When you look into my eyes,
what is it that you see?
The carefree girl you once hoped to be,
or a stranger wearing the face of your dreams?
When your thunder spills through the walls,
I search myself for the fault,
as though guilt were a language
my blood had learned before my tongue.
Mother, could I have been a better child,
or was I simply born with too many edges
for the shape you wished to give me?
I was four when you pulled me by the hair
and taught the doorway the shape of my leaving,
four when my favourite doll fell from the window.
I watched it descend, a little piece of me
learning how easily I had to let go —
of the things that meant the world to me.
I was six when the wooden sticks bloomed bruises
across the small country of my skin,
and now I wonder if every friendship I bury
is another offering laid at your feet.
You did not like the company I kept,
and so I learned to leave people
before they could become important.
Look at me now, Mother.
Look at the empty spaces beside me—
you created a wreckage in the name of a perfect daughter.
You call it love, this thorned vine around my throat,
this garden in which even my breathing must grow
according to the direction of your light.
You want me first, above every name—
crowned with a future bright enough to blind us both.
But what if my heart dreams of smaller things?
A little house, sunlight gathering quietly upon the floor,
a life that does not need to conquer the world
to justify its existence.
You say you would be happy with that.
Yet your expectations keep growing teeth.
Tell me, Mother, when did your protection
begin to resemble a cage,
and when did I learn to call its bars devotion?
I have stood at this crossroads so long
that Janus has carved two faces into my heart,
one turned towards you, one towards the door.
When I walk towards myself, your tears follow me;
when I turn back, I feel my own soul
clawing at the walls of its confinement.
What am I to do with a love
that makes leaving feel like murder
and staying feel like a slow disappearance?
You, who made your dreams out of my bones,
who buried your own name beneath the weight of mine.
You, who has sacrificed her whole life
to give me mine.
Sometimes I look at you and see something divine,
a woman whose hands could coax flowers from stone,
and I wonder if I am cruel
for remembering the thorns beneath the roses.
I love you, Mother, and I hate the shape of my hurt;
I wish I could separate the two
without tearing myself open.
You once said your sisters had sons
and you had been given a snake.
I was five, but the words took root
somewhere beneath my ribs,
and even now I feel them stirring
whenever I mistake my existence for a burden.
I try to imagine the girl you were,
the expectations that coiled around your youth.
Perhaps you were hurting too,
passing down a language no one taught you to question.
But I was five, Mother,
and I did not know how to translate your wounds
without believing they were my fault.
You tell me you were happy to have me,
and I believe you.
That is the ache I cannot pull from my skin.
How can the same hands cradle and wound?
How can the same heart shelter and suffocate?
I want to understand you without becoming
another place where your sorrow comes to live.
And still, I want to sit beside you.
But I also want to sit as far away as I can.
Your cries from the other room reach for me,
and I am torn between comforting your grief
and wanting to silence the noise of our suffering.
Tell me, Mother, how do I choose myself
when your heartbreak feels etched into my skin?
I cannot keep making a home of my own undoing,
cannot keep offering pieces of my heart
to prove that I am grateful for the life you gave me.
Beneath all this wreckage,
there is still a girl who loves her mother,
and a mother she is still trying to love.
I do not know which of us
I must leave behind to become myself.
I only know that I am tired
of disappearing in the name of love.
