You gave me the sword

A letter to my mother

Mom

You bought me the book Totally Private and Personal, a book about writing in a diary as a daily practice. You bought me subscriptions to New Moon magazine and Reluctant Hero magazine, feminist magazines for girls. Reluctant Hero actually published the first piece of my writing to ever be published — an anonymous piece about me being a closeted gay thirteen year old.

You gave me A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World, and while it was a totally age inappropriate book to give to a twelve year old, that book changed my life and introduced me to zines. That book showed me that zines were a place you could say anything, a place where you could tell the truth. You photocopied my very first zine for me, Glitterduck, which I published at 13. You promised to respect my privacy and so I don’t think you read it, but I was writing and publishing about the incest in our family even then.

You say that I only focus on the bad, that I don’t credit you for the good. You accuse me of being mother blaming and anti-feminist and delusional for telling you the truth. You threaten me with lawyers for writing and publishing the truth. But mom, I need you to know, you are the one who gave me the gift of writing and writing is the most important thing about me. Writing saved my life. If there is anyone I can credit with making me a writer, it is you. And there is no greater gift I could have been given.

You gave me the sword I would use to sever you from me. You gave me everything I needed to betray you, to break the fundamental rule of our family and tell the truth. You gave me books and magazines that showed me how to tell the truth about impossible things. You gave me the tools to not only write the unspeakable things down, but to publish them. You taught me about feminism while you allowed the men in our family to sexually abuse your daughters. You taught me about feminism while your actions revealed you to be a sexually abused woman who had not recovered her own power and sovereignty. You repeated the cycle but while you did so, you gave me everything I would need to eventually break it.

I am going to Toulouse to meet with the people who have been translating my writing on incest into French, and the part of me who is a mother-love starved and hungry little girl wants you to be proud of me. Mom look! I became a writer like I always wanted. I became a writer like you said I could. Mom look! I’m successful and internationally read and my writing is important. I think I might even be more famous than you, mom. I wish you could be proud of me. But you threaten me with lawyers. You tell me to stop telling the truth.

Mom I love you so much and I never wanted to hurt you. I spent so many years trying to find a way to tell you that could preserve a relationship. But you require my silence and I refuse to give it to you.

I am the daughter who betrayed you and I think a part of you knew that I would. I think there’s a little girl in you who was waiting for me to save her too. And that was unfair of you to ask that of me. And I’m sorry that the way to save the girl inside you is to betray the woman who built her life on lies. I’m sorry that in order to save myself I had to do what you consider the worst thing I could do. I’m sorry that you need to think of me as a liar when it was you who taught me to tell the truth.

All I wanted was to give you peace. All I wanted was for you to see how much I love you. I didn’t want to have to be the scapegoat. I didn’t want to have to be sacrificed in order to maintain the delusion. I want you to see that I am your daughter and I am this brave because you raised me to be. I will not bend to you because even as you taught me submission, you also taught me how to never submit.

The answer is writing.

Thank you mom. For making me a writer.

Clementine

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Clementine Morrigan is an independent writer, cultural change maker, truth teller, and moral philosopher. She writes essays and literary nonfiction about ethics, politics, relationships, sexuality, violence, trauma, and unconditional compassion. Her cult classic zine, Love Without Emergency, has sold more than 11,000 copies (that’s a lot of stapling). Her podcast, Fucking Cancelled, independently toured the United States. Her readers have created and disseminated amateur translations of her work in several languages. If you have spent time in a punk house or queer collective house in the last 20 years, you have probably flipped through one of her zines in the bathroom.

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