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There’s something special about unconditional love. Everyone knows that, don’t they? There’s something so special about the novelty of loving someone so unconditionally that you’ll love them in any circumstance. There’s also something so cruel about it. The way you can’t control the way your eyes burn every time you swear it doesn’t affect you anymore.
For as long as he can breathe, Regulus Black has always valued love above every other emotion. Anger was tied to the kitchen sink and resentment stayed banging from the inside of the basement door. Regulus holds grudges like he wants to crush the world; he holds grudges like he handles accidents—the glass shattering in his grip, then he sweeps the shards away from the floor. Regulus says sorry even when he knows he shouldn’t.
Regulus is a good son. He keeps that title in a tight lock.
They say that a mother’s love is the most sacred of them all. People fail to tell you how complicated and fatal a mother’s love truly is. Or maybe it’s just Regulus' mother. Maybe he just has it different from everyone else. Maybe all mothers hold their children in such a tight grip that their skin breaks and bleeds—but maybe it’s just Regulus' mother.
Some days he feels like he doesn’t deserve the way she treats him. Some days he thinks that she’s not a good mother. But then he’ll see her crying in the dead of the night and all he’d be left with is guilt. Maybe he should’ve just been thankful.
When she’s in a good mood, and so is he, it leads to chattering conversation and hearty laughs. She’d put her bags down, sitting on the couch across him; cross-legged in a way that almost looked childish and immature. His heart would leap and his mouth would run—heart pounding in a special kind of adrenaline as he told her about his day until he ran out of breath. Sure, he’d slightly hate the way she’d explain things he already knew, and the way she’d keep talking without hearing his point, but all of that would become unimportant if it meant she’d treat him like a friend instead of a responsibility.
But then she’d spill her usual utterance and dialogue and suddenly a light-hearted conversation turns into hollow nods and a heavy chest. For the longest time, he’s known better than to talk during these kinds of conversations. Sometimes he’d gather too much fury and he’d let his words slip and it’ll only make it worse. She’d take his explanations as a form of talking back and she’d take his defensive words as hostility.
What he learned from his 22 years of living is that it was better to stay silent and let things go. Keeping it locked and sheltered and covered because he’d rather hurt himself by allowing his mother to hurt him than to hurt her by spelling out how he feels about her and her frustrating death grip. He’s mastered the act of letting it go and feigning indifference with every hurtful word his own mother tells him even if it’s been killing him slowly from the inside since he was a kid.
Some days he told himself she didn’t mean it. Some days he’d tell himself she means every word she uttered.
He doesn’t know which one’s better than the other. They both equally make him feel absolutely awful below the false pretense of relief and the false sense of contentedness.
Because if she didn’t mean it, then that means he could put the blame on impulsively said words and a triggered temper on a bad day and not take it to heart. But if she means it, then that must’ve meant that she simply cares and her words were only a result of her caring too much and that must mean she loves him as much as he loves her, right? Because isn’t that what a mother’s love is all about? Gentle cruelty and painful compassion?
Regulus is a child on the shore and his mother is the ocean. He welcomes her waves like it’s his own heart. He lets himself be engulfed and smothered by his mother’s saltwater, letting it clog up his nostrils. When he starts drowning, he gladly lets her steal the oxygen from his lungs. And when he splashes in her tide out of instinct, he’ll apologize—he’ll say “sorry” like he always did. In the end, Regulus would hear nothing but the sounds of the water flowing around.
For as long as he can remember, it’s always been like this. Every failure, every argument, every scolding, and every little moment he holds tightly against his chest. When he was a kid, she always saw him older, and when he was older, she still saw him as a kid. She didn’t know whether to tell him how to be mature while keeping him in her grip using the excuse of him still being too young.
Regulus bottled it up, he always did. He loved his mother too much to show her how much he hurts on a daily basis.
And on one Sunday night, he finally let his anger fall out of its confines—his resentment free from the cuffs on the ledge.
It was The 28th of February in 2016. The time was 11:34pm. Regulus was 19 by then, in his second year of college. He didn’t have a dorm, his mother insisted on him taking the train everyday to campus just so he’ll still live under her roof. He didn’t have the heart to say “no” two years ago.
He remembered how cold the wooden chair that he was sitting on was. He remembered how much colder his mother’s stare was.
Now, he barely remembers the root of her scolding; why she started berating him about grades again like she always did. He only slightly recalls it being about a midterm for a subject he was struggling at. Other than that, he really doesn’t remember much else. Maybe he blocked out the memory. His therapist says it’s trauma, but he guesses that’s up for interpretation.
Walburga snickered, something too cold and awful to be fit for a mother. Her brows furrowed with upcoming vengeance and her eyes were a thunderstorm. Regulus' never really been able to calm it down.
“You are no son of mine if you score merely an average pass on that exam.” she scolded, arms folded as she rejected the urge to point her finger at her son for emphasis. “I don’t care how difficult it has been for you, because the problem here is that you are not trying hard enough.”
Some days Regulus wished he’d cease to exist so that his mother can birth him again, and maybe this time he’ll make her proud.
But on that day, as he processed his mother’s words, he vowed to stop feeling the guilt every time he felt hurt by the things she said.
He realized that that was the first time she’s ever referred to him as her son to his face, even if it was used to insinuate that she’d disown him for simply getting an average grade.
At that moment, he also realized that he was never her son, no, she simply wanted to live her unfulfilled dreams vicariously through him. He wasn’t her son, he was simply a vessel.
On their rare quiet nights, one where they’d both overshare to each other, ones that he would cherish deeply as they didn’t happen very often. On one of those rare nights, she told him about the way her parents treated her when she was Regulus' age. She told him about how she wanted to be what they weren’t, and that she swore to never be like them. She then kissed his head and told him that she loved him, smiling so softly in the way that’s fitting for a mother. At the time, he believed it—you know, that she loved him. He’s not so sure now. He’s even more unsure of the first statement she told him. He realized how she broke her own promise, one she made to herself, unintentionally and subconsciously.
Someone once said that mothers are humans, and sometimes they give birth to their pain instead of children. Maybe that’s what Regulus is. Maybe his mother wanted him to be her second chance and her salvation yet she ended up making him the personification of her trauma.
Even then, it is not Regulus' responsibility to heal his wounded mother.
He is not the parent. She is.
He realized that he doesn’t always have to forgive his mother just because she’s his mother. That it’s okay to accept that she’s not fit to be one, that he resents her for the way she treats him, that he’ll love her no matter what but there are limits to that love.
He applied to the college his mother dreamed of getting into when she was younger. That same week, he dropped out. The university he wanted to go to was on the other side of the city, about 4 hours away even on a good day. His high school’s Academic Adviser told him that he’d easily get in with the records that he has.
He was right. Regulus even got a half-paid scholarship. Thankfully he didn’t have to start the year all over again and simply pick up where he left off.
And on Thursday night, he moved out in the dead of the night while Walburga was sleeping. He was grateful for his 16 year old self for deciding to save up for a car that he then managed to get at 18. It was about time he used it, since his mother kept telling him it was a waste of money so she kept it in the garage.
He started the car and drove off, never looked back.
If you had told the version of himself before that moment that he'd free himself of his mother's claw marks and make a life for himself, he would have cried. Maybe he would've believed it, maybe he would have laughed in disbelief. Maybe he would have not believed it at all. Even he isn’t sure how he would've reacted.
That life, he lived it. He studied what he wanted, he let the food rot in his dorm's kitchen sink. Some days, he could barely get out of bed and brush his teeth, even shower. He let his laundry pile up in his room, he let his grief for a mother that loved him too much consume the life he made to get away from that. Some days, he'd stand up from his bed, get his work done. He'd clean the dishes in the sink, he'd make his bed. He'd cook an actual meal, and he'd wash his clothes at the end of every week. He found solitude in a dorm room with a twin bed that would soon occupy two people.
During the second semester, he found the sun. Finally, he has someone who loves him just enough. For once in his life, the way he'd being loved is doing the healing not creating the hurt. For once in his life, loving is what keeps him going, not what brings him down.
Still, he missed her most days. Still, he let the years pass.
Most days, he didn’t feel guilty anymore. Still, let the years pass.
Walburga didn’t come to his graduation. In a way he’s happy about it, but a part of him still hears the scratching of his heart’s broken edges. He stood on the stage after getting his diploma without his mother in the crowd to smile to. He hoped in another lifetime, she was clapping and taking pictures of him with tears in her eyes.
Sometimes he hugs his pillow so tight like if he gripped any tighter that it’ll turn into a mother that loves him. Or at least in the way that he needs. Or maybe in the way that he deserves.
At some point, he threw away all the pictures of him and his mother in the trash can. A few hours later, he came to get them back with tears in her eyes.
He knows he’ll never shake the guilt away—the guilt of leaving her life to start properly living his own. He knows he’ll never be fully angry at his mother who loved him in her own messed up ways. He continues to know that fact whenever he looks down at his arm and sees the indentations of his own mother’s gentle cruelty.
In the end, he learned to not forgive. He learned to not say sorry when he isn’t at fault. He learned to accept that his mother isn’t really a mother and how he’s allowed to be hurt by it—that he’s allowed to hate her for hurting him.
Sometimes he still mourns the childhood he could’ve had, and the mother that Walburga Black could’ve been.
In the end, he bandaged up his arm and lived the life that he owns, not the life that his mother had to give up.
And so she didn’t come to his wedding when he was 30.
But he came to his mother’s funeral when he was 49. His husband by his side, a warmth he'd grown accustomed to, yet a part of him yearns for the warmth he used to look for underneath the soil. His husband touches his arm in support, and that arm feels all warm. Everywhere else, he felt cold. He watched as the priest sprinkled holy water on the burial. He wonders if the droplets would seep through and touch her skin. He wonders if she'd burn or shiver.
Still, he wished she'd spring up and wake up. Say sorry, hug him loosely.
As they lowered the casket, he whispered an “I love you” in the air. He didn’t hear her say it back, and he realized that it’s nothing out of the ordinary.