There’s many things my mother doesn’t notice about me. My mother doesn’t notice that I wear silver, despite the gold necklace she gifted me two Christmases ago. She doesn’t notice that I buy my own groceries, unlike my siblings, because the groceries she doesn’t always remember to accommodate my allergies. Though she means well in her showering of gold, and may simply be ignorant to the oat milk portion of the dairy aisle, she similarly doesn’t notice the dull in my eyes as the feeling of neglect strikes me in these seemingly mundane moments.
She doesn’t notice that I began to finish dinner a little early and eat a little less ever since she commented on my older sister being skinnier than I am; or when she began dieting because she insisted she needed to lose weight, as I stood there the exact same weight as her. And so, she doesn’t notice that I don’t look up when they weigh me at the doctors, or whenever I stay in my room all day and lie when I say I’ve eaten already. There’s much that my mother doesn’t notice, though much I internally flaunt as I silently beg her to see. I’d say she is intentionally looking the other way, perhaps in the direction of my siblings that gives her less headaches over their turmoil. But as much as I know of what she can’t see and doesn’t know about me, I realize there is much that I know I don’t know either.
My mother may not notice that I wear silver and not gold, or that I have enough plushies and actually hate receiving more for Christmas and birthdays. But I constantly berate myself over the blind spots of my mom, that go over my head. Looking back to my childhood, I couldn’t see how tired she was after a long day at work before I immediately started badgering my 8-year-old nonsense to her as soon as she got home. I couldn’t see that she needed rest or that the juvenile questions I showered her in were stupid, and that I should just ask Google. It’s easy to see this in hindsight, as I don’t blame any child for being stupid—we all were. But what haunts me is what I may not see now, and how this unobserved confounder stealthily began to chip away–and proceeds to carve– at our relationship.
My mom may be the one person I have surely known my entire life, yet it feels as though we have never truly known each other. Our lives move along lines parallel to one another, allowing us to have just enough of a glimpse of the other to desire for our paths to cross. I reach my hand out to the line that my mother’s life moves along, grasping out for a connection, a simple interlink that allows us to finally see eye to eye. Despite all that I know about what I don’t know, I know that my mom wants this too. I know that it is my mom who insists on putting me into therapy so I can be happy and stop shutting her and everyone out. I know that despite how annoying I may have been as a child, my mother misses the daughter that couldn’t wait to annoy her mom because she just adored talking to her so much. I, too, wish I could be that daughter again. However, our parallel paths have drifted wider and wider, never meeting all the while our vision of the other becomes more and more distant and blurred. As I wish for a mom, and she wishes for a daughter, we both wish for the other to see what must be healed. Despite seeing this, it seems as though we can meet eye to eye. But perhaps, the path of a mother and daughter is inextricably tangled on a path to somewhere we can never meet.
