Blessed Burden

Being the only child of a single parent for a majority of my life, I know what it’s like to feel obligated to look after that parent. For me, it’s my mom. She’s my best friend and I love her more than anything, but there was a time when I loathed her with every inch of my existence. I used to be afraid of going out with friends, or even going to school and leaving her alone. I was so afraid to leave her by herself because of what she might do with that free time. I tried spending time with her, but I soon found that sadness was contagious. And her sadness was so immense, I found myself bowing under the weight of it more often than I’d like to admit. When she was coherent enough to process that what I was displaying was anger, my mother did not understand that anger. She didn’t know that she was fucking me up beyond repair, and she didn’t care. Her parents were always around when she was growing up and they would never have left her alone to make her own food at age 10, never would have forced her to grow up so fast that she could feel her childhood being ripped away from her. So how could she fathom that what she was doing to me was making me hate her? I understand that depression, when you have it, is like a black hole sucking you in, or a blanket of fog suffocating your thoughts. And I understood, at age 10, that I was all my mom had. I was it. It was my responsibility to take care of her; I was the only one who could even try to ease her pain, pull her back down to Earth, and clear the fog.