Mother and her birthday letter

Date: 6/15/2024

It is my birthday and I’m visiting Grandma. It’s like NEP is there with me. I show him all the cats and kittens and we go through pictures of grandma from not too long ago. Then my mother is there and my mood swings to agitated, uneasy, angry, fearful. I can feel my heartbeat go crazy and my tears well in my eyes. NEP and I were gonna bring some cats home with us, but she starts lecturing us on how many cans of fish they absolutely need to eat per day and I lose it. I say “you know what, babe, the cats can stay here, let’s beat it”. She gives me a letter. It’s just a couple scrap sheets, kind of greenish. The letter is hand written and it looks like it was written by a mental patient. No style, wild strokes, bigger fonts here and there and plenty of mistakes that made me feel even sadder: she used to love grammar and a higher vocabulary and look at how she writes now... I read it while walking out and to the car by the house, my brother now by my side as well. It’s a birthday wish letter, but I’m dumbfounded and hurt: I thought it’d be something like “oh how much I miss you! Please, let me in again!”, but it’s mainly a selfish tale of how her life has improved since she left me behind. Where she goes, what she does, the new completeness she’s found… She writes things like “for this holiday I will spend time with my family. And when I say my family, I mean MY family now, because I’m happy to say I found my real family”. At some points I feel like all she does is bragging about her new life and how much better it is now that she’s gone. Near the end - or just as far through as I can read it before going crazy, she writes something like “I wish I could watch you grow and still be in your life, but oh well! I understand your decision of cutting me out and I respect it, so I wish you the best”. The whole thing is basically her washing any responsibility off for being a shitty mother and reminding me I made that decision so I basically need to stand by it now because she’s certainly well where she is and doesn’t even feel a bit of regret. She leans in for a hug and that hurts me and I say no. Like, I so much need a hug, but a part of me that remembers what a backstabber she is just keeps me from leaning into her arms. I keep walking to the car and all along she’s walking with us. She looks thin and fragile and her face sports an annoying smile, her eyes empty… she looks mental. My heart breaks once again in a million pieces, I can’t take to see her like that, but at the same time I cannot take this feeling of culpability anymore and I tell her “you know what? Here’s my ultimate act of love for you. I hope that you will never ever realize how horrible a mother you were and how atrocious all you did to me/us was. Because that’d be too much for any human being ti bear. The fall would be too too high. It would crash you completely if you saw it and you wouldn’t manage to be as cheerful as you are now. So I wish you to never find out, to never see it and to keep lying to yourself and being happy in your denial”. And then we’re gone. When we get home I’m still holding on to the birthday letter she wrote and NEP kind of wants me to read it to him. But I’m starting to have a melt down and cry now and I don’t want him to see me like that. I just need a hug - that he gives me.