All the time I wasted

The day I first witnessed my mothers abuse had been the eve of my sixth birthday. As I pen down these events now, I cannot seem to understand how I had failed to notice signs of this abuse years before. You may excuse it as a case of extreme immaturity and childish innocence, and perhaps that is the case but these thought provoke me to mentally chide myself now, sixteen years later. I harbor a faint memory of one particular mother, daughter interaction at the age of seven, when I had had the mischance to gaze upon my mothers back and see the pale skin indiscernible under the covering of bruises. When I had asked her about them she replied with these words
"They are stars dear, and if you join them up, they will make a constellation"
She then proceeded to provide me with a marker and asked me to perform the simple, well known task of connect the dots on her back. And I did.
I let the red marker make its way from one ghoulish scarring to the other, a tangle of lines, that my mother called 'art'
And when I looked at them from another perspective, my mind too saw the night sky strewn with the light of stars. I labelled it 'beautiful'
My mother had nodded and crouched in front of me, her dulling brown eyes wanly staring into my eyes, flush with the shine of unshed sorrow. Her smile had quivered and I swear, I swear I heard the ground beneath me shake.

"They are stars and they make a constellation and one day I will join them" she whispered as low as the throb of her faltering heart

"I will join them" she repeated again, more to herself than to me. Reassurance. Attempting to find consolation in the metaphysical. What had she left after all?

While my love for my mother, wherever she may be, knows no bounds- I cannot help but silently hate her for her willingness to suffer for the sake of social security. In her position, the streets would have shown more mercy. I hate her for romanticizing the pain and the abuse she encountered on a daily basis

It was not art. It was not beautiful. It was brutality.

And the bruises on her back did not add up to something transcendental, they were nothing more than the remnants of battle.

A battle that she lost every single time