why do you lie when you tell me you love me

an open letter to my mother

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I cried to this song all the while writing this piece.

I never knew you to be deceptive. I wonder if I ever knew you at all. Sure, there is closeness, but always in a sort of pre-fab sense. Like walking into a model home and gazing around at all that lifeless perfection. The indescribable sadness of a home that has never truly been inhabited.

You look closer, and the mattress is made of cardboard and the art is as nameless as the smiling nobodies posed familially in a frame by the doorway. It’s all sold as the ideal, the model for what a home should be, what your home could be.

Our house was the model house. Maybe you’d know by where the dog chewed the sofa, or by the red juice spilled on the beige carpet that someone must have lived here, but you were careful to never leave a trace at who.

White walls, non-descript furnishings, colorless and bleak. As if you had bought the line that a home can be defined by 4 walls and a roof alone. As if you didn’t care about the inside as long as the outside was sufficiently cloaked in nebulous facade.

And so it was. Our insides were a negligible afterthought to the portrayal, the pose.

I got good at posing.

Every day we’d hug, you’d tell me you loved me, and you’d send me off with the reminder to be good, be sweet, be smart, and make good choices.

But when I was too smart, or I made bad choices — as measured by your golden and infallible scale.

What then?

I asked you once, why?

Why, in the midst of tumult and lies you couldn’t yet (or ever) confront — my father’s convoluted infidelity, your mother’s utter unappeasability — was a child the answer?

Born amongst the fire. Bounced on my father’s knee while he wrote a mistress of his martyrdom. (oh yes, I have receipts)

You told me I saved you.

But there was no worship behind the words.

Desperation, a plea, a child doomed to play proof of a love you could never lose. A totem as venerable as my capacity to make rain only for you.

Children can’t save their parents.

How often you’d remind me of my precocious place on that dutiful pedestal unto which I was so formidably thrust from the start.

Be good. A jaded, broken moral compass.

Be sweet. A princess you’d call me. Can’t you feel the pea?

Be smart. Does a smart ass count?

Make good choices. Never knowing what this meant on any given day, now scared to make any choices at all.

You were the first to call me out on my frenzied perfectionism, as if it existed in a vacuum, or belied you, a good mother.

Children can’t save their parents.

How often you’d remind me, i love you, and all the time, like the dog and her bone, you were conditioning the love right out of me.

A new day, a new line I’d walk obliviously across. Until I was starved on indifference. Bones protruding with the effort. You let me waste away before your eyes rather than see me as I am. You pawned me off to die at the hands of someone who let me, rather than face responsibility. You’d prefer me demoted to the ranks of the inconsequential many; was it a satisfying penance for my lapse in divinity?

I’m sorry. I know I let you down.

My love, pure and unfettered, landed threateningly in its too-raw demand for your commensurate unconditional devotion. You quietly replaced it with a forgery, and I believed your foreboding decree: earn love, worth bestowed, from the will of your maker.

Children can’t save their parents.

“We cannot really love if we are forbidden to know our truth, the truth about our parents and our caregivers as well as about ourselves. We can only try to behave as if we were loving. But this hypocritical behavior is the opposite of love.

It is confusing and deceptive, and it produces much helpless rage in the deceived person. This rage must be repressed in the presence of the pretended “love,” especially if one is dependent, as a child is, on the person who is masquerading in this illusion of love.”

—Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child

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Together we stand. Hand in hand.

Never looking grief in the eye lest he shall see us falter.

Auspiciously pretending, mother & daughter.

Daughter & mother.

The eternal pedestal on which I sit carries your hope, your horror, your need, your shame, and your guilt. I’ve woven each into a crown befitting of your ever-conditional love.

A true princess, at last.

Dance at my feet and sing of my strength, but be careful to never look up.

For I am but a hollow trophy of your triumph.

Like Humpty Dumpty. I teeter. I totter. Doomed to this purgatory of lies and of love, forever weighing the devastation of a fall against the yearning to come irreparably apart.

Will you love me still?

If I choose what it means to be good…

Unburden on me your woes and wiles, and I shall thank you all the while. 

Reveal your fears cloaked as they be, and graciously balance them atop of me.  

Caress me with promise, and affix a taut line. I promise I’ll carry you ‘til the end of time. 

Tell me you love me, 
and for you, I'll agree.
But the lie is all I'll ever see.

anyway, here it is…

-June

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