A message for Biden opponents

[calimary]

55. Mom? Is that YOU???? I thought you passed in 2006!

Mom, since you’re evidently back among us, let me tell you what that attitude did to me, growing up. I heard you the first time. Now it’s YOUR turn to hear me.

You never let up on me with your criticism. Never. You were the first Grade-A-Number-One fault-finder of the whole world. NOTHING I ever did was good enough, or satisfied you. I had a weight problem as a kid and teenager. You NEVER let me forget it. You hated that I was fat. I made straight A’s. I never got in trouble. I never hung out with the “bad boys,” or even “bad girls.” I never snuck out at night behind your back or snuck a boy in behind your back. I never cheated or stole from your purse. I never lied to you. I stayed home and studied and wrote papers and read books for book reports. I was a model student, Mom, and that was my world. And you knew that. You saw it every day.

But I was overweight, and I guess to you, Mom, that was THE cardinal sin of all time. And you never let me forget it.

And you’d nag me about it and complain to me constantly about how fat I was and how bad I looked and how no clothes or fashions no matter how much they cost would ever look good on me because I didn’t look good myself. I had long hair and I’d hide under it and you berated me for doing that, too, Mom.

And there came a point where you started to justify it. Maybe you assumed because I was getting older and less inclined to listen to you or care what you said anymore, you should explain yourself a little.

Remember what you said, Mom? (Cuz I sure do.) You argued that you were “just trying to help me.” I remember as though it were earlier this morning: “nobody will tell you the things I tell you. Nobody will tell you this.” (Sure, Mom. I get that. Nobody else is that driven to hurt my feelings day after day, and make me feel horrible and ugly and unworthy of love. Nobody else will s so hellbent on hurting me and shaming me and NEVER being satisfied with ANYTHING I did - even all the things I did and accomplishments I achieved that were good. It was never good enough. I was never good enough. And believe me, I got the message.

I fought the ol’ self-esteem thing for years. In some ways I’m still fighting it, and Mom, you’ve been dead since 2006. And I’m still struggling with it to this moment. Hell, you kept it up in your hospital bed and then when you were sent home to your own bed the very end because there was nothing the doctors could do for you anymore. I’m still partially crippled by that. Still confused about whether I have any worth to anyone because I don’t look like I belong in the pages of Vogue magazine. Certainly I’m emotionally damaged, to this very day.

But you were just so sure you were “helping me.” You thought or believed, I guess, that you were somehow being “kind.” It was for my own good, you’d say. You were just “trying to help.”