Two Versions of Her

After I published Before the Fall, my youngest sister texted me.
She said, “It’s crazy how different our versions of Mom are.”

She’s right. There are eight years between us, but the difference in who our mother was during those eight years is impossible to explain unless you lived it.

By the time my sister came along, our father had left, and our mother’s mental health had begun to unravel. I knew her when she was still fighting; when her laughter was loud, her rage louder, and hope still lived somewhere inside her. My sister knew her after the fight was gone; medicated, numb, tired, and slipping further into illness.

Same house. Same mother. Two completely different childhoods.

This poem is for her…….to my littlest sister.

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Two Versions of Her

by Kelly Colon

You never knew the man who broke her.
By the time you were born,
he was already gone
a ghost that rattled inside the walls,
but never said your name. 

The woman you called Mom
wasn’t the one who raised me.
Yours was softer, slower,
already hollowed by the years
she spent trying to forget him.

I knew her when she still fought back 
when rage lived just beneath her skin,
when laughter was loud
and dangerous,
and dishes could fly
faster than words.

You knew her medicated,muted,
sitting in the half-light
with smoke curling from her fingers,
staring through you
at something she couldn’t name.

We lived in the same house,
but not in the same story.
You got her sadness,
I got her fire. Her fury. 

Sometimes I envy you and the version you got
the gentler version,
the quiet house.
But then I remember
how much of her I still carry,
how much she burned into me
before the light went out.

And somewhere between us
is the woman we both lost;
the one who might have been whole 
if the world had been kinder

Maybe that’s why
I keep writing her back to life 
so you can see the woman
you never met.

Families are complicated, and mental illness doesn’t just live in one person; it ripples through generations, changing shape along the way.

Writing these poems has become a way of untangling some of those knots, not to rewrite the past, but to make peace with it. To my sisters - may the version you had of her live on in your memories and may your heart be open to understanding that your version of her is not mine.

Thank you for reading and for walking through these stories with me.