Everyone Leaves
Things we learn that may not be true
The week after my grandmother died at the hospital in New Jersey and went to heaven where I could not visit her, I woke up one morning to find my mother sitting at our dining room table. It must have been days before or just after my fourth birthday, but even then, I knew that walking into a room where my mother was just … sitting, and clearly had been sitting for some time, was not the norm. My mother was always moving, always going from one task to another, wiping off counters or fluffing couch pillows or folding laundry or wiping my face. She would cover the seats of public toilets with four layers of toilet paper and still hold me/hover me over them without letting me sit. She liked things (and people) to be neat and tidy. She was always put-together, glamorous. She was not one to sit alone in a room staring off into the distance. I don’t know if I ever walked into a room again to find my mother simply sitting there, but if I did, I can’t recall it.
I remember she looked up at me and she looked so tired. So tired it scared me. She told me to sit down. She said, “I need to tell you something. Your father is not going to live here anymore. He’s getting his own apartment, and once it’s set up, you’ll visit him there, but you’ll still live here. This is your home.” I got up from the table and went into my parents’ bedroom. I opened my dad’s closet and saw that all his things were gone, except for his red-and-blue robe that matched the one my mother had, and some shoe-shapers on the floor at the very back of the closet. I remember thinking he would have to come back for the robe.
Then, I went to his dresser drawers and opened them to find everything was gone. Next, I went to my parents’ bathroom. There I found that my dad’s sunlamp was gone, along with all his wigs and the styrofoam heads they lived on. My dad was bald like Sean Connery, but he was an actor and sometimes he needed wigs for his auditions. He had a recurring role for a year on One Life to Live. He worked as a spokesman for different companies at trade shows between acting gigs. He stood in for James Coburn on a movie set. He was on Captain Kangaroo once, and my mom said she found me trying to talk to him through the back of the tv, as if he was stuck inside. If his wigs were gone, I knew he must also really be gone. I started crying.
My mother explained in the same flat tone what she had already said. It was almost as though she had memorized those lines to say to me, and those were the only lines she had. Your father is not going to live here anymore. He’s getting his own apartment and you’ll visit him there once it’s set up. This is your home, your home is with me. Then she told me we were going for a drive to see an old friend of hers. She told me to stop crying and she put out some clothes for me. Then she took out my little suitcase and packed a bunch of things. She said her friend lived on a farm with her daughter, who was a little older than me. They had horses and pigs and chickens, and we would go and see the farm and it would be fun.
I remember being in the car with my mom and watching her drive. She felt unreachable to me even though I was sitting in the passenger seat next to her. She was very quiet. I was quiet, too. I could not understand why my dad had left without saying goodbye to me. I asked my mom when I would see him and she snapped at me that she had no idea. He would let her know when his place was ready. I stopped asking questions because I could see it was upsetting her. I wasn’t used to seeing my mother upset. We were always with my grandmother, my Nanny, and she would have known how to help, but she wasn’t here and I couldn’t reach her. My dad would have known how to make my mom laugh, but he wasn’t here, either.
When we got to the farm it was late afternoon. My mother’s friend was on the porch with her daughter, who was probably about six. She moved to stand behind her mom when we got out of the car. My mom and her friend hugged. I didn’t know this friend, but I guess they had grown up together in New Jersey. She invited us in and told her daughter to show me around. She and my mom sat down at the kitchen table, and the daughter took me out back to see the chickens, and the horses beyond them. She asked me if I wanted to help her feed the chickens, she would show me how, but I was a little scared. They were loud and pecking all over the place and I thought they might peck at me, so I just watched her feed them feeling amazed. I hadn’t ever seen a chicken up close.
When she was done, she showed me around the farm and explained things to me. What time the horses were brushed and how the pigs were fed in a trough and that her dad had left, too, about a year ago. Now it was just her and her mom on the farm and her dad would come and work it, because that’s how they lived, but he had his own place about a mile away. She hated it. She had to go back and forth and she didn’t have much stuff at her dad’s and it wasn’t a very nice place, and things were better when they all lived together. I guessed that her mom must have told her my dad left, too.
When we went back in the house, my mom seemed a little better, a little more herself. She said we were all going to the grocery store to buy some food for the next few days. While we were there, she put a lot of my favorite things in the cart, like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and Kraft Cheese Singles and Cheese Doodles and chocolate milk. I was surprised, because those were usually just treats and she was filling the cart.
When we got back to the farm, my mother started putting things away. The daughter and I sat at the kitchen table with coloring books my mom had also put in our cart. She and her friend were chatting away, but I started to hear my mother telling her things like my bedtime routine, what time I usually woke up, not to be afraid to discipline me if she needed to, to make sure I helped around the house. And I started to get this very, very terrible feeling that my mother was going to leave me there. I went over to her and tapped on her leg. She looked down at me and I pulled on her so I could whisper in her ear, “You’re not leaving, are you?”
“Don’t whisper in front of other people, that’s rude,” she told me. “Yes, I am going to go home for a few days and rest, and you’re going to stay here on the farm and have fun.” I felt my heart pounding in my chest. This is the first memory I have of actually feeling my heart beating. I didn’t want to stay there without my mom. I didn’t want to be left with strangers on a farm. “I don’t want to stay here without you,” I said quietly, hoping only she would hear me. I tried to speak without crying because she kept telling me not to cry, but it was very hard, and I felt tears slip out of the corners of my eyes. My voice sounded funny to me, like I was speaking through water.
My mother took me by the wrist and pulled me out onto the porch. She got down to my level so we were eye-to-eye. “You are being very rude!” she hissed at me. “It is very nice of Janice to keep you here with her daughter. Her daughter is being very nice to you. There are a ton of animals here and things for you to do and learn. I need to go and sleep for a few days and I need you to be good!” I told her I would be good at home, I would be quiet and she could sleep and I wouldn’t bother her at all. “I need this,” my mother said to me. “I need this, and I need you to let me have this. I’ll be back in a few days and we’ll go home, but I do need to leave you here and I need you to be good.” I gulped as hard as I could. I gulped down everything, my fear, my confusion, my panic, all of it. But when I went to breathe in and out, a wail came out of me.
My mother’s eyes were wild, I’d never seen them like that. She picked me up off my feet and for a moment I thought she might run to the car with me so we could go home, but she just shook me a little and put me down and said I was being very, very bad - so bad she felt embarrassed for her friend to hear. She told me to stop this behavior at once and to be a good girl. She said we were going back in the house, she was going to say goodbye, and I was going to stay and be good until she came back. No crying. I nodded because I was afraid to speak, afraid to cry.
We went back to the house. My mother apologized for me. Her friend told her not to worry, it was understandable and okay, and she and her daughter would make sure I had fun over the next few days. Her friend said it was probably going to be easier for both of us if she left quickly, and my mother, my beautiful, broken mother nodded, gave me a small hug, grabbed her purse and walk-ran out the door. I ran after her, because now I could see this was going to happen, she was going to leave unless I found a way to stop her, and I just let myself wail. I begged her not to go, but she was slamming the car door and the car roared to life. Her friend came up next to me and picked me up and I let her, not because I wanted her to pick me up, but because I thought it would be a very rude thing for me to resist. I knew she was trying to help. We watched my mother drive down the driveway, dust kicking up behind her, until she turned onto the road and disappeared. “Your mom will be back in a few days. She’s just really, really sad right now, and she doesn’t want you to see her like that. She needs to take care of herself so she can take care of you. And I promise we’ll have fun.”
I don’t know how long I was there. I know it felt like more than a few days. It felt like such a long time, I started to wonder if I would ever see my mother again. Or my dad. Or my Aunt Louise and Uncle Richie and my beloved cousins. I’ll never know why my mom didn’t bring me to them. I could never bring myself to ask her, because questions like that enraged her. My best guess is she felt ashamed to need some time to herself. I think she might have felt ashamed that her marriage fell apart, too, when everyone told her not to marry my dad in the first place. I can’t fathom any other reason she’d leave me with strangers instead of family. And my heart breaks for her because my mother was tough as nails. For her to break, for her to sit at the dining room table alone, staring off into a future she couldn’t see that looked nothing like what she’d hoped for was almost scarier than anything else that happened.
But for me, the lesson I took away from the experience is that everyone you know and love can disappear in an instant and there’s not a thing you can do about it, no matter how good you are, how pliant, how quiet, how cooperative. You can’t bargain your way out of that or wail loudly enough to prevent it from happening. I learned that lesson well, I buried it deep into my bones and later, when I got older, that idea lived in me. That fear of being left colored every single thing I did, every relationship I had, every dream I was scared to dream.
It turned out not to be true. Not exactly, anyway.
***If you’d like to meet me for a live talk about fear of abandonment and all the ways it can wreak havoc in your life (and all the ways to overcome it!) I’ll be here at 11:15am PST Friday 8/18/23 (or this talk will be on the Come As You Are Podcast very soon!) And if you’d like to meet me in person (I’d LOVE to meet you!), here are two upcoming opportunities!***