am i my mother

(written late at night, in the car, drunk)

I look across the table and see the same laugh, the same smile lines, and the same mannerisms I've known since I was a child. 

I listen as she cracks jokes, trying to impress others. She’s as she always has been. In a way, she has never changed since I’ve known her, since I was born. 

And yet I watch her look out the window at the ink-black sky and the speeding, blurred light outside, and I wonder what she’s thinking. I wonder if she has her moment, like me, like us; does her whole life suddenly come back to her in a flash, or is she thinking of nothing at all, or is she thinking about her late father, or is she thinking about her home and warm bed? 

Did she just rub her head because she wishes she was a child again, or does she just wish she didn’t see her own mother tonight? 

Is she impatient? Is she uncomfortable? 

I really know nothing about her. Sometimes I sit next to her, and all I want is an approving smile, a motherly hug and an ‘I’m so proud of you’, instead of a ‘why did you do what, what’s that for, that doesn’t do anything for you or your future, what’s the point, are you ever gonna do anything, you never do anything, are you ever gonna do anything with your life’. Why doesn't she like me anymore?

And sometimes I look at her and, not from the present, but I think back to my childhood (apart from a lot of things I don’t want to remember). I think of the time we were at Disneyland Paris, and we would stand in all the hugely long queues, and she would have a bag packed full of drinks and snacks, and would be trying to chat or complain about the queue or the park to spark conversation. Or when we would visit famous English castles, and it would be a ‘day out ’, and I like to imagine how proud she was to come from such a low country to now have her own family and life in her dream city since she was a child herself, to have children of her own, and to be able to take them to all these wonderful places she never got to go to, due to her own awful mother. I see her, I recognise her, I know her as her own person, I do. I'm proud of her though I never say so, and I understand her though I never say so. 

And I feel so guilty, I really do. And this isn’t about me, I promise. But all my writing comes back to me because why wouldn't it? It's my life and perspective, right? 

I hate myself for not being able to be kinder to my mother.