Mother’s Day is always hard for me. Growing up I felt forced to celebrate a person I didn’t really feel grateful for. It felt so forced and uncomfortable to even say the words, “Happy Mother’s Day.” At the time I felt like there was something wrong with me for feeling this way. It wasn’t until I started working with a therapist and I realized how her words and actions impacted my life and the way I view myself that these uncomfortable feelings made sense.

She never even really seemed happy to be my mom. I was always making her angry for a reason I didn’t understand. She was always fighting with my dad or complaining about something in her life. She cried a lot when I was growing up. She didn’t clean our house. She made meals and then complained about making them. She worked long hours and blamed us for the need to earn extra money. She was always in pain. We had to tip toe around the house, careful not to disturb her in any way. She was always going to the doctor. They prescribed narcotics to ease the pain. She got to the point where she couldn’t drive anymore. She was high as a kite every night. She would call me and tell me how much she wanted to die. How much she hated being married to my dad. How much she wanted to escape her life. She tried to kill herself three times before I moved out of our house. One of those times she tried to kill me along with herself.

The truth is that my mom experienced real trauma as a child as well. The middle daughter in between two sons, born in India. She lived with her grandparents until she was nine. When she finally met her family, she didn’t even know these people were her parents. She told me her mom didn’t give her shoes. She learned to cook from the servant lady that worked at their home. To this day, my grandma treats my mom like crap. I grew up watching my mom trying to make her happy and my grandma continue to make my mom feel like she wasn’t good enough. Not smart enough or successful enough.

The trauma my mom experienced left deep wounds. I’m almost confident she was raped while living in India. I think she spent a lot of her life in fear. She never said much about her life growing up, and everything she did share was really heartbreaking. These mental and emotional wounds manifested themselves physically, in the form of Fibromyalgia and the heavy drug use permanently damaged her brain. It caused even further mental instability and I think it stopped her brain from being able to process logic from logic. I know this all sounds really mean to say. But I’m getting to a point here.

I know that she is mentally unwell and has had these issues long before I was born. I know that the way she treated me had nothing to do with me. That something about me being her daughter was triggering her into such terrible actions. But beyond all of that, I know my mom loves me.

My mom, while I know she loved me deeply, did not have the tools to be a good mother. I acknowledge and appreciate that she did the best she had with the tools she was given. She worked overnights at a call center. She put up with in-laws who were really critical of her. My parents don’t have a great marriage. She moved to the U.S and had to wait 25 years to be able to visit her hometown again. She couldn’t go to her dad’s funeral. She is incredibly lonely. She is chronically depressed. She lives with severe physical pain. She didn’t have a lot to give me. And through all of this, she tried desperately to be what she thought was a good mother.

The truth is that my decision to cut my parents out of my life, do the work with a therapist and choose not to have children is me stopping the cycle of abuse in my family. I am enacting generational change. I am changing the legacy of my family. The boundaries I set with my parents are there to keep me safe and healthy. Because if I can’t engage in any relationships that don’t share both of those elements, I can’t heal from my childhood trauma and continue to grow into the person God created me to be. I have hope that the work I’m doing now will continue to impact generations beneath me.

It’s really hard saying goodbye to someone you love. It’s really hard saying goodbye to the relationship you wish you had with them. Even as I write this, I find myself filled with sorrow. My heart will always carry hope for a relationship with my parents, even though my brain tells me my parents don’t have the skills to engage in healthy relationships.

But through all of this, two truths remain. My mom loves me, and she did the best she could. And I will try to hold onto that this Mother’s Day.