My Mother’s Daughter

I am my mother’s daughter. This fact devastates my consciousness like nuclear war. I have lived my life with one intention: to be nothing like my mother. In certain departments, some might say I have excelled. I graduated high school and even went to college. I see a psychiatrist. I can maintain healthy friendships. 

My mother never graduated high school. She does not see a psychiatrist though she suffers from various mental disorders. Friendship seems to be a challenge for her. So in some ways, I suppose I have lived with conviction. In other ways, ways that seem larger and more absolute, I am just like my mother. 

I am addicted to weed. I know that it greatly inhibits my productivity but at this point it seems like something I cannot live without. My memory is a kaleidoscope of nothing and I often trip over my words. My life feels like a dream and that should scare me, but it doesn’t. It would only scare me if it was real. 

I was probably fifteen when I figured out that the thing my mom was always doing on the back porch was smoking weed. I was disdainful of it at first. Slowly, I became intrigued. I was addicted to weed by the time I was seventeen.

 I remember us being in an argument, likely around the time I was eighteen or nineteen. We fought so much during those years. I was a freshman in college. I was making poor decisions, as a freshman in college does. It was scary to myself but I scared the living hell out of my mother. Anyway, we were fighting about some bad decision I had made recently and several times throughout the conversation, she briefly walked in and out of the room to take a hit from her bong. I remember feeling so much shame as I watched her. “She can’t even have a real conversation without being high,” I thought. I noticed recently that I tend to be pretty quiet during serious conversations. Not because I am afraid, but because I am usually high and don’t know what to say. 

I am addicted to nicotine too. That fact feels pathetic to admit but it is a fact nonetheless. I bought my first vape when I was fourteen years old. I have been vaping on and off ever since. I can quit for substantial periods of time, but never for good. I started smoking cigarettes when I went to college and now there is always less and less time between relapses. As a child, my Christmas wish was always for my mother to quit smoking cigarettes. 

My mother has gotten work done. She has only gotten into plastic surgery in the last few years and I have openly expressed my objection to it. It saddens me to watch my mother put her body through so much but beauty is her god and she will die for it. I want to grab her and shake her and say, “There is more to life than being beautiful! You do not need to change to be loved!”. But I suppose what I really want is for God to come out of the sky and say those words to me so that I can believe them too. I want less of my hair to fall out in the shower. I want my therapist to stop asking me, “And, how’s your eating been?” everytime I see her. I want to erase the memory of my grandmother’s face when she realized I had an eating disorder. 

Substance abuse and body image issues may very well be a result of the space in time which I occupy. Maybe I am merely a product of my generation. Still, I am not absolved from the mirror that is my mother. The colossal, treacherous, and undeniable trait that binds my mother and I is that our existences are validated by men. 

I was very strong-willed when I was younger. I saw that people in love behaved similarly to people in psychosis and I knew I did not want that for myself. I decided I wouldn’t date in high school. I didn’t have sex or get into a relationship until I was nineteen.

Looking back, it’s like I understood something I didn’t quite know. I had not yet known what love was like but I somehow knew it would swallow me whole. Subsequently, I avoided it at all costs. My teenage years were tumultuous on their own, had love been a factor I fear there would be no distinction between my mother and I.

I graduated high school three years ago. I went to college knowing virtually nothing about love or sex. I have experienced much love and various kinds of sex in the last three years and still, I know nothing. It seems the more I experience love, the more elusive it becomes. I often miss the girl I once was. I think I actually knew more back then. I knew how to be alone. I knew how to enjoy the sound of rain. I knew when I was hungry and when I’d had enough. 

Such knowledge left me as soon as I got to college. I don’t know what happened. It is something I have mulled over and over again in my head. It will never make total sense. I had known myself so well and suddenly, I did not care to know myself at all. I was old news. What I really wanted to know about, what I wanted to understand and bend to my will, was men. 

I was very reserved throughout my adolescence and I took pride in this fact. I enjoyed telling people no. I could not be had; I was mine. Then, in true hedonist fashion, I discovered the pleasures of alcohol and sex and suddenly everyone had pieces of me I could not get back. I would come home from school every weekend, heartbroken over one boy or another, and my mother would always ask me, “Do you love him?”. It seemed my actions may have passed for acceptable if I was at least in love. “What a stupid question,” I thought. It was not a matter of me loving him. I needed him to love me. 

I lost my virginity in a one night stand. I was nineteen, he was twenty-four. He was a ketamine dealer. He had a cat and an exceptionally filthy apartment. I knew the very next day that I was irrevocably changed. Perhaps that doesn’t sound shocking. Perhaps that was to be expected. Perhaps it makes complete and utter sense that I became obsessed with sex after abstaining from it for nearly twenty years. It was all very shocking to me, however. In the beginning of that May, I was a virgin. By the end, I had slept with four different guys. Three were one-night stands. One happened in the woods. One happened in a backseat. The rest of the details aren’t worth mentioning.  

It felt like I was discovering a whole new world. The more I discovered about men and sex, the less I understood about myself. I stopped devoting my life to thinking and feeling and made pleasure my god. It started with smoking. There was a period that it became drinking. I hadn’t expected it but men– men are my worst vice. If I were the earth, men would be the sun. All life within me depends on them. 

I had come into my sexuality strong, hard, and at once. I tried to make sense of it the only way I knew how. I wrote.

There is a woman that lives inside of me. She only wears babydoll dresses. Her toenails are always freshly painted and she wears perfume on her hip bones. Sometimes she cries, most of the time she sleeps. She is mostly mute. The only time her presence is a lively one is when she is underneath a man. 

This woman needs a man. He kisses her and her eyelids flutter as she wakes. He begins to touch her. Her breath slowly livens, becoming deeper and hastened with each passing second. He gives her head. Moaning, she breaks her vow of silence. He fucks her. At last, she is among the living. 

With the man inside of her, there is nothing she can’t do. She is boundless, limitless, fearless. She straddles him and he tells her how beautiful she is. She rides him until he can no longer mutter the words. Beneath her, the man gasps for air and grabs her hips with urgency. He needs her. She’s done it.

She’s conquered him and every man before him. Every heartbreak erased. She has healed every wound inside of her. In this moment, she is worthy. She is wanted. She wins. 

Of course, once the dawn breaks, reality sets in. She returns back to herself. She is no longer champion of men. She is tired, loveless, inglorious. She will quietly and rapidly slip her clothes back on. She will hold her breath and pray, fervently, that the man will not wake up and give her that gaze; the one that reminds her that his thirst for her is not only conditional but fleeting. Her feet will carry her capitalized body back to me and she will rest in my warmth until a larger, more fascinating, more deserving being offers her a new oasis.

I wrote that nearly two years ago. My life has changed in every way since then, and the woman still lives inside me. 

I need to be desired. I need someone to belong to. I need someone to witness and participate in my suffering and in my joy or else there is no point to any of it.

That is my terrible, ugly truth. I don’t know if my friends would scoff or cry if they knew this. I know exactly what my mother would say. I can see her now. She is sitting at the kitchen table; she has her head in her hands. “Please,” she begs, “don’t be like me.”