Mother, Am I Weightless?

My mother has always told me that I was meant to be here. Not accidentally, not reluctantly, not as a name added to a family tree because life happened and everyone adjusted around it. She tells me she wanted me. Sometimes she tells me I saved her. I have never really known what to do with that sentence. It is a beautiful thing to hear, but it also leaves me with a strange kind of responsibility. How can you be someone's saviour and still feel, sometimes, like you are carrying too much? I think that is one of the strangest things about being a daughter. You can grow up knowing that you were wanted and still spend years wondering whether you have been too much.

I think children learn their mother's tiredness before they understand the word for it. You notice the sigh before you know what caused it. You know when a cupboard is being shut normally and when it is being shut because someone is angry. You learn the difference between her footsteps when she is simply walking down the hallway and when she has had a bad day. You learn how loudly a door can close without starting another conversation. You learn when it is better to stay in your room and when staying there for too long will make things worse. None of this is taught. You just pick it up, slowly, like dust settling on furniture. My mother and I have loved each other through arguments, slammed doors, apologies, and evenings where the whole house seemed to be waiting for someone to break the silence. There have been days when I have thought she understood me better than anyone and days when I have wondered how someone who knows me so well could misunderstand me so miserably.

Sometimes she says, "I am worried about you," and what I hear is, "You are making my life difficult." I say, "I need some space," and perhaps she hears, "I don't need you anymore." Neither of us always means what the other person hears. We have spent years talking to each other through whatever we were already carrying.

That is probably what makes families so complicated. You rarely enter an argument as just yourself. You bring the last argument with you. You bring old disappointments, old fears, things that were said years ago and never properly settled. You can be arguing about something as small as coming home late while, underneath it, both people are talking about fear, trust, growing up, and the fact that things are changing.

I have inherited things from my mother that have nothing to do with the things people usually inherit. I have inherited the habit of worrying before there is anything to worry about. I have inherited the instinct to make myself smaller when someone else is upset. I have inherited the guilt that comes whenever I choose myself over someone else. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that if I am useful enough, understanding enough, quiet enough, I will be easier to love.

There are moments when I look at my mother and recognise myself in her. Sometimes it is in something as ordinary as the way she reacts to a small inconvenience, or the way she keeps thinking about a problem long after everyone else has moved on. Sometimes I hear myself saying something and realise I sound exactly like her. It can be comforting at times, but mostly, it scares me.

For I don't want to repeat everything just because I know it, have seen it, or have learnt it.

There are things my mother gave me that I will keep for the rest of my life, and there are things I hope stop with me. I don't want every fear that travelled through our family to find its way into my future. I don't want to make someone I love feel guilty for needing space. I don't want to confuse concern with control or love with sacrifice. I don't want to become so used to carrying things that I forget I am allowed to put them down.

This is probably one of the hardest parts of growing up. You start noticing your parents as people.

When I was younger, my mother was simply my mother. She was the person who knew where everything was, who remembered what I had forgotten, who noticed when I was quiet, who could tell from my face that something was wrong even when I said nothing was. I never stopped to wonder who she had been before me. What she had wanted. What she had been afraid of. What kind of daughter she had been. What she had imagined her own life would look like.

Children meet their parents halfway through their stories and assume that is where the story began.

It took me years to realise that my mother had been a person long before she became my mother. She had her own disappointments, her own insecurities, her own version of loneliness. She was learning while raising me. There was no manual waiting somewhere that told her exactly what to do when I became difficult, when I became quiet, when I started wanting things she did not understand, when I began becoming a person separate from her.

And I was learning too.

I wish I could go back and soften some of our conversations. I wish some things had been said before they became arguments. I wish some silences had ended sooner. I wish I had understood earlier that sometimes anger is just hurt that doesn't know how to express or introduce itself. I also wish she had understood that my distance was not always rejection. That my silence did not mean I wanted less of her. It only meant that I was trying to find myself.

There is a particular awkwardness in becoming an adult while still being somebody's child. You begin making your own decisions, but some small part of you still wonders whether your mother would approve. You want the freedom to make your own choices, but you don't want that freedom to make your mother feel left behind. You want to leave, but there are still evenings when you come back and feel strangely comforted by the sound of her moving around the house. You want to become yourself without making the person who raised you feel as though you have disappeared. I don't think anyone tells you how difficult that part is. Growing up is often described as leaving, but sometimes it is learning how to stay without remaining the same person you were when you arrived.

I think about the word weightless often. It sounds lovely until I think about what it actually means. To be weightless is to have nothing pulling at you. No history. No expectations. No guilt. No one waiting for you. No one whose mood changes when you walk into a room. I don't think I want that. I don't want to be weightless. I just want to know that I am allowed to put things down. The guilt. The expectation that I should always be good. The feeling that choosing myself means choosing against my mother. The need to explain every decision until she understands it. The fear that becoming independent will somehow make me less of a daughter.

My mother has carried me in ways I will probably never fully understand. Before I could carry my own bag, she carried things I didn't know were heavy. My fears. My future. My mistakes. My small disasters. My unreasonable expectations. She worried about things before I even knew they were worth worrying about.

And sometimes, yes, she put those worries in the wrong places.

Sometimes she put them on me.

I have spent a long time being angry about that. I still am, in some ways. Knowing that someone was tired does not make every harsh word disappear. Knowing that someone loved you does not mean every part of being loved felt good.

My mother loves me. My mother has hurt me. I love my mother. I have hurt her too. I don't think one truth has to cancel the other. Perhaps that is what I am slowly learning about mothers and daughters. We are not supposed to spend our entire lives proving who hurt whom more. At some point, you have to look at what you were given and decide what you will carry forward. I don't want to inherit every unfinished conversation. I don't want to repeat every pattern simply because it is familiar. I don't want my future relationships to be shaped by things that happened before I was old enough to understand them.

Some things should end somewhere.

Maybe with me.

I don't know what our relationship will look like ten years from now. I don't know which things we will laugh about and which things will always remain a little tender. I don't know whether I will ever become the daughter I once thought I would be, or whether she will ever become exactly the mother I imagined I needed.

Maybe neither of us has to.

Maybe we can simply become two people who know each other very well and are still learning how to stop hurting each other in the places that already ache. I want to be grateful to my mother without turning gratitude into a debt. I want to have boundaries without making them punishments. I want to become my own person without becoming a stranger to her.