There is quite the mixture of love and fear mixed into most of my memories. 

There’s the day I was so excited for the princess party that my mom had planned. We had princess outfits and a pig made from meatloaf. We were real princesses.

I remember our friends starting to arrive, and then I don’t remember anything else from that day. 

It’s all gone.

Years later, I’d find photos from that day. I remembered the princess outfits. The photos are a bizarre series, just of me and my older sister, standing in front of the mantel. We’re sad. Then her face gets angrier and angrier, and mine just gets sadder and sadder.

I don’t remember taking the photos.

As I got older and I could take Rachel and Margaret to visit me in New York City, I was determined to make happy memories. We’d go do things and explore. I didn’t have much money, but I’d save up, and we’d take a day and go to the aquarium.

“I wasn’t a good mom,” my mother said to me recently. “And I keep trying to tell people, and they say, ‘No, you were a good mom, you were,’ and I tell them, ‘No, I wasn’t. Can you just listen? I need you to listen.’”

I’ve struggled a lot with my childhood and the things that happened. There will always be a part of me that doesn’t feel safe, that has to fight to belong, that wants to ask for love but doesn’t really know how to accept it. I’ve wanted to be very careful about what I say regarding my parents not because I am scared, but because it’s more complicated than it seems. My mother hurt us, too, but it was different. The biggest difference was, when she finally got to a spot where she was safe, and she didn’t have to fight so hard to survive, and she was able to start healing from her trauma, she turned around and said that she was sorry.

She was so very sorry.

The mom I have now is not the mom I had when I was young. The mom I have now stands up for herself more, listens more, tries to create a safe space more. The mom I used to have was more stern and standoffish and difficult to talk to.

I took a lot of cues from interacting with children from that mom.

I suspected, for a long time, that there were reasons that she was like that, reasons that weren’t so easy to explain, but had a lot to do with religion and faith. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” they liked to say.

I can’t support hitting as discipline for a lot of reasons. And one of them is that the rod is traditionally used as a weapon against the most vulnerable to keep them on the straight and narrow.

For years, that made me angry. It made me angry when I thought about the rods my parents chose, the leather belts and the switches and the paddles. Then a year or two ago, I saw another interpretation. That the rod wasn’t used to hit the sheep. It was used to guide the sheep, to pull them to safety.

And that’s an interpretation I can understand and get behind.

“I was supposed to be able to enjoy my children,” my mother said. “But I couldn’t.”

I feel like as much as I tried with my youngest siblings, I often feel as though I failed them, too. I didn’t hit, but I was stern. I was standoffish. I would try to do things but get so caught up in my fear that it was difficult for me to have a good time. How could I enjoy my sisters, enjoy spending time with them, when I was so afraid that I was messing up, that I was doing it all wrong? I was trying, like my mother, to take my cues from the people that I thought knew better than me.

Stern, authoritative, control.

I wish I had been able to have a better understanding of parenting and guidance then I did when Margaret and Rachel were younger. But that day, the day we went to the aquarium, was a good day. I did my best when they visited me. We’d go do things. We’d make stuff.

There was always fear, lurking in the background.

I was afraid people would think I wasn’t taking care of them well enough, or that I let them do something they shouldn’t do, or that someone else knew something I didn’t and that I was doing everything wrong. It was anxiety, trying to find a problem before there was a problem in order to try to stop that problem before it began.

But love is making a mistake, and admitting you were wrong, and trying again to do better the next time.

And I wish I could try again, one more time.

Love better.

Relax more.

Emblem of Our House is an on-going series about the death of my sister Margaret in 2018, published every Monday here and on Instagram @EmblemofOurHouse.