I have spent a lot of time agonizing over where we went wrong. Why did you stop talking to me after I moved out and why, even when I called you for holidays and birthdays you could barely bother to respond with a text message.

I wondered what I had done to make you hate me and so I went back in my mind. Back into the channel of memories which, at least for me, do not dim with the passage of time. I considered that perhaps the drug and alcohol dependency which I had gained was keeping you away but even after I had overcome that and once again become someone to be proud of still you were distant.

I looked back further, trying to find just where it had all gone wrong. I looked back to my teenage years when I began turning to crime and lashing out. In the end though I was unable to look at those years as anything except the result of my environment. As with children who are denied attention, any person will begin acting out when denied human interaction and basic emotional needs.

I kept going further back. Looking, looking, searching through my memories to find just where you had then given up on me because it became apparent that it had been many years since you had seen any value in me. Eventually I ended up shortly after I had begun going to school.

You had come home from work and I had rushed to you, eager to divulge all of the mean things that my older siblings had done throughout the day. You must have been tired that day because you did not listen to my woes. Instead you invented a new rule. The tattling rule.

The rule was thus: any person telling on another person would receive the same punishment as the one who had perpetrated the wrongdoing. This meant that if for instance, I had been struck by my brother, I would then be punished alongside him for him having struck me and then struck again by him for telling.

It was a rule designed not to protect those who had been wronged but to protect the one in power from having to hear about all the ways in which their progeny had been cruel. It was a rule that made bullying the prime power within the house.

I thought that this was the moment that you had given up on me and for a while I was stagnated there, but after a while I was able to go back even further.

When I was very little I remember you telling me about my first word. “Hungy” which of course was baby talk for hungry. When I asked you why that was my first word you said that it was because my sister had stolen my bottles. Later, when I was older you changed the story and said that my sister could not have done this because she could only drink a certain formula and anything else made her sick.

She wasn’t stealing them to drink them. She was stealing them to steal, years of kleptomania would follow the beginning of this event but you would rather hide from the truth than face the truth. The truth is that she stole my bottles as you first said and you let her.

You were the one responsible for making sure that I was taken care of at that time and yet things got to so crucial a stage that I felt the need to learn to speak, not to communicate about something I liked or a person like mommy or daddy but instead my first word was wasted on a basic human need. Hunger.

This was par for the course for the rest of my life. Anytime they did something bad to me nothing happened but anytime I sought satisfaction I would be punished severely. There came a time years later that my brother had taken to giving me wedgies through which he would forcibly lift me into the air by my underwear.

During this time I took to giving myself lesser ones in order to hopefully prevent him doing so. Seeing this classic sign of trauma in which one hurts themselves to prevent being hurt worse, instead of saving me from my abuser you laughed and said that if I did it to myself I must like it so I should not complain about it.

Systematically, layer by layer, across the entirety of my life you have given me the belief that I have no value and that it is alright for others to hurt me, especially those within my family. You have taught me that among all those in your life I have the least value to you and now as an adult you don’t even bother to act like I am still your son.

You abandoned me, not at a firehouse or an orphanage but you abandoned me still on the day that I was born. You didn’t want me, you saw me as a burden that your poor, sick, depression soaked mind could not deal with. Better to have given me up. At least someone could have loved me. Instead I now find myself as an adult, just trying to learn to love myself and yet unable to despite all the years and the medications and the meditations.

Because of you I am warped. Because of you I value others over myself. Because of you I feel that others committing violence is acceptable and normal. Because you allowed it within my formative years and created rules to reinforce it. You created my agony. You are the reason that I suffer even now.

The worst part is, because you are my mother, I still feel. I still feel regret and remorse that this may reach you, even hidden under the guise of a pen name. I feel horrible because I have placed the blame for my mental illness firmly upon your shoulders. But in the end, time and time again you not only failed to protect me but normalized my abuse so you really are responsible.

I suffer from all the classic symptoms of battered child syndrome and I am not a functional adult. I am just a hurt little kid hiding inside a shell that is painted to look like an adult because the world is cruel.

I miss you dearly and yet you are toxic to have in my life. You who I love so dearly and yet who was never truly able to love me.

Mom.