Yellow Mama E zine

Going No Contact

 

by Sophia Wiseman-Rose

 

       It was the pandemic. Estrangement was trending. Especially from parents.

       My mother wouldn’t listen. She was a professional woman—single mother, self-made, proud of it. Too proud. She called me honeybun, pumpkin. She texted as if I were still a child, still hers. Her beauty gave me a burning feeling at the base of my skull. I rolled my eyes, blocked her, told myself she was toxic. That was the word of the hour: toxic.

       No one questioned it. No adult child would go no contact unless they had no choice. That’s what the articles said. That’s what my friends said. That’s what my boyfriend wanted.

       My mother had never hit me. She had never hurt me. She had been at every recital, every ceremony, the lone figure in the front row clapping until her hands were raw. She decorated Christmas trees taller than our ceilings, gave gifts wrapped in perfection. She worked herself to exhaustion, she smoked, drank too much, danced alone in the dark to 80s music. She wore intoxicating perfume of dark spicy roses and heliotrope. She never dated. She told me she’d always dreamed of a daughter like me. I told myself she was lying. Or mocking me. Or both.

       She begged me to talk to her. She wrote letters. She cried. I told people she was cruel, manipulative, dangerous. They believed me. Because that was the fashion. I was a victim, a survivor. A martyr.

       I married without inviting her. Guests whispered. Some guessed abuse, even worse. Terrible rumours, none of them true. No sympathy for her, and I smiled.

       But sometimes, when my husband slammed doors or hissed insults, I heard her lullaby, faint as breath through a keyhole. And I hated her more for it. I told my online therapist lies, and my progressive therapist nodded: “You need to go no contact.”

       Then she stopped calling. Stopped writing. Stopped sending gifts. Stopped living.

       My brother called: “She’s gone.”

       She had hung herself from her window, clutching one of my childhood dolls.

        I used to abandon things until they died. Goldfish. A cat. Then my mother.

       Her voice leaks from my throat, her DNA saturates the very marrow of my bones.

       I thought I was strong, enlightened, free. But all I had done was kill the only person who loved me without condition.

       Not murder.

       Not even manslaughter.

       Something worse.

       Matricide by fashion.

 

Sophia Wiseman-Rose is a Paramedic and an Anglican nun in the United Kingdom—two callings that have afforded her an intimate view of both humanity’s grace and its frailty. Alongside these vocations, she is a devoted painter and illustrator, and a writer drawn irresistibly to the darker currents of the imagination. For Sophia, poetry and pros are catharsis and liberation: a privileged mode of self-expression, and a means of bringing clarity and order to the often tumultuous landscapes of the inner life.