To D.M. "The Weight You Left Me Holding"

D.M.,

I used to wonder if you even saw me.

I used to wonder if the little girl standing in the kitchen doorway, silently waiting for you to look up from your tea, ever registered as anything more than background noise.

You were always there with your tea; quiet, closed off, somewhere I couldn’t reach.
Only when the world cracked open when death or illness struck did you shift into a different gear.

But by then, I had already learned that needing you was dangerous. That reaching out would mostly mean being left reaching into empty air.

I know now that you were drowning in your own grief.
I know you lost more than a son you lost a piece of yourself when he died.

But what no one talks about is how, when a mother disappears into her sorrow, the children left behind have to carry everything.

I carried the silence.
I carried the loneliness.
I carried the sharp little comments “oops” like splinters under my skin.
I carried the guilt of wanting to matter and the shame of knowing I never mattered enough to pull you back.

You weren’t my best friend in high school.
You weren’t my guide.
You weren’t even really there.

And when I started dreaming of a life outside the small town walls you thought would protect me, you clipped my wings in the name of "practicality."

You taught me to settle when I needed to soar.
You taught me to make myself small when I needed to learn how to fight for space.

You feared the world and in doing so, you built a cage you expected me to be grateful for.

I understand now that you did what you thought was best.
Maybe it was all you knew.

But understanding is not the same as forgetting.

And I will not pretend that the weight you left me holding didn’t shape my life.
I will not pretend that I didn’t stumble under it, didn’t bleed because of it, didn’t have to learn how to put it down one shattered piece at a time.

I am not writing this to hurt you.
I am writing it because, for once, I am allowed to say:

You hurt me.

Not with fists. Not with screaming.
But with absence.
With silence.
With expectations so heavy I nearly collapsed trying to meet them.

And still, somehow, I survived.

Not because you carried me
But because I learned how to carry myself.

I am no longer angry every day.
But I am no longer silent either.

I see you now for who you were and for what you could not be.
And I am finally learning to forgive myself for needing more than you were able to give.