My mother had a certain shoe she used to hit me with. It was a black, frayed velour clog that lay listlessly on the ground during times of peace, but left bruises on my back when the beast inside my mother became enraged.

It's hard to describe the way my mother would become angry. I've likened it to the Tasmanian devil, the cartoon character that spits and yells inaudibly, then spins out of control. She wasn't tall or particularly strong, but her beatings hurt. The bruises stung for days. They healed, but I feared her constantly.

She wasn't angry all the time. For the most part, I had a happy childhood. My father helped me with homework and took me for bike rides. We ate dinner at my grandparents' house every week. There were always presents under the Christmas tree. But every now and then I'd do something to set my mother off. Once, when I was in second grade, we painted T-shirts in Girl Scouts. The paint on my shirt ran when it was hung to dry, thereby making the garment useless. This infuriated my mother. She pulled me by my hair and threw me around the kitchen. She took the shirt, pointed at the blobs of messy paint and asked me what they were supposed to be, but before I could answer she slapped me. Another time she locked me in the closet. When I was a bit older, she spit on me before I went to work. The scariest incident by far was when she came after me with a knife.

I was in my late teens when I discovered that all of this was child abuse. When I was little, I thought that all children occasionally assumed the fetal position while their mother pounded their back with the nearest object. I thought all kids automatically flinched when a hand was raised. I thought all kids were terrified like me.

I believed my mother hated me. She hated me because I was a bad person and a disappointment for a daughter and that was why she hit me. She'd always say, "If you weren't so stupid I wouldn't have to hit you." It was my fault; I was a terrible child. I didn't know then that she was only repeating what had been done to her. I had no idea that the stout Italian grandmother I loved so much had done the exact same thing to my mother decades earlier. That when my mother was 16, her parents wanted her to enter an arranged marriage and when my mother refused, the solution was to tie her to a chair and beat her.

When I learned about all this, I decided I had to work on forgiving my mother. Abuse was all she knew. She didn't hit me out of hatred, she hit me out of habit. Her unmanageable anger did not stem from my inadequacy but from her own childhood. I know she loves me. She put me through college. She wrote me a note when I graduated saying how proud she was of me. And she now she is dying.

She's had cancer for the past ten years. It began in her colon. She was in remission for a few years but then it grew in her lungs. Then her liver, now her lungs again. She's not having surgery this time. I don't know how bad it is because she never volunteers that information and I'm too terrified to ask, but I wonder if she will be alive to see me get married. Or buy a house. Or, God forbid, have children. I know this disease will kill her. The periods of remission have become shorter and shorter and it's only a matter of time before I get a phone call telling me to head home. I try to push it all out of my mind, I try to tell myself that there's no point in fixating on her death but I'm not that strong.

I'm torn. I want so desperately to have an intimate relationship with my mother but because of our abusive past I can never be close to her. Not once, not one time in my entire life has she ever truly apologized for terrorizing me the way she did. When I have brought up specific incidents, she says she can't remember them or that she never did the things I say she did. Her denial breeds fury in me. I have partially forgiven her. She parented the only way she knew how, but her method has left its mark. I have trouble trusting people and becoming emotionally dependent on them. My current boyfriend knows this; he often tells me he feels like there is a wall he cannot penetrate. I notice myself fly off the handle sometimes. I fear I will become her.

But now that her mortality is evident I'm trying my hardest to leave the past where it belongs, even though it still affects me today. I want to love her and I want to have no qualms about it.