I believe in the power of letting go.
One night I wake up to my parents fighting, a common occurrence for most children. However, this time is different, this time they see me peeking wide-eyed from upstairs and ask me to come down. They sit me down and they tell me that they are considering divorce. I guess I saw this coming, but I never could have predicted what my mom told me the next day.
She had told me she was fed up of the life she had created with my father and me. She expressed to me how frustrated she was with how she hated her job, how she had no friends, and how she didn’t feel any love reciprocated for her hard work and sacrifice. But how, I wondered to myself, could we love someone who didn’t want to be with us.
My mother is a nice person, a good friend, but a mother who carries so much melancholy. She blames me for her failures and pines to live somewhere else, somewhere without me and my dad. My mom wants to leave us and the life we created so she that may return to her high school friends and her other family, the family that does not include my dad and me but my grandmother, the family with whom her heart lies.
She forced me to question myself and everything I had achieved. She constantly reminded me of how I always fell short of her expectations for me, and because of this, my family was falling apart. What kind of parent does that? Rather than provide me with the necessary motherly love, foundation and support, she made me feel like I was never enough. I have grown up angry at my mother, developing the type of anger that cements with time and never seems to go away. It grew into a huge burden, a cancer, in my life. I was angry at her for blaming me for her misery, but I also began to think her unhappiness was my fault.
Carrying this burden on my shoulders has been draining. After I moved out of the house, I still found myself carrying this weight on my shoulders. I do not want to be like her, I do not want to blame someone for my unhappiness. Watching my mother regret her decisions, I have learned from her mistakes. I have learned what I do not want to be. I am still angry at her for regretting her decision to stay married to my dad. However, I believe spending my entire life angry at my mother or regretting my past decisions will get me nowhere. Letting go of the past and focusing on the wonderful things in life, I know will make me happier than she. I want to remember the right decisions I have made, rather than spend my time holding onto my past. I know I just have to let my anger for my mom go. By letting go, I can just move on and stop blaming myself for something that is out of my control.