"Who wants to love somebody like me?"

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This line makes me smile - it's one of the only lines in my mother's diary that does. The first time she wrote it she was much younger and beginning to discover relationships for the first time. I guess she was jealous that her friends all had boyfriends and she didn’t.

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The second time she wrote it she was scared. It was July 17th 1997, when she was just 16 - my age. She'd met a guy who asked her out, and with that came her first experience of domestic violence. "Ryan grabbed my wrist so hard that my skin turned pure white and stayed that way for hours after. He told me that he loved me but I don't know if it's true. I knew nobody would ever love someone like me."

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A small photograph of a couple is stuck to the page with tape. It's my mum and the abusive boyfriend. She looks beautiful. Beautiful but scared. Her lips are smiling though her crystal blue eyes are sad, and his arm is draped possessively over her shoulders. His face is still intact despite the number of holes I'd stabbed into the rest of his body with a pin. I never wanted to forget his face, though. He doesn't deserve to be forgotten for the asshole that he is.

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Their relationship lasts for page after page of the diary. He takes up way too much space.

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I flip through the thick, picture clogged paper until I get to the first mention of my dad. It’s around Christmas in 1998 and my mum is outside school in the evening with her boyfriend. “This was his last chance. Well, the last chance of the hundreds of last chances that I’d given him. But this time I could never forgive him. He’d threatened to hurt my sister.

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I tried to walk past him but he kept grabbing my sleeve and pulling me towards him. We must have been loud enough to attract attention because the next thing I knew a fist flew through the air and hit Ryan in the face. I looked up to see a boy. He was tall with brown hair and brown eyes, and I recognised him from one of my classes at school.

He took me to the park, away from Ryan”

 

Near the end of the diary my mum seems happier. Her writing is more elegant and less rushed. There’s a small piece of paper wedged between two pages near the end. It’s a note that must have been passed between my parents.

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“You wanna love someone like me?” – mum wrote that to dad

“Want to? I didn’t think there was any way to not love you.” – dad’s reply.

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I turn to the last page and the entry that dumps a huge mass of guilt onto my shoulders. There isn’t even a date; just two messily scrawled words on a tear-stained page: “I’m pregnant.” It’s the last thing she wrote in the diary.

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The corner of the paper curls slightly beneath my finger tips, only to uncover another page underneath it. I’ve never noticed this before. I prise apart the pages that have spent years stuck together, and find the real last entry.

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“To my darling baby. You look at me with adoring eyes, but I can’t return your love. I don’t know how to. I can’t even look at you when they place you in my arms, but believe me, it’s my fault, not yours.

I wish I could love you the way you love me, but if you could love somebody like me, you must be messed up too.

Goodbye my child.”

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I blink and tears falls from my lashes onto the words, merging with the ink to create black channels that run down the page. I’d always been told that my mother had died during childbirth and for all these years I’d believed that. But now I know how she really died, and it was my own dead mother who told me.

By: Pipwadderz

Rating: T+

Motherly Love