Quiet Grief

Mother’s Day feels like a joke with no punchline, like the kind of card you don’t buy because you’d have to lie in cursive. I stare at the shelves lined with pastel lies, the soft-scripted thank yous, and the you’ve always been there's. I want to scream at the cardboard. Always been there? Where? In the silence? In the slammed doors? I don’t remember the warm memories I’m supposed to have. I remember the pressure, the pretending, the clench in my jaw when I’d try to get it right. I remember not being enough no matter how much I performed love. It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s that I don’t know how to say it in your language. Yours is all obligation and correction. Mine is quieter, stubborn, broken in places, but still trying. So Mother’s Day comes around and I write this instead of buying a card. Because no Hallmark line fits into the mess I carry. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe honesty is the only gift I can give.