My Mother Hated Me For Twenty Years and I'm Dead

For a long time, I was obsessed with clearing my name.

But every time I tried to explain myself, all my mom heard was me making excuses.

She thought I was just like my dad, born worthless.

To this day, she still believes my dad was so jealous of Tracy’s dad, her first love, that he didn’t try hard enough to save him during surgery.

And by her logic, I inherited that same “inferior blood” and was destined to ruin Tracy’s life.

I used to wonder how a mother could abandon her own child and gave everything to an adopted one.

But now that I was dead, I didn’t wonder anymore.

And I didn’t care anymore.

The night I died, my mom threw Tracy the perfect birthday party.

People who didn’t know what happened were posting “Happy Birthday, Lillian!” on social media, but my mom deleted every single one of them.

It was clear to everyone that she was done with me.

The next day at work, she came in wearing a shiny new gold necklace.

“Tracy’s so sweet,” she bragged. “Even on her birthday, she bought me such a beautiful gift. Not like Lillian, she never gave me anything but grief.”

She was all smiles, proudly showing off the necklace. But the whole office fell silent.

They remembered it was my birthday too.

And they remembered how I always treated my mom.

“Mabel, Lillian just died. Maybe ease up on the comments,” Uncle Jordan finally spoke up for me.

Hearing my name, her smile faded. She shot him a sharp look. “Jordan, why are you always defending her?”

“Lillian was a good kid. Why can’t you see that?”

Jordan stood up, pointing toward the tree outside the window. “See that tree? Every time Lillian came to see you, you’d tell her to leave. After a while, she was so scared, she’d just hide behind that tree and watch you from there. She was just a little girl, Mabel. How could you not feel anything for her?”

His voice cracked, his eyes filling with tears.

My own tears fell, uncontrollably.

At least someone in this world had loved me.

Uncle Jordan was the one person who really understood me.

He saw everything I did, and because of that, he cared about me in a way no one else did.

My mom didn’t like it, but he would just shrug and say, “Little girls deserve to be loved by everyone.”

Eventually, she stopped trying to change how he treated me. But this time, he crossed a line.

She slammed her hand on the table, standing up so fast the chair nearly tipped over. She pointed at him, her voice shaking with anger.

“Did I ever ask her to come? Didn’t I tell her to leave me alone? If you cared so much, why didn’t you take her in before she died?”

Jordan’s whole body shook with fury, his mouth opening and closing as he tried to find the words.

After a long moment, he finally said, “You’ll regret this.”

“I’ll never regret it,” my mom shot back, her voice cold.

They stopped fighting after that. She didn’t even mention the necklace anymore.

She had something else on her mind. She’d put my apartment up for sale, the one I used to live in. And it had to be cleared out today.

She was so angry she grabbed her purse, and stormed out of the funeral home, stepping right on my ashes on her way out.

I followed her back to my old place, the apartment where I’d last lived.

It was a tiny, worn-down unit in the outskirts.

The moment she opened the door, the stench hit us both, rotten, foul.

The cake was still sitting on the table, candles melted to the bottom.

I had lit them that day, hoping she’d show up. But she never did.

Now the cake was moldy, crawling with maggots and flies. The sour smell filled the entire room.

My mom pinched her nose and avoided the mess, moving straight to my things.

I’d always kept the place tidy, so all she had to do was throw everything into boxes and toss it.

She did it all with a look of disgust until a small pink notebook slipped out from one of the boxes.

My heart leaped to my throat.

She frowned, picked it up, and started flipping through the pages. And that’s when she found it, my secret, the one she never knew about.