My thirteenth birthday sealed your fate.

I waited, dear mother, for hours. The candles were positioned just so on the cake that I had baked and iced myself. A matchbook stood ready to light each one, so that I could blow them out and wash all the past years away. My few presents where stacked neatly on the other end of the table, the ice cream stored safely in the freezer. And I waited.

Around three, when you were only an hour late, I sat down to watch a little T.V. By the time four rolled around, I decided to call you. The phone rang endlessly in my ear, and each time that tone sounded, my heart pumped out a lethal chant: You don't matter, you don't matter. But still I hoped that my heart would be proven untrue, afterall, any number of things could have gotten in the way. Maybe you didn't answer because you were already in your car, cursing the fates that you were late for your precious daughter's entrance to teenage-hood. I comforted myself with that thought, and got a book out to read.

My dad came to sit with me at six, and though I didn't recognize the expression on his face just then, I know now that it was pity he felt for me. Indeed, I was a pitiful little girl, clinging desperately to the insane hope that just this once, on this, my thirteenth birthday, you wouldn't let me down. How gullible and pitiful indeed. By seven, I decided to just put everything away. You were four hours late, and fifteen phone calls later, my heart's chant had drown out the little smoldering ember of hope I had worked so hard to keep alive.

You never even apologized.

I found out later that you had decided to spend the money we were going to use to go out to a movie on a cheap bag of pot, so you and your boyfriend of the moment could escape reality for a while. Was I such a horrible reality you had to escape me, dear mother?

My thirteenth birthday sealed your fate. I decided that day, as my father cradled me like the small child I had been instead of the blossoming youngwoman I was while I wept bitterly on his shoulder, that you were not my mother. A mother does not escape her child. A mother does not neglect her child. A mother does not disappoint or reject her child. And a mother does not use her child. You are not a mother at all. And now, you're barely a woman to me. How will you escape that reality?