Allergic to Boundaries

I didn't go looking for the word. It found me.

My adult child said it casually one day, y'know, you have your own life. I was surprised. Then a little hurt. I thought I was doing the right things, showing up, staying connected, being present in a way nobody ever was for me. I never wanted them to feel abandoned the way I had. That fear drove a lot. But the words stayed with me. I sat with them long enough to stop defending against them and start actually hearing them. They were right. My happiness was too tangled up in things I had no control over. I was checking in too often, asking questions that weren't mine to ask. And somewhere underneath it was something I recognized without being able to name, if I didn't hold on tight enough, would I lose them the way I had been lost? It wasn't rational. It was just what I knew. And in trying to make sure they never felt what I felt, I had gone too far in the other direction.

What She Took

For eighteen years I thought he didn't want me.

That was the only explanation available. He wasn't there. Nobody explained why. And when you're a kid trying to make sense of an absence, you fill the gap with what you know, and what I knew, what I had already learned from her leaving, was that there was something in me worth walking away from. So I filed him under the same story. Two parents, same conclusion. The evidence was hard to argue with.

This One's Mine

There were no Mother's Days in my childhood.

Not with her. She wasn't there to have them. The holiday didn't exist between us until I became a mother myself, and suddenly there she was. Present in a way she had never managed to be when it actually counted. And with her presence came the expectation, the texts, the gifts, the performance of a relationship she had never built.