There’s something deeply disorienting about realizing your mother may never have actually existed as a real emotional presence in your life.

She was there, of course — physically. She cooked, she bought gifts, she smiled in public. But she wasn’t there. There was no real connection. No warmth. No emotional resonance. Just role-playing.

Lately, the longer I’ve been away from her, the clearer the pattern becomes.

She needed chaos to feel real.
She needed drama, friction, or performance — some form of external reaction — because without it, there was nothing underneath. No humour. No real curiosity. No genuine love. Only the performance of it.

She made me feel like I was impossible to please.
Too complicated. Too difficult to buy for.
But really, that was just her way of avoiding the truth:

You never tried to know me.

And I tried so hard to fit the narrative. For years, I gave her chances. I hoped time or distance would make her softer. That maybe this time she’d reflect. Maybe this time she’d say, “Yeah… I got some things wrong.”

But she didn’t. She still hasn’t.
And now I finally understand: she won’t.

Even when I went through psychosis — even then, she couldn’t look inward. She couldn’t sit in the mirror of what she’d contributed to.
Instead, she bought me a house.
As if bricks and mortar could cover the wreckage of thirty years of emotional starvation.

I thought maybe that meant she felt guilt. Maybe some unconscious part of her was trying to make amends. But now I see it more clearly: it was an offering to keep the illusion going. A transaction. An attempt to buy back the story that she was generous, loving, selfless.

And just like always, when I started to pull away — when I became serious about protecting myself — she sensed it.
She used my sister. She used silence. She used the tools she always used.

But this time, I didn’t come back.

This time, I saw through it.

And this time, I know what my body’s been trying to tell me for decades:

You can’t connect with someone who doesn’t really exist.

And I don’t say that with cruelty. I say it with grief.
Because this is what it means to finally break the spell.
To name what was never there.
And to stop trying to turn ghosts into family.