To My Mother, My Enemy

I have hated you like I have hated no one else in all the world
Through all the years of my life I have tried to destroy you
For I truly hated you.

Oh, it wasn’t just dislike. The emotion was far deeper.
For me, hating you was a passion,
Wishing you dead was my deepest desire.

But how could I kill you who were already dead?
I could only do so by destroying myself.
And I very nearly did.

“How could you! How could you?”
I raged in my heart.
“How could you bring me into the world
And then hate me?”

“Why?” “Why was I born?”
To be the object of hate?
To be abused, to be hurt,
To be lied to and kicked around
By the world because I was me?

Did it give you some perverse pleasure, hating me?
Did you think you could hurt your own mother
By hating me because she loved me?
Was it because I was a dirty little half-breed?
“Why?” The choice was yours.
You chose my father, so why did you hate him?

You did some terrible things to me in my life,
And I grew up hating myself. Hating the stupid,
Dirty thing that I was.

And all along I thought I loved you.
When you died my sister wrote
Beautiful love poems for you.

When you died, there was hardly a ripple in my life.
I didn’t know you. And you didn’t want to know me.
How I longed to have a mother who loved me.
ME!
Her first-born child. Her beautiful daughter.

How I still long to ask you the questions in my heart.
How I long to say “I forgive you,”
And to hear you say “I love you.”

But that isn’t possible
For you are dead.
I can only feel pity
And sorrow for someone
Who had so much to resolve
In their own life.


The only thing I can do
Is to forgive myself
For hating you
For hating me,
For hating myself.

The only thing I can do
Is to let myself live,
To let myself become
The person only I can be.

The only thing I can do
Is say “I am sorry, mother,
I do love you”, even though
You were my enemy.


My mother was killed in a car accident when I was 10 years old. We were hit by a drunk driver. Through no fault of her own she left many things unresolved in her life.