How Do I Wash the Mother Out of Me?

A personal essay on betrayal and first love

Dear Reader,

The following is a story that would not leave me alone; it’s been dogged, persistent, following me everywhere, and so I wrote it. My guess is that this is a first pass, a first iteration of something still forming. We will be in tough territory together. Keep in mind that this is my life, my lived experience, which I make into art—as part of a therapeutic process, and as a subversive act of healing.

My curiosity is about how to tell the truth without feeling guilty when I was raised in systems both familial and structural where telling the truth equated to betrayal. To tell the truth was being sneaky, whereas to lie was kind. Only recently did my therapist point out that I have it reversed from what would be considered typical. I’ve already published and then unpublished this post once because of my own internal panic.

Still forming. Always learning.

This is a piece of my story that I have not spoken about publicly, and only in the last few years have been able to speak out loud to my therapists and friends. In order to honor my own boundaries, worth, confidence, and sense of self, this essay is going behind a paywall.

Melissa Febos writes, “That these topics of the body, the emotional interior, the domestic, the sexual, the relational are all undervalued in intellectual literary terms, and are all associated with the female spheres of being is not a coincidence. What I mean is, this bias against “personal writing” is a sexist mechanism, founded on the false binary between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the former.”

This helps me, and maybe you, to remember that this kind if art is subversive, an act of resistance.

Medea on her golden chariot, by Germán Hernández Amores

Thank you for your support, your love, your feedback and notes. Even if I can’t get back to you right away, please know that your messages are read and carried with me, like little stones, grounding me to this earth.

Happy new moon, darlings. I love you. We got this.

Audra

xoxooxoxo

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How do I make medicine of betrayal? How do I write my way through something I don’t want my mother to read? Chelsea, a writer friend of mine, said to write with abandon.

Abandon.

But what, and whom, will I abandon?

I feel inspired by Sophia Coppola and want to do more with less. I want the colors of the curtains to be perfect. I want three women hugging at the end of the film to say nothing. I want toe nail polish to mean multitudes. I want to say less, but I have so much to say.

abandon (v.)

late 14c., "to give up (something) absolutely, relinquish control, give over utterly;" also reflexively, "surrender (oneself), yield (oneself) utterly" (to religion, fornication, etc.), from Old French abandonner "surrender, release; give freely, permit," also reflexive, "devote (oneself)" (12c.).