A Mother And Daughter's Twisted Bond

A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary. From the beginning of a young child's life, most experience a strong bond with their parents. As they grow their parents go from holding their hand through everything, than have to learn to let go. For some, letting go is harder than expected but what if for some families letting go was as easy as walking away from their child? My personal bond with my parents was and still is far different than usual bonds with parents should be. When my mother was just 19 years old, she became pregnant after dating my father for about a year. She had planned to take college classes at Hesser College in Concord to major in Marketing. Shortly after having me, at 20 years old, she dropped out of college and began working at Unitil full-time while I was taken care of in daycare or my grandparents (her parents). Being so young, my mother never got to experience college or what life before a child really was. Today, that has effected her immensely. Not only her, but our relationship. Other the years, I seemed to have taken on the duty of being a mother to my own mother who never had the chance to fully grow-up.

At the age of eight, I had started to understand and notice that my father and mother didn't have the most perfect relationship. Almost everyday I would end up taking care of my mother instead of being taken care of because my father was abusive physically along with drugs. I remember one night I could hear him screaming at her. I climbed out of bed and stood at the end of the staircase in the shadows listening. Throwing plates into the wall while my mother sat at our kitchen table was hard to watch. I always knew that my mother dealt with his abusive personality but I never understood why she wouldn't just leave and get away from it. Most nights she would bring me to my grandparents where I would stay for days. It had become home to me. At that age I hadn't noticed my grandparents had taken the role of being parents to me while my mother was figuring out her life without me in her way. Moving on in her life means forgetting the past. I was holding her back from that. The biggest mistake she had made and can't get away from is my father. With me around, she will always have a part of him right in front of her. Her way of getting away from that, was getting away from me.

When I was thirteen, I had been permanently living with my grandparents and my mother was living in Concord with her new husband. I was happy that she finally received the life she always wanted but was upset that she couldn't share it with me. Unfortunately, her husband and I did not get along. I felt as though he was trying to control my mother into telling me how to live my life and I didn't want someone I barely knew calling the shots for me. As I had grown to know, my mother let men control her into doing things and I was not going to let her husband control how I was living so I decided not to live with them. I would visit her regularly on weekends and spend time with her but things were different. She didn't seem like a mother to me. I felt as though I was leaving my parents house (grandparents) to visit my older sister (my mother). My grandparents had raised me and I developed the idea that they were a parent figure to me. Growing up without my mother always around made me feel as though she didn't have the authority to treat me as though she was a mother so I developed more of a sisterly bond with her. We would go to the mall, get our nails done, watch movies etc. I could talk to her about anything and everything that I wouldn't talk to my grandparents about. It seemed as though everything I told her, she would be carefree and I wouldn't get into trouble if I told her because it wasn't like she could punish me. I don't live with her and she doesn't have time to care for my actions when she is working and living a life without me