I will always love you. No matter who tells me you are not worth it, no matter how hard I try not to care. I will always love you, because you are my mom.
Everyone tells me I should hate you, and at some times in my life I wanted to, sometimes I did. But the hate always wore off. I always loved you more than you ever knew. I tried so hard to hate you. It makes no sense for me to love you after what you did. I always forgave. I figured one hit, you just had a bad day. I could handle the pain. When it got worse I found more excuses, oh you were drunk. But that is not an excuse. Nothing is an excuse for abuse. No matter what type. Verbal or physical, it all hurts.
What hurts worse is after. It is not the hit that damages, it is not the sound of your yelling. It hurts because I love you so much, and you never showed your love back. Maybe you just did not know how to. You see you tried to buy my love and forgiveness, but you got it regardless.
You hurt me more than you or anyone could ever imagine but the craziest part is, I feel bad for you. I feel bad that you feel like the only place you could take your anger out was on your children. The children that grew inside you, that were yours. You hurt them. That is so sad to me. The fact that you did it repeatedly is even more sad. But the saddest part is that you never even apologized. You never fixed your mistakes, you never took responsibility for what you did. That is sad. That is heartbreaking.
But I will always love you. With every hit, I want to believe there was some type of love behind it. Because you were hurting, you hurt others. I will always feel a sense of responsibility for you, for your actions. With every nasty comment you made towards me, I choose to forgive you. For this is what I am called to do. I am called by my Savior Jesus Christ to forgive you, so I choose forgiveness. I choose to love you. But I also choose to love you from a distance, I choose to love you so I will not hurt anymore.
I choose love, and I choose forgiveness. Because I choose to try to understand. I choose to learn. I choose to overcome.
