LaDita

Earlier tonight I came across a baby picture of my mother that makes me want to cry every time I see it. There is a look of fear and anguish in her eyes, and I know where it comes from (I'll get to that in a second). But everytime I see that photo, all my anger towards her simply evaporates and I just want to hug her and tell her that I'm sorry.
I'm crying right now as I write this, I'm really emotional right now with a combination of PMS and withdrawals.

My mom had a very crazy, terrible childhood. She was my grandmother's first child soon after my G-Ma moved to the US from Russia. My mother was conceived in Shanghai, China during the revolution. My mother does not know who her father is, and my grandmother, after sixty years, still refuses to tell her. This has been very hard on my mom, and a huge source of resentment, especially over the last few years.

My G-Ma, with my then three year old mom married a farmer here who had a few kids of his own. They both had six more kids. The horrible man decided that since he wasn't technically related to my mom, he could have his way with my mother whenever he wanted under the nose of my grandmother. He molested her for many years, and she was raped by one of her step-brothers.
My G-mother treated her horribly, especially in comparison to her other kids.

I am not sure what happened between the time my mom left home and when she married my older sister's father. I know she was not well and pretty messed up after all that. Unfortunately back then, there wasn't much attention to parental abuse, counseling or self-help books. So, like many she turned to drugs and alcohol and a crazy lifestyle to numb her pain.
She met my sister's dad, got married, he turned out to be abusive towards her (though now, I think alot of went both ways). I think my mom was acting out her anger towards her step-brother and her step-dad on men she got involved with. Just a theory. My dad wasn't that much different, but alot crazier.

Fast forward to five years old, me, my mother and my sisters are all living in a crazy house with the electricity constantly being shut off. My mother is drinking almost every night to the point she can't walk and my eldest sister has to take care of her, and as a result, my other sister and I too.
My dad, who is freshly out of prison for armed robbery and trying to turn his life around, is privy to this and sees it as an opportunity to have full custody of me. He does, for a short while, until my mom get sober and gets me back. She is sober for seven years, though very emotionally unavailable, distant and treats me as a burden. I am fifteen when she relapses and she turns from quiet and despondent to raging psycho. Acting out violently to me or anyone else who was around and blamed the other person (most often me) for her attacks and generally gets away with it, destroying my character to relatives, family friends and even neighbors by telling them what a horrible, ungrateful daughter I was to her. This goes on for a couple of years until some circumstance or another allows me to fully remove myself from her. Nothing has been resolved. My sister's marriages and childbirths kind of stole the limelight away from me. Now all my mother's attention is focused on them and our relationship now is very strained. When we do talk (which is rare nowadays) it's uncomfortable and there's an unspoken rule that I'm not allowed to bring up the past or I'll get hung up on.
She is still drinking, though I don't know to what extent or what damage she may be causing. I have a feeling that she's probably never going to stop on her own. She has tried to stop many times over the last couple of years, but I think she has given up trying.

The feeling I have alot lately is that time is running out. She's sixty, she's not in the best of health (chain smokes) and is on a variety of prescription medications for this and that which cause her to have bad side-effects and have to get more drugs to get rid of the side-effects.
I a worried sick about her and I feel I need to make amends to her somehow, soon. Who knows, maybe she will live to be ninety, but my biggest fear is her passing away and not making peace with her. Second to that, my biggest fear is her passing and not having any idea what kind of hell she put me through while growing up.
I have pretty much accepted the fact that she'll never be sorry, or that she'll ever really know. So I know that my apology will be one-sided. I am really sad for what she went through while growing up herself. It's an interesting and very awkward paradigm of what came first, the chicken or the egg?
"Mom, I'm really sorry for what you went through during your childhood. Now will you apologize to me for what you did to me during mine?"
Whose is worse? Who should be the one whose sorry?


Thank you, I really just needed to get this out.