the umbilical web

on love, grief, and forgiveness

It’s like the moment before walking through a spider's web, right when you feel the filament enmesh with your skin, invisible, strung between the trees like the persistent call to forgive your mother. It snares a subtle yet undeniable truth. And it lingers, the weight. Like the moment before you touch a sap-stained branch, its residue of intimacy issues and fear of abandonment glued on your skin, demanding your attention, a gnawing presence. Very much like when your eye is ambushed by an eyelash, a minute intruder, reminding you that your mother loves you, but sometimes her love hurts. It’s like that – being her daughter.

It started with the seemingly insignificant act of selecting a minuscule, pink, plastic representation of a wife, as my chosen companion in the winding journey in The Game of Life. I suppose, in the eyes of my mother, this simple act provided a signal that perhaps I did not conform to the anticipated longings of a young girl. My mother gingerly broached the matter of my husbandless vehicle, "Who will kill the spiders for you?" she asked, burdened with an ancient, unspoken worry. Nearly everything she said held this weight. Mothers possess an innate talent for worrying about their children, but to me, it felt as though she was terrified about everything I was not, including an act as minor as who would do the bidding of expelling the spiders. 

I wonder if she envisioned me as a helpless princess, awaiting rescue from the menacing arachnids that dared to intrude upon my tower. Did my mother believe I needed a man to do my own killings? I responded adamantly, "I will! With my high heels!" My dogged determination was not only the boldness of a nine-year-old child, but a rejection of the conventions foisted upon me, which, perhaps, felt like, to my mother, I was rejecting her as a person. It marked, what I believe to be, the foundation of a life-long tug-of-war between my mother and me. She pushes, I pull. Both holding on as tight as we can, until our fingers bleed. 

The relationship between mothers and daughters proves to be, time and time again, an inherently intricate and delicate web, forever doomed to repair the threads that bond the two of you each time it is destroyed (and it is destroyed more often than not), an everlasting saga of repair and connection. You are, at all times, aware of the tether tying you together – woven with equal parts love and grief. I think daughters are born holding this grief – it's somehow embedded in our DNA, a heavy burden that we inherit along with our mother's eyes and her smile. I say daughters, but what do we call the vessels burdened with the weight not only of her mother's anguish but also that of her mother's and her mother's mother's? And why is it so heavy? Why can't we put it down somewhere, anywhere? Why must it bleed into everything we touch, every person we try to love? Why are we responsible for it? Sometimes all I want is to break the vessel and watch the shards fly everywhere, but that would break my mother (more than it breaks me) so I carry the load. Therein lies the grief. 

My mother was never fully there, either emotionally distant and unavailable or physically absent thousands of miles away, living a life detached from the children she spawned. In doing so, she denied my siblings and me not only the opportunity to offer her our love but also the chance to build an intimate relationship with her. During my pre-teen years, she expressed her worries for the day I would become a teenager. She feared I would grow to despise her, that our lives would be composed of senseless arguments and tension – such was the nature of things; it was our fate. I never pushed my mom’s hand away as I aged into the discomfort that comes with being a teenage girl as she had envisioned. In fact, it felt like maybe she had pushed mine aside. 

Growing up with an absent mother leaves a void that swallows you whole. As a child, you blame yourself for her detachment and begin to think of it as a reflection of your own inadequacy and worthlessness. You become a sleuth, searching for clues and evidence in the nuance of every action and interaction you have to support this narrative. When a story is repeated often enough, you begin to believe it. This notion that you are fundamentally flawed lays out the foundation for a lifelong search for external validation – that you are not a shitty person, that you are loved, that you are wanted. Trust, both within yourself and others, is a rare and fragile commodity to encounter. You are forever trying to complete a puzzle that has missing pieces, and the gaps haunt you in your sleep. The hunger for intimacy is a natural symptom of these gaps – it’s a yearning to connect and be connected to – yet this desire is rooted in a deep fear that this connection will be severed just like your mother's had been, so you leave them before they can leave you. 

The torrent of grief I feel is all-encompassing at times – a deep riverbed of loss and shame that flows throughout the entirety of my being and personhood. How do you grieve someone who is still alive? How does one mourn the loss of not only your stolen girlhood, but of your mother’s? At times I just want to scream. Rage. Weep until my tears consume me. Isn’t it sick and twisted that the person who poisoned you is also the one with the antidote? How do you grapple with the weight of it all? Teach me how to grapple with it, mama. 

In an effort to ease this burden, I decided to spend six weeks with my mother – the most amount of time we’d spent together in over a decade. We pretend we know each other well enough to soften our collective grief, but we continue to exist as strangers. The big moments she missed out on are what we talk about the most – all the first days of school, all the boyfriends and friends she never met, all the proms, dance recitals, birthdays, holidays, an endless list; but the more mundane moments – the sharing of meals, the Sunday flea markets, the exchanges of stories, the morning cups of coffee, the morning and nighttime routines, the trips to the grocery store – those are moments we mourn together. It is in those intimate moments where the essence and details of a person is revealed to you. This trip was our joint attempt at bridging the gaps that widened over time – the knowledge that six weeks couldn’t encapsulate years of missed moments, but it was undeniably better than nothing. 

Weaving myself into a web that was spun without the intention of housing or feeding me was strange at first. I couldn’t help but feel like a spiderling in her presence, wanting to be held and cared for. For five weeks we ran around the same comfortable topics: astrology, old memes and trashy TV shows, the well-being of my brothers, and the guilt she bears. I play off her absence in my life like it wasn’t that big of a deal each time she brings it up because I know the guilt she holds is larger than my grief. I feel guilty because she feels guilty, which makes her feel even more guilty. Instead of talking about it more, we smoke weed and play Nintendo 64 and she laughs at the little things. It is my favorite sound (my mother’s laugh).  

By the sixth and final week, something between us erupts; perhaps it was the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of resentment and love exploding all at once. My mother confesses her deepest fear: the possibility of rejection from her children. This shocks me, not because it is irrational, but because her actions and words throughout my life seemed to invite that very rejection. Up until a certain point, you think of your mom as an entity and fail to recognize the person she was before your arrival, with her own set of needs, wants, and desires, often in opposition to your own. This is a natural realization to arrive at, of course – some are shielded from this reality until the dying days of adolescence, at which time the tears in the web become apparent, but others are not granted this privilege of obliviousness. I say “privilege” because you tuck away your childlike innocence and take on a form of parentification once the illusion of maternal invincibility shatters before you even learn how to tie your own shoes. You become responsible for yourself, observing your mother having one episode after another, crumbling under the weight, and, seeing her like that, you crumble too. 

I recognize my mom’s inner child – a scared and shy little girl, one who had grown up in a turbulent and unstable environment. Sometimes, when we’re sitting in the car, she’ll tell me the most heart-wrenching story from her childhood and I am struck over and over by the painful realization of just how little I know her and how sorry I am for it all. I recognized this wounded child in her from a young age, and that recognition was the reason I didn't reject her – I couldn’t reject her – even though, at times, it would have been easier to do so. Easier, perhaps, in the sense that I could have placed the blame solely on her. But the hurt would still remain, as would the weight. 

My mom wrote me a handwritten note after I left, and in the first line she stated the insecurity she had about her handwriting – “messy and ugly” she called it. I wonder if she would say that if she knew my handwriting looks like hers – would she then call it beautiful? How can mothers hate the design of their webs, but claim they love their daughters? Mothers and daughters exist as grief-stricken mirrors to each other. The mothers hate themselves while loving their daughters. This is what I mean by that weight. It exists in everything I do. Like the feeling of a spider’s web on your skin, even if it’s gone, the phantom sensation lingers.

These words are my attempt at brushing off the web, to place the grief somewhere other than on my skin. The more I can channel grief into an essay, a video, a poem, the more I am able to move freely in the world without being burdened by it because I have given it a name, acknowledged it, voiced it, and released it into the void. I hope to turn my grief into something beautiful, but the more I write the uglier it becomes. I have to remind myself that, yes, there is grief, and sometimes it is ugly, but there is also love and sometimes it is beautiful. Grief is evidence that love exists between me and my mom, and where there is love, there is forgiveness – for her, for myself, and for us. 

My dad tells me I’ll be a good mother when the time comes, and, God, I hope so. I hope if I am to have a daughter that she loves her mind and body and knows she has ownership of both. I hope she radiates light and trusts herself. I hope she dances under the moon and embraces how full of love she is. I hope she sings and weaves tales. I hope she sees me as a safe haven. I hope by the time she is earthbound the weight placed on her floats in comparison to the women she will never know but who share her face. I hope she is a revolutionary girl who knows the power of pleasure. I hope she challenges me and holds my hand. I hope if there is anger and resentment she is able to untangle herself from their web. I hope she teaches me what true love is and extends that love to her grandmother. I hope she reconciles with me when it’s time. I hope she can forgive me. Sweet baby girl, please forgive your mama.

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