A needed community

Hi, I’m Jessinta. When I was 14 my biological mother died, further sending me into the depression, anxiety, and PTSD I had already developed from my mom’s former abuses. Because I didn’t live with my mother and made it obvious that we didn’t get along, only one person checked on me after the first day. In fact, quite a few people told me “At least you weren’t close.”

When I was born, my mother tried to throw me off of the balcony because “demons were coming to get us.” When I was sixth months old, my aunt and dad would regularly walk in on her holding pillows over me and my infant cousin, claiming “Aliens are in them.” When I was two, she took me to Arizona on a one way flight without telling my father—due to an order of protection and the lack of divorce, my mother was viewed as a fleeing wife. She was not fleeing violence though, she was fleeing the monsters in her head. At some point, she allowed me to be molested. When I was 14, her psychosis finally caused her to die in a single-car accident. And I was suddenly, very much, in every sense of the way, without my mother.

I was alone in this new world of grief–alone and small and scared, and suddenly I was very motherless. Not only in an emotional sense, I had been without her for my entire life emotionally, but now I would never receive a ranting phone call about aliens ever again. I would never again hear her screaming about my dad and how he “took me away.” I would never hear her ask “So how’s my cat?” when talking about a cat that was in fact, mine. I would never smell her again. She is gone, her body now ashes that I wear in a necklace.

And nearly ten years later, I have decided that it is my time to make this place. To make the Dead Parents Club so that maybe, just maybe, entering the world of grief is less lonely.

Images Provided by Aro Ha Wellness Retreat