We Are Not Like Them

by Christine Pride

“No,” I respond, trying not to sound defensive. Whenever I get asked this, which is all the time, my answer always feels wrong.

She’s been here for approximately two minutes and my jaw is already locked tight from being on edge.

trains all her focus and attention on me like I’m the only thing that matters to her. This is why I love my doctor—she looks you in the eye, talks to you like she has all the time in the world, as if there aren’t forty other women in the waiting room.

swallowing down the microaggression, as I’ve done a thousand times.

can’t shake my compulsion to fill the quiet, to make everyone around me comfortable at all times.

But having this moment with Momma, so sad about her own mom, unfurls something in me, a curiosity about her, a desire to know her more as a woman, a longing for a different kind of relationship.

what if she had let her guard down more and I’d gotten to see this side of her, the side that admits to feelings? We might have had an entirely different relationship.

was the only way to play a game where you didn’t make the rules, a game set up to make you fail. But it wasn’t a game at all—it was survival. And to survive, you couldn’t get too mad, too upset, too defiant, because there would be consequences…

there will always be some essential part of me that is unknowable to her because of our different experiences?

Maybe it’s what we all want from the people we love: to be seen for exactly who we are.