Memory is a knife that cuts both ways - sometimes swift and merciful, other times slow and jagged, leaving wounds that never quite heal right. The story of my Mousie isn't just a memory; it's an open wound that weeps whenever I dare to look at it too closely, a testament to the ways family can become both sanctuary and battlefield in the space of a single breath. She was the mother of my father, the most delicate of women, perhaps even as delicate as Helen.
They called her Mousie - a nickname that should have been soft, should have carried the gentle weight of family intimacy. Instead, it became a word I couldn't say without tasting bile in the back of my throat — caustically choking me, without feeling my throat close around it like a fist. The name haunts me still, whispered in the dark corners of my mind where regret breeds like bacteria in an open sore. I was a teenager still in that time, when the call came, still wearing the invisible bruises of my mother's "discipline and hatred,” still learning to navigate the minefield of her moods. Dull my body to her fists. Flatten my emotions to avoid the pain. My father's family had been excised from my life like a tumor - clean, clinical, complete. A surgeon could not have done a better job to me. Or so I thought, until Mousie found a way to reach across the void, the endless empty time that existed between us, driven by the imminent death of her sister, my great aunt. The news of this dying woman should have moved me, should have stirred something deep and familial in my blood. Instead, it only triggered the pavlovian response of fear - fear of my mother's reaction, fear of the consequences of feeling anything at all. It was on her that she was to beg me to break my silence, and talk with her. It was her sister’s dying wish to hear my voice one more time. One time that she might try to end my silence to the family, and break the curse that I was standing under.
The day of the call, I remember the weather - a harsh, bright afternoon that seemed to mock the darkness brewing inside our house. My mother, moved through our home like a storm front, her presence changing the atmospheric pressure of every room she entered. I could feel her coming before I saw her, the way prey animals sense an approaching predator. That hatred was so thick you could taste it. So heavy you could barely carry it. So Her hand, when it closed around my arm, was hot enough to brand, her fingers leaving crescents of white pressure on my skin as she dragged me to the main area of the house.
The main room of our house had always been her stage, the place where she performed her favorite role: the martyred mother, the righteous disciplinarian. And the great table that sat at the center. Convictions were given at this time. Crimes were punished at this table. Sitting at this table meant life or death. Often in the guise of better intentions. The phone sat on its cradle like evidence at a crime scene, and her voice, when she announced Mousie was waiting to speak to me, carried the same satisfaction as a judge pronouncing sentence. I can still see her eyes - O great mother, those eyes. People talk about eyes being windows to the soul, but my mother's eyes were more like mirrors, reflecting back all the darkness she carried inside, multiplying it, amplifying it until it filled the room. A heat with searing pain that eats you from the inside out and leaves you empty, used, and exhausted with her own sick disgust inside of you. .
"You have a choice," she said, but choice was just another weapon in her arsenal, another way to make me complicit in my own destruction, and a destruction that she reveled in and loved. "And you know what I will do to you if you don't do it." The threat hung in the air like smoke, acrid and choking. The evidence before the court was clear, as I knew exactly what she would do - had memorized the encyclopedia of her cruelties, hatred, anger, and abuse, had cataloged every punishment, every "lesson" she'd ever taught me. The scars on my psyche ran deeper than any physical mark she'd ever left. Just another scar. Just another bodily mark. Just another brief suffering. I could deal with it.
The phone receiver felt impossibly heavy in my hand, like lifting a corpse. A dead cold corpse. No - heavier than that. Like lifting the accumulated weight of every beating I'd ever taken, every bruise I'd hidden, every scream I'd swallowed. Mousie's voice floated through it, a ghost's whisper: my name, over and over, each repetition another nail in the coffin of what might have been. Her voice crackled with static, or maybe that was just the sound of reality fraying at the edges. The way she said my name - mother of the earth, please, the way she always said it - like a prayer, like salvation, like I was worth saving. That's what breaks me even now, decades later, when I wake up at 3 AM with the taste of those unspoken words still bitter on my tongue. The sound of her hope - that's what haunts me most. The raw, unvarnished belief that love could bridge any gap, heal any wound, tear down any wall. How fucking naive we both were, thinking that emotions alone could overcome the gravity of fear, the terminal velocity of falling apart. The Bane of my suffering standing there , breathing deeply and effortlessly with its harsh tone, like a bad wind through a grove of dead trees. Her hope was a knife twisting in my gut, serrated with every childhood memory we shared: Everything. The word echoes like a joke now, like a curse.
I sat there, trembling, while possibilities bloomed and died in my mind like time-lapse flowers. Time slowed down to an immeasurable pace. Each potential future unfurled its petals only to wither in the acid rain of reality. I could tell her everything - about the nights spent locked in my room, counting ceiling cracks like rosary beads, every beating seared into the back of my body, every strike thrown upon me with hatred, each one a meditation to the mother of the earth for morning. About the carefully placed bruises, strategically hidden under long sleeves and longer lies, a map of pain drawn in purple and yellow across my skin. About the psychological warfare that had become as natural as breathing: the gaslighting, the mind games, the slow erosion of self until I wasn't sure where the abuse ended and I began. I could beg her to send my father, to rescue me from this hateful prison where the bars were made of fear and obligation rather than steel. Where pain was normal, and happiness and joy were just distant afterthoughts that never happened. Where every crystal vase and Persian rug screamed wealth while I suffocated in silence, begging for the release that would save me. Where my bedroom door's lock clicked with the finality of a judge's gavel, and my mother's footsteps on the stairs sounded like a countdown to extinction. The words rose in my throat like vomit, burning with the acid of too many silent years: "Please, Mousie, help me. Please tell Dad I need him. Please save me before there's nothing left to save. Please. Just come and get me. PLEASE!!! I’M BEGGING YOU!!!! PLEASE!!!"
My fingers traced the coiled phone cord like a rosary, each twist a sin I couldn't confess. The receiver grew slick with sweat, or tears - I couldn't tell anymore where one form of weakness ended and another began. Mousie's breathing on the other end was a lighthouse beam cutting through fog, illuminating all the jagged rocks I was about to crash against. Her patience was infinite, her silence an open door I couldn't walk through. She waited, as she'd always waited, for me to be brave enough, strong enough, broken enough to finally let the truth spill out.
But truth is a luxury for people who aren't trying to survive. Truth is for the strong who do not yield to that suffering. I was not strong. And this was not to end in a fashion of strength. For people who haven't learned that sometimes staying alive means dying in little pieces, one secret at a time. The words stayed locked behind my teeth, a prison of my own making, while Mousie's hope hung in the static between us like a noose made of dreams. But I knew better. Mother of the earth help me, I knew better. I'd learned through years of careful study exactly what my mother was capable of, had watched her demolish every support system, every potential ally, every escape route with the precision of a military strategist. Id watched her kill the things that I cared about. Burn the things that I loved. Every Book, Every scribble, every sense of joy. Burned to Ash. And the consequences of defiance would be swift, brutal, and absolute. She would make sure I never had another chance to reach out, would tighten the noose until even breathing became a privilege rather than a right. I could not already breathe, so I grew fearful of the breathing I would not be able to do further. When I finally spoke, my voice was a stranger's - rough with tears and thick with self-loathing. "Mousie." Just that one word nearly broke me. "Don't fucking call me." Each syllable was a betrayal, not just of her but of myself, of the person I might have become in a world where love didn't come with conditions, where family meant safety instead of survival. "Do not find me or otherwise think about me anymore. You are dead to me. And when you do find me. You won’t like what you see."
The tears came then, hot and endless, burning tracks down my face like acid. I was crying for more than just that moment - I was crying for every birthday card I'd never receive, every holiday I'd spend wondering, every future moment when I'd need a grandmother's love and find only the empty space where Mousie should have been. I had by then lost Helen. She was not there to reason with the cruel mistress of my pain. I was crying for the girl I was and the woman I would become, both of us carrying this wound like a hidden deformity. My mother's smile, when I finally looked up at her, was the smile of a victor surveying a conquered land. "Good, you do as you are told." Five words that encompassed my entire existence, my purpose in her narrative: compliance, submission, surrender. Words that I had heard constant, and words that I would hear constant more. The approval in her voice made me want to scrub my skin off with steel wool, to peel away every layer she'd ever touched.
Years passed like seasons in hell, each one taking me further from that moment and yet somehow never far enough. When I finally broke free, when I finally gathered the courage and resources to seek out a family I had cast out on that fateful day so long ago, so I could find Mousie and try to explain the inexplicable, time had played its cruelest joke.
She was gone, having taken her questions and her hurt and her love to the grave. She would never have closure over me. She would bear her ill will of me on the Long Walk, and I would never be free of my own evil deed. I stood at her headstone, the granite cold and indifferent under my fingers, and tried to find words adequate to the magnitude of my regret. How do you apologize to a ghost? How do you explain to a marble slab that every harsh word was a desperate attempt at survival, that sometimes love has to be sacrificed on the altar of self-preservation? That in choosing to live, I had to let a part of myself die? Perhaps I should have died that day, and not refuted my own existence. Perhaps I should have begged for her help. Would it be better now?
The weight of that choice has become my constant companion, a shadow that grows longer with each passing year. It whispers to me in quiet moments, asking impossible questions: What if I had been braver? What if I had risked everything? What if, what if, what if... The answers, if they exist, died with Mousie, leaving me with nothing but the echo of her voice calling my name through a phone line long since gone dead. In my dreams, sometimes, I answer differently. I tell her everything. I let her save me. The cold, hard truth gnaws at my gut—my mother would have likely taken my life if I'd answered any other way, her rage always a hair-trigger from explosion. But in these dreams, I somehow escape that fate. I get to know the woman behind the nickname, get to feel the warmth of a grandmother's unconditional love. Before I wake up. And then reality reasserts itself like a slap to the face. The truth is both simpler and more complex: I survived, but at a cost that I'm still paying, one regret at a time. They say time heals all wounds, but some wounds aren't meant to heal. Some wounds we keep open as a reminder, a testament, a warning. My grandmother Mousie, became one of those wounds - a permanent scar on my soul, a lesson written in the ink of tears and sealed with the wax of regret. Her story, my story, our story serves as a memorial to all the words left unsaid, all the love left ungiven, all the healing that came too late. In the end, perhaps that's the real tragedy - not just that I lost her, but that I lost the person I might have been with her in my life. That version of myself, the one who could have known a grandmother's love, who could have felt the warmth of family without the chill of fear, exists now only in the realm of might-have-beens, another ghost to keep her company in the graveyard of my regrets.
But then that would be too happy, wouldn’t it.