Mom Abandons Ship

This is part 7 of my life story.
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1994 was the most significant year of my life because it’s the year my mother abandoned me. I was eleven years old and in sixth grade. For the next three years I held onto the belief that she was coming back for me. And it wasn’t until even three years after that when I finally stopped looking for her face every time I was in public. Almost twenty years later I still haven’t stopped seeing her crying face bidding me goodbye in my dreams. And I don’t think I’ll ever stop wondering if she’s still alive, and if she ever thinks about me.

We measure time by significant events in our life, our memories are not marked by dates like a diary, or timestamps like a Tweet, but in “befores” and “afters” when compared to our life’s significant events. It might be a marriage or a divorce, the birth of a child or the death of a loved one. I’m consumed with envy when I read a story where a child’s timeline is based on “the Christmas that I received X”. My childhood timeline events are my adoption in 1989 and when my mother abandoned me in 1994. There are a few others since then, but the strongest is still when she left.

Mom and dad had been beating the shit out of each other for two years, each giving as good as they got. Mom voluntarily took most of the blame for their fights, believing that she was broken, mentally unstable, and a danger to us all. It angers me and shames me to admit that I didn’t know to defend her, but instead joined my father in talking down to her with one side of my tongue while saying pretty and supportive things with the other side. Without knowing better I was feeding her belief that she was poisoning the family with her presence, and I take my share of the responsibility for driving her away. Despite that, I don’t, I can’t forgive her for leaving me and Nichole with our soon-to-become-abusive father.

The trailer home was long empty of glassware to break in fits of anger. Everything that was repairable had been repaired so many times it was more duct tape than anything else. Anything that was not repairable was simply done without. Without stuff to break my parents had turned their attention on trying to break each other, and by 1994 there had been more than one hospital trip for each of my parents, but looking back, miraculously, not a single visit from CPS.

They were determined to break something about each other and they finally succeeded on October 24th, 1994. Just before Halloween they had the worst fight I’d ever seen. Nichole and I had long since given up the futile task of trying to prevent or delay their fights, and while the storm raged in the living room we worked on homework, played games on the SNES, and read. That evening, unexpectedly, a sudden silence in the living room brought us to the peak of our attention, and I remember my mom’s muffled voice, crying.

“Oh god, Jim, get up, get up, please get up.”

I don’t know why we didn’t get up to investigate, but I didn’t move, I didn’t even breathe until I heard the front door slam. We looked at each other and went hesitantly to the window and watched through the blinds while mom shoved Jim into the backseat of the car and drove away. I can’t tell you what I thought or felt for the rest of that day. For one of the most significant events of my childhood my memories are surprisingly hazy, but I do know that Nichole and I had made dinner for ourselves and put ourselves to bed before anybody came home. We were laying awake in bed, silently when the door opened and one set of footsteps rather than two came into the house.

We lay holding our breaths for the longest minutes of my life while mom moved angrily around her bedroom. Finally her sounds came to rest outside our bedroom door. She peeked her head quietly inside, and satisfied that we were asleep she tiptoed into the room. She sat first on Nichole’s bottom bunk.

“You’ve been a blessing in my life,” she whispered through quiet sobs “one that I don’t deserve. I wish I could have been a better example for you and I wish I could be here to watch you grow up. You’re a better daughter than I could have wished for. I love you, Honey.”

Then she climbed onto the top bunk, sat beside me, and just cried for several minutes. She kissed my forehead and choked an “I love you, Baby.” No special words for me.  She simply climbed down and walked out of my life forever.

Dad didn’t come home until the next day. He told us that mom told the doctor that they’d both fallen from the roof while setting up Halloween decorations and the fall had knocked him unconscious. He told us that what had really happened was that mom had hit him in the head with a beer bottle so hard it gave him a severe concussion. She’d left him a note that she was checking herself into a rehab center, but none of the centers he called had a record of her.

For weeks every time the bus stopped outside we would all rush to the window to see if it was bringing mom home. Jim was the first to stop checking the window and eventually told us that she wasn’t going to be coming home at all. He told us that we’d be better off without her, but he was crying as he said it. We did our best to comfort him that evening and saved our tears for each other after bedtime.

“The night that mom left” became the event of my childhood against which all other events were measured. Everything was before or after that night, and the memories of my childhood are pretty well cemented against the backdrop of that abandonment. It’s an event I may never come to terms with, and in some ways I don’t want to because I’m afraid that might mean that I have to forgive her. No matter how much I loved my mom I just don’t want to forgive her.

This is part 7 of my life story.
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The Physical Violence Starts

This is part 5 of my life story.
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It seems obvious now that keeping our parents drunk all the time was a plan that was doomed to failure, and sure enough it didn’t work for very long. What it did do, however, was to add another load of guilt to the inevitable fighting between them. They accepted every beer we pushed on them, and for a while they tried to hide their fighting from us, waiting until we were on the other side of the trailer before they started flinging mean words at each other under their breath. Then the words got louder and it became less important how close Nichole and I were.

Sometimes when one of us entered a room in the middle of a fight they would stop, and one of them would politely ask us what we needed. If it wasn’t to bring more beer and remove the empties, or a good enough reason to pull them away they would ask us to leave while mommy and daddy “finished their conversation.” But we knew that this wasn’t a conversation that would ever be finished, it was simply continued evening to evening, increasing in volume a little each night.

The nights where they put each other aside and spent their time focused on us were more rare and more exciting than Christmas. Every night it seemed that their fights started as soon as they were both home, and continued long after Nichole and I put ourselves to bed. We became adept at sleeping through their screaming. But I remember one incident that was bad enough to wake us both up.

There was a crash from the living room of the trailer, the sound of breaking glass. Then there was silence while my sister and I held our breath, and finally dad’s voice, lower than usual. “What the fuck, Sissy!? Is this the kind of woman you are? Get out of this house. Come back when you can be an adult.”

There was the sound of a door slamming, and then there was silence until morning. For the next few days dad had a black eye and mom was very quiet.

The fights were absent for a few wonderful, lovely days. It was enough that when we weren’t in the trailer I could pretend that everyone wasn’t walking on eggshells. When the fights started up again, though, something had changed. Dad would taunt mom into hitting him. I didn’t realize that is what it was early on, but looking back I can see how he played on her guilt of having done it already. Once she hit him, he began to hit her back. Any pretense of hiding the fights from us, their angel children, disappeared completely.

That’s what dad called us during their fights, their angel children. When he finally got her to hit him he would point at us and say “Go on, Sissy, show our angel children what kind of mother they have.” And then he would look at us and tell us to run. He would tell us to hide in our room until the monster left and mommy came back to us again. In our room we would sit together on the bottom bunk and drape the sheet from the top to make a curtain to hide us in our own little world. We would hug each other and cry as we listened to them beat each other up.

The fights always ended the same way. While they both got bruises, dad always got more, and the fight would end with him screaming at her for traumatizing us, for abusing him,  and for being a horrible woman and mother. Mom would run out of the trailer crying and when she came back she would be silent for a long time. She wouldn’t look at anybody until dad left, then she would hold us and she would cry, sobbing apologies for being an awful mother. We both did our best to console her, and to tell her that we loved her and didn’t think she was terrible.

By the time dad came back she was together enough to beg his forgiveness. He would drop to his knees, grab her hand, and pull her to join him. He would accept her apology, forgive her, and tell her that no problem was one-sided. He would beg her forgiveness in return and kiss her on the forehead when she told him that it was all her fault and he had nothing to be forgiven for. He would tell her that he knew she never meant to hurt us or him, and that we all know that she was a wonderful and beautiful person inside. He assured her that we were all going to stay with her until that person we all knew she was came back, and then we could all be happy again.

I didn’t know at the time how manipulative that was. And for the next twenty years of my life I used the same tactic, destroying the people I loved in the guise of loving, helping, and supporting them.

This is part 5 of my life story.
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