A letter to my mother who raised a daughter with depression:

Dear Mom,

From the time the world was still big, you always begged me to see the glass half full. Just a little girl, so sad, and didn’t yet know why I felt this way.  Little did I know, I’d been programmed to that nature. It wasn’t something I chose to be. Just like one doesn’t choose to have cancer or to be gay. I didn’t volunteer to only see the gray in a rainbow. You kept pouring water into my cup and taking me by the face telling me to “look” despite my snot nosed and hoarse voiced “I can’t”. From the time I was just a little girl, I didn’t understand that you understood that.
Not once did you let me run away in my bare feet and bathing suit. There was never a time where you weren’t there to talk me down from the cliff that I had built for myself.  Despite all the fire from my tongue that I burned you with when the sadness was so explosive that it came out as anger in its purest form, you never ignored my call. Like superman, anytime a small voice that of a mouse’s, came from your bedside in the middle of the night or the shadows of a bedroom painted pink, you came to the rescue. Only if I had taken comfort in your arms then and didn’t find them as a nuisance, but this was still before I knew the secret that you hid from me.

A moment I will never forget was when I asked for help and you told me I didn’t need it. I was “just a kid” going through a “rough patch” and “give it a little while” and I “would be fine”.  Like a judge swinging a gavel and the closing of a book, there I decided you didn’t understand me. This is when the blood began to fall from my fingertips, the letters being written as goodbyes, and cries to God to take my life before I did. Windex easily wiped away the splatters from mirrors and bathroom sinks and music muffled my tears and pleading. As time went on and the world became a little less big, I asked for help again and shamelessly you said “okay”.

Little by little, as I sat in the chair telling my life to a stranger did I realize who I was at the start and who I had become. Completely defeated by an illness that was pushed to the back of the agenda so many times, I was tired and scared.  The love I thought was love was the exact opposite. The guilt I carried had nothing to do with me and I still let it munch away at my personality and my conscience. And the root of my problems was the man who stole your heart but was turning mine to coal. How hard it must have been for you to sit him down, like a patient, and deliver the news that his daughter hates him and doesn’t want him to be there for prom or concerts or performances. The man you married used taking medication as a way to fire a bullet during an argument and told his 15 year old daughter she “doesn’t understand” what she’s going through when in fact it is so undeniably real and intimate that if she didn’t understand she would still see the world as big.

That night in the car you finally let me in.  Every tear that slipped from my eyes you took responsibility for because you thought you had passed on this crippling disease to your little baby girl.  Despite being crushed by the weight of every “I hate you” I had slung your way and the exhaustion from staying up all night tossing and turning on the idea that the words I say about leaving one day and never coming back might actually be true, you still smile and hold a stature that could halt a thousand running horses. Now I understood. My whole life was not oblivious to you. The pleads you gave me as a child to see water for more than water was your way of trying to make sure I didn’t turn out like you.

To me, you are now more than my mother.  You’re a person. Whose only crime was loving me too much.  Sacrificing your peaceful sleep to answer the “Mom I need you” from a face you couldn’t even see. Stapling your lips shut because you knew it would only make things worse if you said anything. All those times you explained in nothing short of a lie why I had taken down everything from my room, why I was crying, why I was always a miserable. It took 16 years to recognize you are a person. It has taken me 16 years to finally say thank you.

Mom, thank you.

With love,
Your daughter