The woman I hated

My mother died one month ago, on September the 29th.
She was 62.
She had had heart trouble earlier this year, but it seemed the danger was over.
She had to take care, of course, and slow down: no more cigarettes, no more wild things, but she was fine, and upbeat as always
But it did not last.
Surgery did not help.

I've been walking around like a zombie for weeks.
My friends and my girlfriend were worried.
I needed time. I took a few days off. I self-medicated massively.

Now I feel all right to start again.
But first I need to remember her, and to do it my way.



I hated my mother, for years.
As I grew up, she was cold, aloof, hard and unforgiving.
I hated her because she quite openly hated me, or so it seemed to me.
She sent me off to a Catholic school, and when I was home she treated me like a house guest, but at the same time demanded everything of me.
The music was too loud, the clothes too tight, or too short, or the wrong color, the heels too high, the hair too wild, the make up out of question.
Much of what I am is a direct reaction to her, to the way she treated me when I was a girl and a young woman.

Of course I rebeled. I wanted to be everything she had warned me I'd become if I did not follow the rules.
I started challenging her, we started fighting.
I started calling her a heartless, frigid bitch in her face.
I can't count the times I shouted at her to fuck off.

I still remember the first time I came home in full Goth princess drag.
I was no longer living at home, by then. I was working in a Goth/Fetish shop here in town, and I had to look the part. I actually enjoyed it.
I came home to visit, all black leather and lace, my hair streaked with purple, my nose pierced. Smoking a cigarette.
Her shocked reaction was delightful.
We fought of course. It was what I had wanted all along.

Only much later did I found out the reason for my mother's distance and hostility was because she was living in the closet.
A closet smoker, a closet lesbian.
She was so afraid.
I often wondered if that was what had caused my father to leave us.
She would not tell, she would not talk about that.
It was the only thing she would not talk about.

My mother came out after my father's death.
I was shocked, probably a lot more shocked than she had ever been by me.
I was shocked to find out she smoked.
I was shocked to find out her weekly visit to the salon was an opportunity to get baked with her friends, and gossip while stoned.
I was shocked when I first met her girlfriend, that had been my math teacher.


After she came out, we got close. We became friends, accomplices.
We found out we were actually quite similar, we had so much in common.
We shared jokes and secrets.
We were out to rise hell.
And now memory is all jumbled up, and I have to reconcile the stern young woman that hurt me so much as a girl, and the crazy old lady that dropped E with me before we went to Midnight Mass together on Christmas.

We had fun. We told each other everything.
She was the harshest critic of what I wrote, and my first fan.
She reinvented herself online as Serena, but she never was at ease with social media. She tried her hand at writing.
She became a big part of my life.
She wanted to be there when I would marry my girlfriend: she called us "my two lesbian daughters".
But now she's gone.

Last year, around this time, we were having one of our little get-togethers, on a Saturday afternoon at her place.
We were a little high, and happy.
She put her arm around my shoulders, and in a cloud of smoke she whispered to me that she was so proud of me, and of the life I was making for me, and that I was all that she had secretly hoped I would be.
We had laughed a lot after that.

I can't express in words how much I loved my mother.


Now she's gone, and I will have to be myself for the both of us.

PS: I want to thank you all for your kind words and your warmth.
Now I'm better, and your friendship means a lot to me.
I love you (but don't get any ideas)