Dear Mother

Every Mother's Day, I see three thousand random people posing with their mothers

A must-have, for the three hundred word essays they write, starting with the most unnecessarily obvious hashtag this world has ever known: #longpostalert

And each of them has a singular story to tell really, which is why the sheer waste of that many words, hurt my literary ego

Hundreds and hundreds of words, and a planned candid photo, which honestly should be called forced candid at best, and hundreds of kilobytes of data wasted for what

For one sentence, which in all sincerity, isn't even a sentence, more like a seven-word advertisement to sum up the greatness of each of the three hundred random strangers

A billboard that reads: EAST OR WEST, MY MOM'S THE BEST

Mother's Day posts, birthday posts, random motivational posts out of context, Oscar acceptance speeches: mothers have made their way everywhere there's light, there's good, there's hope

And yet somehow been conveniently left out of divorce notices and suicide letters and rehabilitation centres, because that's bad advertisement

I know what you're thinking: what an ungrateful bastard of a son to speak such of their mother

You know what? I wish I was, for that would at the least explain three decades of a cycle that not only never ends but continually adds on to itself, kilos of trauma, every year, until it turns cancer and fucking kills every last hope you ever had in humanity

For years and years, the world has told tales and sung songs of the magic that mothers are, the miracle that motherhood is

You know the one thing common about miracles and magic is, they're both nothing but illusions, imagined water in dead dry sand

You make believe a make-belief story and it's just another make-belief story

You start believing a make-belief story and that's the same delusion that bred religion: the story of an infallible all-powerful whose theory and reality are more distant than a distantly faint reality

And once that happens, there's nothing short of godliness, for that's where delusion peaks at: gods

And once delusion has peaked, you worship mortal mothers and clay gods, often on the same goddamn pedestal

Where are the stories of the mothers who smothered their living sons and choked their breathing dreams until both lay dead still

Where are the stories of the mothers who in the name of motherhood burned and slaughtered childhoods to suit the sadist narcissists within

Where are the stories of the mothers who assumed they were gods and pledged blind faith in the name of obedience and denounced their children every time they were questioned

Where are the stories of the mothers who were audacious enough to manipulate their children into believing motherhood wasn't a choice but a sacrifice, a sacrifice that demands blood, soul and skin, of the very ones they mothered

Where are the real stories of the real mothers and the real trauma that has been passed down generations in the name of tradition

There aren't any, you know why, because motherhood doesn't approve of bad advertising

And so every time, another god of a mother emerges

I throw up a little, as flashbacks of a vivid past I want to blur so badly I wish I could drink them to oblivion, blur my teary-eyed vision instead

Dear God and Dear Mother belong to the same pedestal for me

They are two phrases I don't remember uttering, writing, or even believing in, in a long long time