Mommy dearest...

My mother pinned me against the wall and screamed at me, her face inches away from mine.

“He’ll never marry you. He just wants to sleep with you, thats why he proposed.” she yelled and specks of spit flew at me.

As far as I could remember, my mother had always had anger issues. We lived in Mumbai, India in an apartment and my mother was notorious amongst our neighbors for that reason. My father, sister and I walked on egg shells around her and she was like a ticking time bomb who could go off any minute and say things no mother should ever say to her children.

“You look like a whore. Which corner will you stand on tonight? What’s your rate?” she said to me when at age seventeen I wore a short skirt to school.

“You should just kill youself now.” she said to my sister when she didn’t do well in college and came home sobbing.

She even grumbled at my paternal grandmother, who lived with us, as she attempted to tidy our living room with her eighty year old hands.

Of course, I know now that my mother’s anger was just the tip of the iceberg. My mother’s parents had never cared for her either. Her issues probably stemmed from the lack of love and belonging that was imprinted on her childhood. And she had managed to imprint our childhoods with hate and violence as well. My mother’s anger issues had gone unchecked.

As she pinned me against the wall, I decided in that moment I wasn’t a girl anymore. I was a thirty two year old woman who had picked a man of her choice to marry and my mother was not happy with that decision, becuase he wasn’t Indian. But also because he didn’t make a six figure salary. I decided in that moment to fight back.

So I back yelled at her, “Do you think I care about that? You think I am a virgin. Well guess what, I am a whore. He isn’t the only guy I have been with. I have spread my legs and accepted many men inside me.”

I was shaking with fury as my mother’s hold loosened. She stepped away, aghast at the obscenities crawling out of my mouth. I continued to shriek for what seemed like hours. I emptied my bucket of hate on her and drenched her in dark, gooey filth. And for the first time ever, mommy dearest backed off and was crying in a corner. I laughed at her helplessness; that part of me she could not control. In that moment, I saw the defeat in her eyes and I knew she could never catch me again.

I was free.