Mom, why do you hate me?

I feel that you do, although of the claim’s veracity,                                                                         I am unprepared to claim without any lack of certainty,                                                            that you do

A few examples highlight the genesis of my question,                                                            a scared, teenage mom, alone, parents smiling with grimaces, besides themselves, beside you? Did you put your fears, your perceived failures and arrears, onto the infant baby when your hands touched me? Did you press these panic attacks and scary facts into my mouth when your breast fed me? You didn’t know? Momma, did your anger with men – with him, and him, and him – did you exhale it on my soft baby skin? Did I remind you of him, and of that?

I know I’ve wronged others, mom, you’ve let me know that I am – shall we say, less than a so-and-so – but why do you hate me? Have I ever destroyed the inside of your home? Shot up heroin while talking on your phone? Left you with a child to raise? I don’t blame my half-siblings for being close(r) to you; I just want to know, why do you hate me so? I really don’t know. Did I not – living with grandma and grandpa – want for years to go on a trip with you? Just you? And when I had bang-up accident with truck and trailer – motorized failure on Big Freeway – $5,000 came to compensate my little body, after seeing glass fly in air, papa and ma pushing my head down and feeling time slow to almost a stop as we floated very near death. What I wanted more anything: To take a trip with the money – just me and you. And then you said no. You were afraid of travel, let alone in a condition alone with an alien child? Am I an alien to you? You always seemed afraid of me? And then that fear turned to hatred. And that hatred turned to stone. And then all I saw of my mother was a sociopath encased in flesh, kept erect with the help of bones. Looking at me, you saw at first a flamboyant, irritating gay narcissist, then by degrees a criminal-to-be, and your predictions came true. Is that why you hate me?

But what if we took a third

Observer, and asked them to look at the whole thirty-two years of fears with an Eagle Eye, and they came back with reasons more complicated than I could conceive, as urbane and counter-naive you think me be?

And this did happen during sleep, where thoughts and their objects melt into one, and down and down deep, from above, an Angel came, and I thank G-D and . . . and I weep, mother, I weep, Cynthia Cochran Addington.

I weep.