. No, more than happy---joyous. An abiding joy that resided within her, regardless of what else she went through.

My mother has encouraged me to do things that would create happy memories. While we were growing up she would spend hours regaling us with stories from her childhood and stories her parents had told her from their childhoods. As a young girl, I worried that I wouldn't live my life well enough to regale my future progeny with such enthralling stories. I still worry about that. But these memories are shocking in their unpleasantness. I'm not sure why it's so important to me to talk with my mother about these things.

I've always felt that my mother and I were at odds. She loved me, of that I had no doubt. However, it was clear that our personalities were at opposite ends of the spectrum. Our rough patch began when I was 16 and it endured until I was 24. I was determined to assert my personality but after a lifetime of never seeing this sassy, defiant, cold-eyed side of me, my mother felt certain that what she was seeing wasn't really me.

It was. I'd just finally found my voice. But the voice I'd found was still unable to tell my mother the things I should have told her when I was 7, 8, and 9 years old. I couldn't speak the things that had plagued me at 15 and 19. The years went on and I found myself choking over all the unsaid words. Every conversation was a minefield and I was constantly and obviously tense. Who am I to dash her knowledge of me to the ground? To dig up my long-buried hurts and display them before her like a dog with a favorite bone? What right do I have?

Two teenage boys, the sons of family friends who we hadn't seen in over 15 years. Their names were as ashes, dusted out of my mind as though a great wind had swept them away. Separate occasions, years apart, but somehow mirroring one another in the terror, the confusion, the guilt that welled up within me. I locked it all away for years, tucking it neatly into a chest that was welded shut. I had no need to revisit. Ever.

It happened again. Someone I trusted, someone who'd been a safe harbor. We were in what I thought was a safe space. There, he pressed his advantage. The chest cracked, the contents seeped out. They'd been stewing, rotting for years. An ingredient added...

I was lost. I was to blame. I had to be. Something was wrong with me. 
The last time it happened I determined it would be the last. And it was. Unlike any time before, this man intended to press to completion. And he took. The last time it happened I determined it would be the last. And it was. Any other encounter would be on my terms and my terms only.

I looked at my mother with laughter in her eyes, telling a story she'd told us dozens of times and singing a song she'd learned as a child. I searched her face, searing everything about her in my memory. Because if I uncorked this bottle, spilled out my hurts, sipped the bitter elixir and faced the aftereffects... this would be the last time I saw her this way.