Hurt
...is a dark cloud covering the sun
...is waking up from a dream to a lonely room
...is your hero becoming human

Mom and I closed the door behind us and walked over to sit on her bed. A few nervous chuckles, a sigh, and I clicked the record button on the small device in my hand. So we begin.

It was a simple enough assignment: Find someone and interview them to get their life story. My mother was close. She and I had a friendly rapport. It would be easy, I thought, to both ask her and access her for an interview.

Before I interviewed my mother, I knew bits and pieces of her story. I knew she and her mother had a strained relationship, that my maternal grandmother had an abusive history both with my mother and my older half-brother. I knew that she had married my father after knowing him only three months. But the details were sketchy, not clear.

The most important thing, my professor had told me before the interview, was to get the interlocutor to talk, and to talk on subject. As it turned out, that was not a problem. I only needed to ask a few questions here and there, mainly to get her to clarify certain points.

As it turned out, the most important thing was trying not to cry.

I never knew exactly what my mother had been through in her life until that night. That night, she told me a terrifying story of physical and emotional abuse, of love and hate, trust and betrayal.

She told me about how her mother had taken every opportunity to make her feel like scum. And how, after her parents’ divorce, her grandmother had slandered her mother so badly that she went to live with the woman who had made her life miserable.

She told me about the things she had done wrong in her life. And about the wrong that had been done to her.

She told me about how she had been raped repeatedly by someone who was supposed to love her. And how she had found herself pregnant in an unhappy an abusive marriage to a man who would end up selling her high school ring to buy drugs from her brother.

She told me about how she and my brother had escaped that relationship, but still lived every day under the oppression of my grandmother. And how she met my father.

And how, despite my lifelong belief of their happily-ever-after story, things had gotten off to a rough start.

She told me about my brother’s difficult life, his struggles in school and with the law, with my father and my grandmother. And how it hurt her to see her child suffer so much, especially when he turned away from her for so long.

She told me about how she has become a stronger and a better person because of the things in her past. And how she hopes that my brother and I will one day be able to say the same thing—that we are better people for our pain.

My mother told me so many things that night. Good things. Terrible things. Things I will never forget. My heart was broken for this woman who sat beside me on the queen-sized bed.

For a brief moment, we were not mother and daughter. We were two women, each leaning on the other for emotional support. We were mentor and student, teaching each other about life and the world. We were friends.

Even now, as I write this, my eyes fill with tears and my throat begins to sting. My hero, my mother, who had until that moment seemed super-human in my eyes, became human. She had suffered terrible things in her life. I realized I knew nothing about her until then. I realize now that, despite what she told me in those two hours, there is so much more to her than I will ever know.

Looking back, her humanity is now what makes her so amazing. To have seen and felt so much bad, and yet to see the good in the world… to have experienced so much evil, and yet to be able to rise above her origins and say, “I will not become my mother”… that is true heroism, true power, true strength.

I am hurt for my grandmother, who is now a bitter old woman estranged from her daughter’s family. I am hurt for my brother, who must struggle every day with the ghosts of his short past. Most of all, I am hurt for my mother, who has come through so many things to become the woman I love and admire so much.