Letter 1: Dear Mom

 How fucking dare you expect me to be an adult, shouldering adult concerns and conversations as a *CHILD*? I should never have had to listen to concerns within your marriage, your family, your work, or your social life. I should have never had to worry about being the “good, easy child” because I wanted to make *your* life easier. I should have been experiencing new things, trying and making mistakes instead of reading about them because that was easier for you.

How can you say I’m abusive when it’s the emotional neglect you’ve dumped on me for years that’s made it so difficult to put my feelings first - besides being actively suicidal? I haven’t been the most coherent at stating what was wrong and how - but pus usually doesn’t come out of an infected wound neatly. By the way, during the times my depression actually was bad, thanks for telling me I didn’t have it bad enough to be depressed - did you somehow think that was helpful?

How fucking dare you try to compress my life as small as possible just to be more convenient for you? You chose to send me to a private school - and then only to magnet schools, effectively preventing me from having friends my own age. You chose to actively discourage me from pursuing activities you weren’t interested in; I don’t know if it was feelings of inferiority or simply a distaste for having to plan around me, but it worked terribly well. The only activity outside of school from grades one through six was Girl Scouts, and I remember not wanting to go most times. 

Returning to finish school was selfish; the way you went about it essentially left me parentless when I needed it. You didn’t set boundaries with other people - including your husband - and so that slopped over on to me. Making yourself run ragged at your job was also terribly poorly executed; in your push to make yourself noticed, you failed hard at one of the main components of your job, which was processing books. In addition, I learned that my time wasn’t worth anything if I wasn’t being useful. If I wasn’t helping with stuff for your job, you didn’t really seem to want to spend any time with me - and if you did, from your tone and body expressions I was always left with the impression that I was an imposition.

So much of ‘adulting’ I’ve had to teach myself, from friends, books, and the internet. Things like how to curate your possessions, to eat food that is tasty and nutritious, to maintain things like a house and a car, to exercise and to take care of one’s body appropriately. There were lessons, too, you should have taught me and didn’t - like why a fifteen-year-old girl is never actually interesting to a man seven years her senior, or how to tell people no. 

Why did you have a child that you didn’t want to teach, play games with, or expose to new experiences? Why did you have a child when you left me to be achingly lonely after I started school? Why did you have a child when you treated me like an adult? In essence, why did you have a child when you didn’t want to be a parent?

I’m still so angry and frustrated at knowing that YOU squandered so much of the potential I had to be a happy, fulfilled person. Was your convenience, your to-do list worth my life?