Trying to love my mom is like trying to get wet for an ugly man.

It is a physiological impossibility.

All affection I have left for her seems habitual, residual, obligatory.

Guilty.

She deserves compensation, of course, for all the years of domestic labor, emotional support, and objectively excellent upbringing she’s provided me. So, I pay my dues in crippling gratitude. 

But nothing can stop her telling me what to think, how to feel, what to wear, when to call, when to text, when to eat, when to shower, where to go for a haircut, what to pick for a profile picture, no, yes, no, can’t, you just can’t you slut, you he-girl—from gnawing me inside-out. It’s like that ancient torture, you see, with ice dripping onto your forehead, drop my drop. A tiny drop is nothing. Two tiny drops are nothing. But hit that spot with a tiny drop for twelve years and there’s festering flesh and nerves frayed raw. Even when the drops stop, my skull is the vestige of their gravity. At my worst, just the sound of her voice makes me leave the room.

I actually left the house when I was twenty-one, for college. But even when we’re not together, we’re together, and I have to excuse myself.           

I try to make the moment delicate.

I turn my head away from the camera.

I let a pause run on for too long.

I tell them I am busy.

But she has made it a rule to ignore the first cues and plow through: How is Jack? How is Jill? How are your housemates? Mom, we don’t even talk to one another. Oh, I see. Anybody new? Pointless questions to prolong a petering conversation. Her blatant cluelessness—so consistent and tactical, it can’t possibly be real—always touches a nerve, a nerve I hold between my thumb and forefinger just long enough to answer another question. Either dad saves me, or I save myself. Finally, I spell it out for her.

“I have to go.”

But nothing can save me from her saccharine farewell: kissy lips and “사랑해.” I have not told her that I love her in my mother tongue in a long while. I do not remember when I last spoke the words to her. Words are too sacred to be wasted by the unmeaning. Utterance will not conjure what is uttered. So instead, I say, “love you too.” English, as the common language of the world, is as ubiquitous and impersonal as public toilets.

But she is always so personal, making everything about me, so she can gloat how well she raised me or tell me how not to fuck it up. Everything in the world comes down to my life and her place in it, its mastermind orchestrator. No matter where I start, it always ends with me, me, me, and her, her, her. So, we talk in circles. She says it’s all for love, love of a kind I could never hope to receive from another person because no person is like the mother who birthed you. Mother and daughter, parent and child, one of a kind, once in a lifetime. I guess it is one of a kind, this composed revulsion, numb apathy, boredom, spite, superiority, all euphemisms for an unquenchable thirst for dry distance stretching from me to her like sand. Each “love you too” puts another grain between my toes and hers. You say “사랑,” so I will say its dictionary equivalent back to you so you won’t feel sad or mad, and let me go. Should I feel bad for being transactional when all she wants is to get personal? I thought she had enough of personal when she snuck through my drawers and found a diary full of “fucks” and “bitches” when I was eleven and porn when I was sixteen. I know I had enough when she did it all over again with my phone, making me paranoid. I was stupid enough to think she would actually listen when I said, please don’t touch it, it’s private. I think it all started then, those terrible nights of humiliation when I realized I could never have enough space from her.

All I want is space. Silence, followed by a completely voluntary video call. But our time with each other is as regular as clockwork, set for Sunday 11 AM or 4PM. (She complains when I choose 4PM.) It is slightly nauseating to watch her miss me so. Don’t I text you every day? Morning and evening? Every time I go out and every time I come back home? For her, it’s the bare minimum. She is entitled because I’m a better parent than most other mothers, so does that mean I must be a better daughter than most other daughters? Hell, maybe you were the one who was transactional all along.

The thing that drives me crazy is that a tiny part of me agrees with her.

Her umbilical right to intimacy makes me wonder if I ever left the womb. When will the cord sever? Will it ever? If she dies, will the rot of her flesh travel up to my belly button and kill me, too? Will gangrene settle in, gnaw off the womb she secretly worshipped for grandchildren, children I never gave her because I felt more like a son than a daughter? Actually, I wouldn’t mind.

But that is probably far, far away. And that is good. I do not want her dead. I only want to know if I would mourn when the day comes. I run thought experiments where she lies in the coffin with her eyes closed and those tireless lips, still forever. I would prefer her corpse to have white hair and thirty deep wrinkles. That way, she dies old, old enough for me to not need her at all. I despise myself for fearing I need her, even now. When will the milk digest and hit the toilet bowel, ready to be flushed, never smelled again? Does the fetal fluid ever dry, evaporate into the sun? I have been clammy for too long.

I think of what we used to have when I was nine, before I did all the things she tried to stop me from doing, with which she is now fine but not totally and even if totally, a bit hypocritically.

It’s like trying to tape back a limb onto a stump that doesn’t bleed anymore. How do you fix that? Do I make myself bleed again? Lavish it with stiches and bandages and ask her to kiss it better again? But you see, I’ve had enough of surgery—violations supposed to be good for me.

Maybe the stump is happy to be useless and dead, at last, at last.