Let It Go — The Adult Version

A memory surfaced earlier this morning. I remember how, when I was in elementary school, my mother drove me to the big amusement park in Pittsburgh. We had no idea how to get there. This was before the days of GPS and my mother refused to use maps. We discovered wooden arrows pointing the way to the park. We made a game out of spotting the next one and the next one. We followed those painted wooden arrows all the way to the park. It took us about an hour to get there. We had fun at the park. We ate things like fried bread and cotton candy. We went on a roller coaster and screamed. I don’t remember much else about the park itself. Mostly I remember how special it felt to have my mother‘s positive attention for once. We followed the arrows backwards to return home. A little later on this morning I remembered that the reason my mother drove me to the park was because she hadn’t bothered to sign the permission slip that would have allowed me to go on the bus with all of my classmates. I remembered the incident as the one time that she had swooped in like the hero. And though it was nice that she took me to the park, in reality, her behavior was more similar to the way an ex buys your child a special dinner or toy but doesn’t pay his child support. It was a bittersweet realization. Later on in the day, a friend and I drove to another town and had fabulous massages. The woman who did mine really helped my sciatica, and then she did something strange and magical on the inside of my legs. It felt as if a burning sensation was clearing something out all the way down to my feet. “You have a lot of something here,” she said. “It’s tight. You’re holding something in. It’s not exactly anger,” she went on,“it’s more like an inability to trust. You need to let it go.” I’d already let so much go from my past, but her words helped me. I realized that I was still actively in the dynamic of worrying about my mother’s reactions. I was waiting for her to hurt me. How bonzo is this? Why was I giving my almost 94-year old mother, who has become nicer due to her dementia, the power to hurt me the way she did when I was young and she often acted as if she didn’t care about me, and looked the other way when my grandmother abused me? Perhaps what I truly need to let go of now as an adult is using my mother to hurt myself.

Cinse Bonino
2024