The Gap.
Sometimes I read my mom's messages and I cannot make the math work.
She says she loves me. She has always said she loves me. She says it in cards. She says it at the end of phone calls. She says it in the apology messages that arrive in the wake of the latest blow-up, the ones that start with I love you so much and end with a soft request that I please stop being so heavy about everything that happened.
And then, two days later, when I respond honestly — when I say here is what I carried, here is what it cost me, here is what I still need — the love evaporates and what's underneath shows up. You're embellishing. You have a victim mentality. You're punishing me. You're attacking me. Get some therapy so you can see the truth about your life choices.
Both of those messages were written by the same person. Within the same week. About the same daughter.
It is wild to me. It has been wild to me my whole life. And I'm finally old enough — and tired enough — to say so out loud.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about being raised by someone like that: the hardest part isn't the cruelty. The hardest part is the inconsistency. Cruelty you can name. Cruelty you can leave. Inconsistency makes you crazy, because it teaches your nervous system that love and harm come from the same hand, and you never know which one you're about to get.
So you stay alert. You read the room. You learn to gauge her mood from the sound of her car door. You become an expert in a single human being, a tiny little anthropologist of one woman's weather, because your survival depends on knowing whether today is a good day or a put your shoes on, we're sleeping somewhere else day.
And the whole time, she's saying I love you. And the whole time, on some level, she means it. And the whole time, you cannot reconcile the love she claims with the way it actually arrives, so you do what kids do when reality stops making sense: you decide you must be the broken one. You must be remembering it wrong. You must be too sensitive. You must be the problem.
You carry that into adulthood like a second spine.
I want to be careful here, because I don't think my mom is a monster. I don't even think she's lying when she says she loves me. I think she has a feeling about me that she calls love, and I think that feeling is real to her, and I think she'd pass a polygraph about it.
But love isn't just a feeling someone has about you in private. Love is also how they treat you when you're standing in front of them telling them they hurt you.
And by that measure — the only measure that has ever actually mattered in any relationship, ever — the way she has loved me has not been safe.
That sentence took me thirty-something years to be able to write.
Here's what I've started to understand:
Some parents love their kids and don't know how to show it.
Some parents love an idea of their kids and resent the actual person who showed up.
Some parents love their kids when those kids are useful, agreeable, or quiet about the past.
Some parents love their kids most when those kids are small and powerless, and start to struggle when those kids grow up and begin naming things.
I think mine might be a mix of the last two. I think she loved me hardest when I was the one taking care of everyone else, when I was the helpful one, when I was the daughter who held it together so she didn't have to. And I think when I started, very gently, very slowly, to say hey, that cost me something, can we talk about it, the love started to flicker. Not because it wasn't real, but because the version of me she loved was the version that didn't ask questions.
The version of me writing this? She doesn't know what to do with that one.
The gap is the thing.
The gap between I love you so much and you're a victim of your life choices.
The gap between I'm sorry for everything and however, what happened then was me protecting you.
The gap between I just want my daughter back and if you don't want me in your life and in Ryden's life, so be it.
That gap used to live inside me. I'd absorb it. I'd try to bridge it with my own body, contort myself into whatever shape made the two halves fit. Maybe she didn't mean it that way. Maybe I'm being dramatic. Maybe if I just explain it better next time, the loving version will stay and the other one won't show up.
It never worked. It was never going to work. Because the gap isn't mine to close. It lives in her, and only she can do anything about it, and I am not in charge of her healing, no matter how many times I was handed that job as a kid.
The relief — and god, it is a relief — has been letting the gap sit where it actually lives. Outside of me. In her. As information.
Because that's what it is. It's information.
The gap tells me what kind of love I'm dealing with. Not the love she says she has, which is presumably real to her. The love that actually shows up at my door. The love that calls. The love that texts back. The love that responds to me sharing my pain with you have a victim mentality. That love. The actual one. The one I have to live with.
And once you can see the love clearly — once you stop trying to make it match the words attached to it — you can stop hoping it'll behave differently next time. You can stop preparing your nervous system for a version of her that hasn't shown up in thirty years and probably isn't coming. You can grieve the mom you needed and still see the mom you got, and you can decide, as an adult, what kind of access that mom gets to you and to your kid.
That's not hate. That's not a victim mentality. That's not punishing her.
That's just literacy. That's just learning, finally, to read what's actually written.
Some nights I still read her messages and feel the old vertigo rise up. The but she's my mom, she must love me, what is wrong with me that this hurts so much. The little girl in me who would still, even now, climb into her lap if she'd just hold still long enough.
I let that little girl feel what she feels. I tell her she's not crazy. I tell her the gap she's noticing is real and it's not her fault and she's not making it up.
And then I water the plants. And I hold my daughter. And I remind myself that love is not a word people say. It's a thing people do, repeatedly, over time, in ways you can feel in your body when they're around you.
By that definition, I have love in my life.
By that definition, I have always had less of it from her than I deserved.
Both of those things can be true.
Both of them are.