Monday, March 26, 2007
Mom,
First of all, allow me to say that I feel like I really shouldn’t even be calling you Mom. But, that is what you were supposed to be to me. Instead, you were the single most dangerous thing to me in my entire life. I’ll address this letter to you with the word “Mom” just for the sake of reminding you how much you have hurt me. Of all people in this world, there is nobody I would feel more pain in addressing this letter to than to you. Anybody else could have done to me what you did, but the pain wouldn’t have been as deep and as severe. To have your own mother knowingly and willfully hurt you and allow other people to hurt you right before her own eyes is the worst kind of hurt I think I will ever know. But I’m sure knowing that you are the biggest source of pain in your own daughter’s life doesn’t bother you a bit. In fact, it probably even makes you feel good – you probably feel a sense of control from it. You should know that you do not, nor will you ever control me. More importantly, you should know that you failed at making me your company in misery. Hence, I am here now writing you this letter. I don’t want to write you some long letter about how I feel about you right now because that won’t do me any good. I don’t need a long letter to write about how I feel about you. It would be me saying I hate you and I want to be as far away from you as I possibly can twenty million different ways. However, I will be writing you recounting specific incidents in which you hurt my heart. You confused me and you made me feel terrible but at the same time I loved you and I wanted to enjoy my mother. I chased after you up until I was about fifteen years old. Now I’m seventeen. With everything I have gone through in this past year at the shelter, all alone, experiencing things that no mother in her right mind would ever want for her child, you left me here. You tried through DYFS to get me to go stay with you in order to escape the suffering I live through day in and day out here. They even tried to bribe me on your behalf, saying that you wanted me to know that if I go live with you then I can go back to Pingry. How pathetic. You clearly don’t understand how horrible you are. What does it mean to you that I have chosen to suffer the way I do living in a shelter for sixteen months over even attempting to visit with you? It means that nothing compares to how horrible you make me feel and how much I fear you for everything that you have done to me. I need to tell you in my own words exactly what things you did to me (even though I am sure you already know considering how hard you try to hide them) that were plain and simple WRONG. So, here it goes.
You were giving me a bath in the dusty rose pink bathtub inn the upstairs bathroom at our old house on Glenside Avenue. I had this plastic toy snake, and it was a relatively big toy snake. It was sort of shaped in a circular or C shape. It was yellow with some light brown scales on its skin, maybe some very light green in there, too. Its belly was a lighter color yellow. The toy snake also had an open mouth with a bright red plastic tongue poking out. The tongue was hard and straight. You were poking the tongue in my vagina. Then, you put my hand on the snake and you said, “Don’t move,” as you got up and left the bathroom. When you came back, you got all upset with me, acting shocked and dismayed – almost disgusted by me, and said, “Talia, what are you doing? What’s wrong with you?” I just pulled the snake away really fast and hoped that you weren’t aware that I kept it there because I wanted to keep feeling the weird sensation it gave me to have the snake’s tongue touching me in that spot. I already felt ashamed enough as it was, and to have you come back in and look at me like a dirty child, a child that had something wrong with them, it just crystallized the guilt in me.
FREE OF YOU,
Talia Ray
