My mother...

I remember.. walking through the grocery store with her. How the little old ladies would look at us with stares of uncertainty...
I remember calling for her, and laughing at the strange looks.
Their logic? How someone of chocolate skin could produce such a fair skinned child.
My logic? It was just funny, the wide eyes, the slack jaws...
I remember her asking me questions sometimes, as if my opinions really mattered, and I would respond with whatever answer I knew she would like most. Her softness, her largeness, larger than life... encompassing the world...

I was always sensitive to that... the kadence of her voice, the tightness of jaw... the tension in the air... If she was upset, then I was upset. If she was hurt or outraged.. I was hurt or outraged.

I know of days when it seemed like it was just her and me. My sisters and brother would stay with a relative... the wrinkle in her brows when she couldn't afford to pay for all the groceries... the feeling of shame when we had to put some things away...
These things remain close to my heart, as our shared pain. Our struggle... when I was hers and she was all that was right in the world.
Even when...
even when her face would change, her eyes widen with anger, and she would hold a knife to my throat and threaten to cut me. Perhaps I said the wrong thing? I could not please her... Should I have looked at her a different way?
Or when the dark plastic trash bag descended over my head, and she held it there when I struggled, desperate for air. She held it there and said. "Don't play with these any more."
She was life and she was death..
She was death when her fingers encircled around my neck, and she squeezed... I was strong enough to fight it. I was strong enough to pull her fingers away.. and yet I did not. I was mesmerized at the anger I saw there. The emptiness that she had for me in that moment...
She was life when we'd play Christmas songs, and we'd dance around the house, with no presents under the tree and no guarantee that we would have any.
She is love and hate.. my mother.
She is love when I think of all the things she gave up, so that we could eat.
She is hate when I think of the word 'stupid', or when I collapsed doing dishes, crawling my way to her room, needing her help, and she found no need to rise from the couch to come to my aid...
My mother is my past, she is my present, and while I desperately try to struggle to regain the healing, while I struggle to understand the bruises and the hugs overlapping... overlapping so that I am unsure whether or not I can fully hate her, knowing I will always love her. I struggle with the knowledge that I can never fully trust her.
Always confusion...
Always in angles, in curves and circles...
Never a straight, definitive line.
Then again... sometimes relationships are like that...
Even relationships between mother and child..