Ordinary Beauty

Sometimes the hardest people to love are the ones who need it the most.

How can you make someone love you when they won't? How long are you supposed to keep trying?

There are worse things in life to be than fat, and one of them is ignorant. Another is prejudiced. Another is deliberately cruel.

Now, I learned a long time ago how to be quiet on the outside while I'm freaking on the inside. How to turn away like I don't see all the things that need to be seen, just to keep peace. How to lie low and act like I want nothing, expect nothing, and hope for nothing so I don't become more trouble than I'm worth. I'm five months short of eighteen and I know how to be cursed and ignored and left behind, how to swallow a thousand tears and ignore a thousand delibarate cruelties, but it's two in the morning on New Year's Eve and I'm mad and scared and bone tired and really, really sick of acting like I'm grateful to be staying on a hairy, sagging, dog-stained couch in a junky, mildewed trailer with a fat, dangerous, volatile drunk who sweats stale beer and wallows in his own wastewater, and who doesn't think there's one thing wrong with taking his crap life out on his dog, who comes bellying back for forgiveness every single time, no matter how rotten the treatment-

Hate the behavior, not the individual.

That goes for old wounds, too, you know. I really wish we'd had the chance to talk before this," he says, cracking the window so the smoke can escape. "There's a Longfellow quote I have stuck on my bulletin board at the church office- 'There is no grief like the grief that does not speak'- and it's true. I've found that keeping pain inside doesn't give it a chance to heal, but bringing it out into the light, holding it right there in your hands and trusting that you're strong enough to make it through, not hating the pain, not loving it, just seeing it for what it really is can change how you go on from there. Time alone doesn't heal emotional wounds, Sayre, and you don't want to live the rest of your life bottled up with anger and guilt and bitterness. That's how people self-destruct.

And maybe love is terrifying. I'm terrified now, but not in the way she would think. I'm terrified because I hate who she is and what she's done, I do, and yet there is still something strong and powerful between us, some kind of deep, primal bond that won't end, won't snap or break or change, it just remains there inside me, as sold and factual as my blood and bones - she is my mother, I am her daughter - and I don't know what to call it because it doesn't feel like love, not the good kind I felt for Ellie, with all my heart, but instead an instinctual pull that's been there from the beginning, drawing me back to her again and again, the woman who has hurt me like no one else ever could, and now she's dying and the bond is still here, inside me, and I won't call it love or hate because emotions has nothing to do with the fact that she is my mother and I am her daughter, and we will be connected in that way forever.

Never say God - and the Beatles - don't have great timing.

If she'd said she loved me and still did all those cruel and careless things, would my child mind have decided to accept that as the definition of love? Probably. Would I have ended up believing that love was manipulative and hurtful and full of pain, gotten use to being shoved aside, sworn at and disregarded, picked up and hugged, and then slapped around for getting in the way, starved and smiled at, neglected and cursed, told I was no good and would never amount to anything, then hefted high and proudly shown off down at the Walmart, introduced as a little pisser and a big mistake in the same breath? Yes, I would have, because if she said she loved me and then acted that way I would have thought that was how you loved someone, and how someone should love you back.

I learned to move silently in the background, a dirty, neglected little kid with no voice, no wants, and who made no trouble so as not to call the wrath of the eight or so tweaking adults who lived there down on me. I drifted, faded, and became a listless, ghostlike scavenger who took what she could get. I lived mostly in my head and for a while actually convinced myself that I was a survivor of one of those catastrophic earthquakes or tornadoes I used to see on the Weather Channel,a dazed, bewildered, and emotionless girl picking her way through an endless landscape of foul and stinking rubble to try and come out on the other side.

How can you make someone love you when they won't? And what if that person happens to be your mother?