“I’ve written a list,” my mother said as our session began in her therapist’s San Francisco office. “It’s called ‘the 40 most unforgivable things I’ve ever done to my daughters.’”

Fog flowed above the skylights as she fidgeted in her seat, twirling her blue chiffon scarf. I cringed. I hated the idea of therapy, but Mom loved it. She’d convinced me to go, even though I protested, telling her, “I don’t need any apologies.”

At 30, I was still frozen in fright as if I were 7 years old and hiding under my bed because I feared my next beating.

I sat opposite my mom while she smoothed her light powder pink matching skirt and jacket so no wrinkles would show, as if that would somehow help in ironing out our own.

My parents, who were Russian Jewish second cousins, met at a bar mitzvah and married at 19. Mom was 20 when I was born. She got addicted to speed trying to lose the baby weight and used barbiturates to sleep. When I was 7, my parents divorced. My father moved to Mexico while my mom, sister and I remained in New York City.

Mom had been seeing her psychoanalyst weekly for decades to process her pain of having been an abuser for the first 13 years of my life. Focused only on becoming a college professor and starting my own family, I’d spent those same decades pretending I wasn’t damaged in any way. Denial protected me and I had never seen a mental health specialist.

Twenty years after she got sober, she set up this time to formally ask for forgiveness. Until then, we’d often gotten together and had perfectly pleasant times by never talking about the past.

My lower back ached as I settled into the stiff beige leather chair, wishing I wasn’t there.

“Today’s session is for your mom,” the therapist, Terry, said. “She wants to tell you how sorry she is about the abuse that took place when you were young. She’s been plagued with guilt.”

I looked over at my 50-year-old mother, whose hazel green eyes I had inherited along with her petite frame and dimples. I also have the same thick wavy brown hair, and perhaps the propensity to fidget, since I couldn’t stop nervously twisting a strand as she spoke that day. In every other way, though, I felt nothing like her.

“The fact that your mom is about to apologize for specific acts of violence and neglect in no way excuses her past behavior,” Terry said.

I sat motionless and muted, staring at Mom. I knew what she was going to say and I didn’t want to hear it.

“When Leslie was 5, I repeatedly closed her in the garbage room and told her I didn’t want her anymore,” Mom read aloud. “Each time she tried to come out, I slammed the door shut and told her she was being thrown away.”

I quivered as if she were still locking me in that rubbish room in our swanky Manhattan apartment building. I shrank back to being tiny and helpless.

Mom continued, “I know I can’t undo the past. I feel so much pain, I don’t want to die without saying how sorry I am for everything on my list.”

She read aloud from her categorized maltreatments, among them: strangling me, pulling my sisters and I around the apartment by our hair, hitting us at midnight when her speed kicked in, forcing us to clean at 2 a.m., telling us repeatedly she wished we were dead and had never had been born, regretting the drug dealers she brought home, and holding primal scream groups at the house where we had to hear adults yell obscenities several nights a week.

Mom made it only partially through her list before I could barely stand it. My mouth was ajar and my breathing jagged, as if gasping for air in a room that had been lit on fire.

Ribbons of red streaked across the skyline as the sun set. The session ended with an eerie silence. Still pulled by a primal force to please her, I finally spoke.

“Mom, I forgive you.”

I had not gotten over any of it —I’d just gotten good at saying I had. Mom’s description of each act she regretted reminded me of everything I tried to ignore. It was both re-traumatizing and validating to hear her voice these truths in the presence of her analyst. Though I remembered it all, hearing her recount the details woke me up to my deep and unprocessed pain.

Mom’s face went pale and her limbs went limp. Perspiration surrounded her hairline as she tilted her head down and said softly, “I can’t believe how mercilessly I hurt my own babies.”

A late lunch at the Thai restaurant directly below her therapist’s office had always been the plan, but after the session I had no appetite. The scent of lemongrass and garlic wafted around the room, but did nothing to return me to my senses.

Mom must have known. Before I scanned the menu, she said, “I don’t know how you can sit near me after hearing all that. You must think I’m a monster. How can you even stand to look at me?”

I tried again to casually dismiss her anxiety.

“Oh, of course I can look at you and have lunch with you because I love you,” I said. “That was all so long ago. We can move on now.”

There were multicolored Christmas lights and twinkling mini-Buddhas surrounding our booth, but I felt anything but festive. As a child who was abused, I always craved my mother’s love and professed my own for her often in hopes of getting more. Over the years that followed, I learned my behavior was typical for kids who went through what I did.

The menu blurred as I blinked back tears. I knew I was lying to myself and I wasn’t ready to move on. I still harbored unresolved resentment and anger toward my mom. Faking feelings was my jam, though, so I blurted out, “What great flavors!” after my first bite of pad Thai, even though I didn’t taste anything except bitterness.

Though I was upset, I realized that Mom’s bravery to say how sorry she was for each of her specific offenses enabled me to understand that I would need to begin my own therapy at some point, but I wasn’t ready yet. My fierce focus on forgetting my past continued for years.

No one close to me could understand why I still had a relationship with my mom after the abuse ended.

Therapy, which I finally did begin 10 years after that session, and Buddhism helped to create loving emotional connections for us. We began practicing Buddhism when I was in the seventh grade. My mother had planned to kill herself, but instead tried an ancient meditation chant, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, based on Mahayana Buddhist teachings. She dared me to try it with her for 100 days as one last attempt at happiness. I tried it, initially to prove her wrong, but as we chanted day after day, I felt hope and noticed mom becoming kinder.

Within that year, she stopped using drugs and hitting us. This motivated me to stay connected to her. The Sanskrit word myo means to revive. Through the visceral vibration of chanting with her daily, I started sensing maternal love from Mom. Her actions to transform our destiny started with our shared spiritual journey when I was a teenager, enabling me to enjoy time with her even though the trauma of the unspeakable things she did was still locked in my cells. Before I finished that school year, she began seeing her therapist.

I was 32 when I received her formal apology. It became a positive pivot in our relationship, but I still couldn’t entirely move forward. Eight years later, I became so sick, I ended up on the floor in a fetal position unable to walk my kids to school. I was diagnosed with severe, chronic, ulcerative colitis — an autoimmune disease.

A Reiki practitioner I started seeing at the time asked me, “Did you ever experience any trauma?” I laughed nervously and said, “My mom used to smack, hit, and yell at me most days for over a decade, but that was so long ago, that can’t be why I’m sick.”

She looked at me and said, “That’s exactly why you’re sick.”

That’s when I finally started therapy and began to understand why it had been so life-changing for my mom.

Our braided spiritual journey and her atonement initiated the reconciliation of our family, but I had a lot of work to do if I truly wanted to heal. While we never had a second therapeutic hour together, I continued the work Mom set in motion on my own.

My mother passed away from diabetes 10 years after I began processing my terrifying childhood. She was only 69.

I find comfort in having been able to experience joy with her during her lifetime, which is something I once never thought would be possible.

On her deathbed, she looked up at me and said, “How can you truly love me?”

Unlike the lie I’d told in the Thai restaurant years earlier, this time I meant it when I told her, “Mom, I do love you. You can let go and go to your next life. I will be OK.”

After her death, I found nine of her diaries while clearing out her office. She recounted the abusive years in each journal. I learned she was consumed by self-hatred for her entire life — that’s why she thought suicide was her only way out when I was in middle school.

I also found the original atonement list in one of her notebooks. It spanned 10 pages. I discovered that her therapist had encouraged her to create that formal session to make amends.

Reading her words line by line, I was overwhelmed not only by her regret for hurting me, but also by how she desperately wanted my happiness.

Mom halted generational trauma in its tracks by changing her behavior, which led to my ability to break the cycle. She continues to propel my healing even after her death. My daughters marvel at the transformation from one generation to another, and on more than one occasion, they have told me they’re proud of me for changing our family patterns.

I continue practicing the Buddhism my mother and I began when I was 13. I still go to therapy to process my painful past. But now, instead of only her wrath, I feel my mother’s courage to transform her life and repent. Remembering the words she said to me so long ago helps me heal as I continue to hear her apology in my head. I forgive her again and again. She showed me how darkness can turn into light. What greater love is there than that?

Leslie Mancillas is a writing professor in California working on her memoir about surviving childhood abuse, “My Bipolar Mom Almost Killed Me: How A 100-Day Bet Saved Us.” Follow her on Instagram @lesliemancillas.author. You can learn more about her at www.lesliemancillas.com.

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