A Mother's Love is Not Required for Life, by Felicia Sullivan
Our friend Felicia Sullivan will have a new book coming out soon. Titled The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here: Scenes from a Life, the book is a biography of her growing up with a beautiful but deceitful drug-addicted mother, her life amongst drug dealers, succumbing to drug abuse and finally redeeming herself.
The Huffington Post has a particularly moving piece on Felicia’s troubled relationship with her mother – and how she came to realize that a mother’s love is not required in life.
Giggling, my mother reveals that she’s leaving us for another man, one she met in a bar — he’s taking her to Disneyland! Disneyland! — and could I not call her for six months, make that a year, because she’s concerned that I would inevitably wreck her happiness. You always do. In the same breath, my mother tells me, Oh, the sex. You wouldn’t believe. I start to shake because my mother is leaving us for a man and mouse ears. I look up at my mother, watch her scrape her teeth with her fork, slurp the last dregs of her piña colada, and I writhe. I hate her. I hate you.
Nine months later, on the eve of my college graduation, my mother calls me, hysterical. The man who bought her mouse ears tried to strangle her. She’s been fired, living on white bread, and can still see the marks his hands left on her neck.
Could we take her back? Could life be the way it was?
I pause, wondering if it’s possible to drown standing up. I want to be the dutiful daughter, the one who loves beyond repair. But I think about the way it was: the woman who never allowed me trespass to my real father, a mother who stole my childhood from me. I remember the years of neglect, rage and abuse, her decade-long cocaine addiction, the fear of angering her and the terror of wondering whether she would get even in my sleep, and the countless times she told me I wasn’t worth her labor. I wasn’t worth anything at all.
I told my mother that she made it impossible for me to love her. Her response was a cold fuck you.
Link | Felicia’s blog – Thanks Felicia and congrats on the new book coming out!
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