The First Time She Drowned

by Kerry Kletter

I saw her only in her most perfect form, and any suggestion of coldness or unkindness was merely a reflection of me.

Every once in a while this primal longing erupts in me, a sort of lost-alone-in-the-dark desperation that strikes deep in my chest. But as soon as that happens, I hold my breath and suffocate the feeling until it passes. I don’t want anything to do with her. Not after what she’s done. But the thing is, when you don’t have a mother, you don’t have a home, and when you don’t have a home, there’s nowhere to go when you’re sad or scared or alone, even in your own mind, there’s just nowhere to go.

I have seen this happen before, how one act of parental kindness across a history of cruelty can make a kid in here forgive everything that came before simply because they have been deprived of kindness for so long.

It was when I discovered that there are two kinds of death. There is ceasing to exist, usually accompanied by a funeral and loved ones in mourning. And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive.

Like in all this time that she had been feeding me her rage and despair, depositing it into me like coins into a slot, she had never stopped to consider what might happen to all that hate. And now that she was face-to-face with it, I could almost see the dawning awareness that she had created this, and that this which she had created was now bigger than her. It was bigger than both of us, but especially my mother, because I was used to carrying it.

The only people who have room to worry about the future are those who aren’t fighting just to survive the present.

Suddenly I don’t even care that I fell, because of that brief moment when I stood, and I wonder if this is what other people seem to have that I do not—this courage to fall because they have the memory of standing.

That facing the truth of who my mother is hurts less than holding on to the illusion that she could ever give me what I needed.

part of being healthy is being able to hold and remember who people actually are instead of who we wish they were. It’s a daily struggle against a brain that tends to want to cling to fairy-tale hope, but it’s also the only way to guarantee a life surrounded by those who build rather than destroy. In the end, the loss is about letting go of what I never had in the first place.