Half a Dollar, And Never Enough

Love was a strange word when I was growing up.

In a broken home—a one-parent home—I was already guaranteed to hear it fifty times less.

But my mom didn’t use the word love when it came to me.

She loved deals.
She loved coupons.
She loved free things and her long-distance boyfriend.
She loved saving money.
She loved all-you-can-eat shrimp nights.
She loved online games from the comfort of her office chair.

But she didn’t love me.
Not out loud.

I heard the word so rarely from my mom.

And never from my dad, when he was gone. 

No one ever taught me what love was—
So I gave it away to everyone.

I loved every boy who told me I had a pretty mouth or pretty eyes or a haunting stare.. 
I loved every friend who gave me their time.
I loved every adult man in my life—
Grasping, blindly, for the shape of love.

The boys who whispered things they'd heard in online videos hurt me in ways I'm now embarrassed to admit.

And even though they declared their love to others as easily as they did to me,
I clung—like a fading shadow—to the dream
That I was the only one their hands had grazed.

When my older sister's boyfriend “loved” me,
Confusion wrapped itself around me like an uneasy embrace.

When I felt his fingers skim my thigh in the passenger seat of his truck,
As songs played that grown men shouldn’t share with fifteen-year-old girls,
I thought it was because he loved me—
Not because he wanted to love me.

When he laid beside me in my bed,
Pretending to want to talk about life’s problems,
I thought it was out of love—
Not out of desire dressed up as concern.

And when I tried to show boys that I loved them,
I did it by trying to love them—
And I did it wrong. Every time.

The universe gave me boys like gifts,
But wrapped them in trauma—
As if it were trying to teach me what love was
By showing me everything it wasn’t.

I had no foundation of love.

No blueprint. No roots.
I had no foundation of a mother—
Only a woman who loved everything but me.

And so I learned to let others love
everything I could give them—
But never who I was.

I wear everything she was—and still is—
Like the comfort of an oversized sweater.
Something to hide the extra skin
She made sure I was well aware of when I was a child.
Skin that’s only multiplied
Since the first time I learned to hate my body.

I see her when I look in the mirror—
Even though I carry my father’s eyes,
His expressions flickering just beneath the surface.
But she’s there in my mannerisms.
In the hyper-fixations.
The endless collections.
Stacks of things that remind me of the mounds of boxes and junk
She crammed into our single-wide trailer—
Pushing me out with every new thing
She haggled down to half a dollar.

All of it worth more than me.

I tell myself I’m not like her—
That I’m nothing like her.
But then I catch myself
Arguing for all the reasons to keep
Sentimental pieces of clothing
That I couldn’t stretch over my stomach
Even if I tried.

I see her in me when I dissociate from reality—
When everything becomes too much,
And my brain shuts down to shield me
From the crushing weight of inadequacy.

I hear her voice
When I stand naked in front of a mirror and begin the ritual.
When I pull apart the folds and stretch marks,
Measure the width of my thighs,
The curve of my stomach,
The heaviness of my arms.

Her voice echoes in my head
When I scold myself for not hiding it all better.
When I throw on a 3XL t-shirt that hangs past my knees
And still tell myself, It’s not enough. You’re not enough. Cover more.

And then I hear his voice—
My father’s sharp, cutting:
“You’re just like your mother.”
An insult meant to wound.
A sentence I’ve never forgotten. 

But my mother said the same thing—
That I was just like him,
Any time I disobeyed, questioned, or dared to disagree. 

I’ve been trapped in a violent whirlpool of Who am I? for so long
That I can’t tell the difference anymore—
Between the parts I was told I am
And the ones that actually belong to me.

Maybe I’m a mix—
A patchwork of every word ever spoken to me,
Every action ever taken against me.
A collage of damage, and survival.

But when I try to weigh it all,
There always seems to be
So much more bad than good.

And I wonder—
If the absence of love in my childhood
Is why I struggle to find love for myself
In my adulthood.

Why all the boys want to love me
With their hands,
But never with their hearts.

The way my mother
Taught me to hate myself.