Happy Mother's Day

My mom never used dryer sheets.

 I didn't know they existed until I was homeless for two days and my friend let me do laundry at her house and told me she'd already put a dryer sheet in the dryer for me. I slept in my car in the cemetery the first night, on my friend's half-deflated air mattress puddle the next night, and alone in my car in the grocery store parking lot the third.

 My dad begged me to come home. He said he would help my mother communicate with me, said she would work things out with me. I didn't want to believe him. I shouldn't have.

 It's been a year and five months since I had a conversation with her. Two happy mother's day texts and a happy birthday text, and I received a single one-word text reply back,

 "Yep."

 My mother likes to sing to the radio even when she doesn't know the words. She decided she wanted to sing because it made her happy. If she messes up the words, so be it. She likes to sing Spirit in the Sky and I Can Only Imagine. She likes Potential Breakup Song by Aly and AJ. She sits at her computer desk and looks in between the divided lenses on her bifocals, focusing on facebook swap groups and permaculture and eco-friendly self-sustaining solutions. She has a loving nature. She could spend hours kissing her goats, milking them, petting them, feeding them, taking care of them.

 These are the things I want to forget sometimes. The days I miss my mother make me feel guilty, like it was my fault that she killed my rabbit, like it was my fault that she sent me harrassing, nasty text after text, like it was my fault that when I told her to talk to me like a civil human being, she said, "Block me, bitch."

 I was eighteen and she called me a slut. I was eighteen and she told me to get out of her car and walk. I was eighteen and when I walked the last mile to the house, she told me to take my computer and leave my cell phone and get off of her property.

 "Go to the neighbour's house. Call your friend. You can't stay here anymore."

 I was sixteen and she used to check to see if I had cuts on my legs. I did, but she never saw. I was seventeen and my counselor told her she had seen my scars, and my mother was furious, eyes blazing like only hers could.

 I was fifteen and she dragged me out by my arms into the middle of the living room floor at one in the morning and yelled and yelled until I blubbered out a yes or a no to her questions. I was fifteen when she forced me to tell my online friends I could never speak to them again.

 They're my family, now.

 I was eighteen and she dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night and forced me to bake her muffins. Gluten-free paleo muffins. I don't even remember what part of it was food anymore. I had been at school all day, come home, studied, did my chores, did my brother's chores, and finally passed out crying. I had a lock on my door and a chain. She broke it. I had a test the next morning.

 I was nineteen when I told her I was gay, standing on my apartment's porch in the damp after-rain air, cell phone with prepaid minutes pressed to my ear, my breath hot and held in my lungs for too long while I waited for her reply. She didn't care. She cared about everything else, too much, to the point where I was afraid to tell her anything. Anywhere I went, anything I did that wasn't school related, I felt she would punish me for it. I didn't even live with her anymore.

 I was twenty and she used my tablet to take pictures of me at my nursing graduation. The selfie she took on it shows the top half of her head and two bunny rabbit fingers in a peace sign. Her cheeks are plump with mirth.

 I was twenty one and lying on the floor in my apartment drunk night after night, single and alone and if I told her I was dating someone, she would talk to me about it, "It really seems like you like him," but then I dumped him the next month.

 When I was sixteen we would get dressed up and go steampunking together, go to the opera, museums, dressed in fine Victorian wear, doing each other's makeup and hair, making gear-encrusted guns together and Tesla coil powered hats. Collecting kraken and corsets until we could sail in our airships and defeat the world.

 She bought me a pair of metal handcuffs and said we could use them to do a Western photoshoot and all I could imagine was my boyfriend using them on me.

 I was seventeen and she used to drag me to Walmart with her. She didn't want me to be alone in the house by myself.

 I was thirteen and she told my robotics teacher to stop saying, "Even girls can do this!!" and attacked him with a vengeance because yes, in fact, girls could do it, would do it, and he didn't need to say it every five seconds. She defended my brother and simultaneously put him down when he corrected people and got them disqualified at chess tournaments. She was rejected out of every group she started. She attacked thing headstrong and fiery and too blunt and too opinionated and I loved her and hated her for it.

 When I was ten I had an ache in my heart for a boy I barely knew and wrote it down and she read it and pulled me into her bedroom and put her arms around me and told me that when she was my age, she could talk to a boy in German across the world and he would talk back and she thought she loved him but she was in love with the idea of him and it was okay to feel that way but it wasn't real and I wasn't even mad that my feelings dissipated, I was mad that I didn't have the emotion to write the story anymore.

 I can write, now, without needing to feel the ache running through my veins until I stroke out from angst, but she doesn't read it anymore. I live with my fiance, I work full time, I have two college degrees, my wedding is less than six months away.

 And she won't be there.

 And I'm about to become a paid published author and she doesn't know that.

 And I'm nonbinary and use they/them pronouns and she doesn't know that.

 And I am a different person now and she doesn't know that.

 I am freedom, living out my days without a mother to hold me back, without toxicity sinking its icy fingers into my life. Without her hanging over my shoulder, guiding me with guilt. I am freedom. I am freedom.

 So why do I miss her?