Dear Parents,
Mom and Dad: I love you. I do. I have to don’t I? I’m your daughter. You birthed me. That has to mean something? Yet sometimes I don’t know how I would feel if you died. You are my mother and my father. But you have never been my mama and you sir have definitely never been my daddy. Mom you had me and my siblings to have people to love you. For the attention. To be needed. WE were your coping mechanism. Dad – we were just more disrespectful mouths to feed. Thanks to you I never had a friendship with any of my brothers and sisters. They had to raise us. And also thanks to you we had no other friends outside the family. Now, when we’re all grown, our family is starting to heal. I can talk to my sister as an equal – as a friend. You took all of our childhoods away without a second glance. Even now, you cannot apologize. Will not. We mean the world to you? You would do anything for us? You. You took our lives, and didn’t even care you were doing it.
We are all in constant fear of becoming you. Dad, I see you in my brothers, and it makes me cry, so terrible is anything that resembles you. My greatest fear is becoming one of my parents. Selfish, psychotic, unreasonable, and self-absorbed. You have made me afraid to trust anyone or anything because of your mood swings and “apologies”. You have been nothing but two faced to me for as long as I can remember. How can I trust anyone if I cannot trust my own parents? How can I have children and raise them without turning into you? You’re all I’ve ever known. I do not want my children afraid of me. I do not want my children to have to take care of me. I want my kids to feel protected and loved and trusting. How can I do that when I’ve never felt that way myself? How can I love, never knowing what love is?
Your Technical Daughter.
You are strong. Everything they put you through has just made you a better person. Do not let yourself crumble into anything that resembles them. My father was the same way and last year my sister said “I can see you becoming like Dad”. I had never had someone say something so mean. It hurt for months, but I realized I was because I was closing myself off. I was trying to protect myself, exactly what my father had taught me to do. I have learned that forgiving but NEVER forgetting is the best answer, not easiest but best. I still can’t look my father in the eye, but I will not let him break me again. I hope you find a way to love yourself and to love others. Its only through love will you heal.
Thank You so much for saying that. I wrote this letter a year ago, and I can tell you that now I’ve finally found and accepted that those people are not my parents in any other way than simply biological, I’ve discovered that it was never that I was not worth loving, it is that they were unable to love. And I have found love, pure unadultered love. And I will never become then, because I am NOT them. In order to be them they must have raised me and influenced me. Which they didn’t. I hate my parents. And I’ve never felt freer.
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Again, thank you