If I was a Real Person

My mom once apologized to me for everything that she did to me as a kid.

I can’t tell you what that felt like. It made me feel like I was a real person.

It was right after her brother died, so I don’t know if she was just in a low place or reevaluating or what. She was very close to her brother. He died very unexpectedly when he was hit by an 18-wheeler truck. He wasn’t even 40 yet.

I lived with my grandparents then and my grandparents had driven down to New Jersey to be with my uncle’s widow and help make arrangements. I went to stay with my mom, because my grandparents asked me to.

I’d gotten into an argument with one of my sisters. I went outside. There was a bit of an emotional blowout as my sister accused me of always making everything about me, even with Uncle Rick having just died.

“Everything always has to be about you, Jen. You can’t stand to not have attention you for two seconds. We’re all sick of giving you attention. There are other people in the world.”

She’s not entirely wrong. Maybe she’s a lot right, actually.

I was upset that weekend, because the guy I’d been hooking up with (who I was dumb enough to think was my boyfriend) had told me he didn’t want to see me anymore.

It went something like this:

He texted me, asking me if I wanted to come over. Texted me at 11:30 at night.

Yes, yes, I know.

I just didn’t know back then. Or I didn’t really want to know.

I had nothing in common with the man and didn’t really enjoy talking to him.

Sex with him was boring and I never orgasmed with him even once. Look, I cum super easily. But whenever a guy made me feel like I could be any human with a vagina and he’d be acting the same, well, I could never enjoy it that much.

We worked together in the deli at Wal-Mart. He talked shit about me when I wasn’t at work. Told the other guys what an idiot I was and how he could get girls a lot hotter than me, but I was sort of stupid and easy to talk into anything.

“She’s ugly, but I don’t have to fucking take her out to dinner or anything.”

I knew he said those sorts of things about me. I kept sucking his dick anyway.

That was really the tagline of my late teens and early 20s: Dude treated me like shit and I sucked his dick anyway.

Anyway, that night that we “broke up” he had texted me only hours after my family had found out my uncle had been hit by a truck and died. Everyone had been sobbing all day. I was drained. I’d had no idea how to comfort my grandfather. I’d never seen him cry before.

“Want to come over?” he texted.

“I can’t tonight,” I texted back. “Can you call me actually?”

And he did.

I told him my uncle had just died and everything was so weird at my house right now. I started to tell him that my uncle had always played Barbies with me as a kid, but we hadn’t been close in years.

He cut me off.

“You know, Jen, I’ve been thinking, we should break up.”

He used the words “break up.” It’s not like I got the idea he was my boyfriend on my own.

I was floored. Back then, I used to let people treat me any kind of way, but even then, I knew that interrupting someone talking about how their family member died that day (after a booty call text btw) to say “Let’s break up”-I knew that was a whole different level of fucked up.

And I felt a flicker of anger, of derision for him. For this man whose entire personality was smoking weed and buying overpriced hats at Lids. For this man who used rap slang and had rims on his car and let his pants sag so low you always knew what color his underwear was. For this man who berated me the one time I didn’t shave my vagina completely bare and made me feel so disgusting. I did have a flash of anger at him. I did start to think ‘What the FUCK is wrong with you?’

It was gone very quickly though, replaced by this sense of something like, ‘Oh…this is because of me. If I was a real person, he would treat me like a real person.’

I said to him, ‘Oh, okay. Bye then.’

Before I could hang up, he said, ‘Wait. You could still come over, if you want.’

And I’m happy to report that I wasn’t quite that pathetic.

With forced politeness, I replied, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. Good night.’

And I hung up the phone.

That was the first time I turned down a booty call invitation from him and the fallout was like nothing I’d imagined.

He called my house several times and each time I picked up and said, ‘It’s late and my grandparents are grieving. Please don’t call again.’

He had another girl call the house twice. She said really rude things to me, made fun of me. I listened in shock and hung up without replying.

This was what had happened on Friday. On Saturday, I went to my mom’s house and my grandparents went to New Jersey to help make arrangements. I think having something concrete to do made them feel better.

By Sunday, I’d mentioned the situation with this man a few times, and understandably, it made my sister Carly really angry and we ended up in a massive fight.

After the fight, my mom and I sat out in her car in the dark surrounded by the pitch black of the New Hampshire woods.

“Maybe I wouldn’t be like this if you hadn’t been so awful to me,” I snapped at her. “You have no idea what it’s like to live in constant fear, never knowing when you were gonna start screaming or when you’d hurt me or Carly or Marie. The time with her arm-“

And we’d never talked about the time with Marie’s arm before. I think she’d hoped everyone had forgotten. She looked so afraid then. She looked terrified that I’d say the words out loud and I wanted t grab her shoulders and scream her face, “You DID that! How is me saying the words of what you did any scarier than you DOING that? If you’re scared of anything, it should be what you are capable of!”

But I didn’t. Because anytime I got too upset with my family, they called me crazy and acted like everything I was saying was nonsensical.

I stopped talking and waited.

She cried. Tears ran down her freckled face and she looked really small then, scared and pale with the light of the moon glinting off her tears.

She cried and she said, “I’m so so sorry. I’m so sorry I did that to you. To all of you. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know.”

It was so authentic. It was so real.

It made me feel real.

And for a period of about a year and a few months, my mom and I got along. We went to a No Doubt concert together. We talked on the phone. I went to visit her regularly. I slept over. I told her I loved her. I meant it.

I felt connected to her.

And then.

My younger sisters told me about all the awful stuff she was saying about me behind my back.

My oldest is the crazy one.

My oldest has emotional issues.

My oldest probably won’t ever make anything of herself. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up on welfare.

She’s dramatic. She’s emotional. She’s bipolar.

Mom…we were close for the first time ever. All of my anger was gone, because you’d apologized. Why did it all have to be pretend?

A lot of this happened when I was trying to move in with my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I was moving to Massachusetts. Her house was much closer to the Massachusetts border, so I’d asked if I could move in with her for a few months while I job-searched and found an apartment. She said yes to my face.

Behind my back, she said everything she really thought.

I stopped responding to her texts and phone calls. I finally let go of her in my mind. So many years of thinking one day we’d be okay, everybody should be close to their mom. So mine was a teenager when I was born and she fucked up a lot. I could forgive her. I wanted to forgive her.

I could forgive her for the trauma. But she couldn’t forgive me for being traumatized.

I miss her and I think my issues with her are the root of a lot of my issues. I mean, it wasn’t until I cut her off thay overnight I seemed to lose the ability to connect with people at all. I do a wonderful job of faking it. But I don’t really care about anybody. Even if I wanted to, I don’t know how to. I feel so panicked when I start to feel close to someone that I do everything I can to make that connected/I-care-about-you feeling go away.

There have been a few exceptions. Those exceptions were people who were hit with a massively inappropriate amount of affection from me. People who, for whatever reason, my brain decided were safe to let all the barriers down and throw all my need for human connection at.

There was a girl I worked with. This was when I was 24. Almost 2 years after I went no-contact with my mom.

I definitely cringe looking back, thinking how creepy it must have been for her that I went out of my way to dress like her. I packed lunches to match hers. When she said she hated McDonald’s, I stopped eating there. She was on the heavier side. I tried to gain weight to look more like her. She went out to lunch with me a few times and she’d become irritated with me for how much I’d eat and how “you can eat like a pig and stay 100 pounds.” What I didn’t tell her was that I didn’t want to be a 100 pounds, because I wanted to be like her. I wanted to look like her and sound like her and be as close to her as possible. I wanted to be her best best friend.

I’d become so nervous around her that I had nervous ticks I’d never had before in my life. I twisted my arms up into knots, because my heart was pounding so hard and I didn’t know how to make it stop. I tugged on the end of my ponytail and a couple of times she winced and said, “Stop, doesn’t that hurt?”

We went out drinking one day and I sloppily, falling all over myself drunk, yelled about how much I adored and admired her and wanted to be best best friends with her.

“I think you’re so amazing, Nicole. You’re so cool. I wish I was cool like you. I know I’m weird, but I wish we were best best friends. I think about you all the time and always want to be around you.”

Our friendship, if it even could be called that-I think to her I was just an acquaintance, cooled off after that.

So, I think a lot of my problems go back to my relationship with my mom. And whenever other people talk about their moms, I always wish I could be close to mine.

And here is, what I think is, the worst part.

I wouldn’t matter if she apologized to me all over again. It wouldn’t matter if she told me she wanted to be close to me. It wouldn’t matter if she swore up and down and up and down to never talk badly about me or hurt me again.

I know that I’d never feel okay around her. I’d always wonder if she was showing real affection or the fake affection she showed me the last time I let my guard down with her, the smiling “My Jen!” hair tousling affection to my face while telling everyone else what a complete fuck-up I am.

I’ll never ever have what I had with her that one year after she cried in the moonlight and said with what seemed like such authenticity, “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did it” and I believed her.

I’ll never believe her again. I’ll never feel okay with her again.

And then there’s the real rub, I am worried I’ll never feel really okay with anyone again.