The Mother You Weren’t
I was twelve years old when you stopped trying. When you’d had enough of motherhood. It appeared to be spontaneous in my naive, child’s eyes; As though you’d simply flipped off the Mom switch and were suddenly sixteen again. You started locking yourself in your bedroom, having friends sleep over, living on TV and junk food and defying authority; mostly my father.
You were the product of a wealthy household growing up. A life of privilege and plenty, of exclusive clubs, etiquette and money. With strict adoptive parents who would have given you anything, so long as you were willing to play the game by their rules.
But you were defiant from the start, refusing to be the obedient daughter. You chose love over money and ran away with my father, a California beach bum without two dimes to rub together, but a passion for life and a charming smile that lit up a room.
You married, you had three children, I being the youngest of three girls, and arguably the most sensitive and most devoted to you. As a child, I considered myself a “mama’s girl.” When my sisters turned to my father, I always turned to you. You were warm and caring, you held me when I was sick, you let me sleep in between when I was scared, and when dad said no, you’d make a bed beside me on the living room floor.
The best memories I have of you are as vague now as a dream. The kind that felt so real at first, but quickly slipped from your remembrance once you’d thought about it too long. When I look back on my memories, it’s easy to linger on the darkest days of my life with you, it’s easy to forget who you were before the switch and recall the days when you were “mommy.” And though these memories are vague, they do exist if I allow myself to seek them out. If I open my mind to those dusty corners and excavate the memories stored there.
You had thick, chocolate curls and feathered bangs. You wore wide rim plastic glasses. On sunny days, you pulled your hair into pigtails and wore your baby blue striped swimsuit and track shorts to pick cherries in the yard. We went for drives in your blue Volvo. You’d crank the radio when Chicago came on, Bruce Springsteen or Alabama, thrumming your fingers on your knee to the beat while the desert breeze whipped through the rolled-down windows. It’s funny, the things you don’t realize you’re watching until they’re the only real memories you have later in life.
You had a bad memory. You often called me by my sister’s names. You forgot the names of our favorite bands, and when we’d correct you, you laughed so hard, you’d double over crying, laughing until you couldn’t breathe.
You were a member of the PTA, the leader of the Girl Scout troop, the 4-H troop, and the youth group. You took me to summer camp, you volunteered at the county fair each year, you spent hours with us kids making miniature model houses, table settings, banana bread. You took us hiking, family biking, camping and exploring anytime you had a free moment to spare. And I would have followed you anywhere until the day you stopped leading.
I learned about your drug use from a seven-year-old. Her name was Carrie, and she’s dead now. She died in her sleep after choking on her own vomit, passed out drunk at the age of fourteen. I wonder if her own mother had never flipped the switch if Carrie would still be alive today.
You locked yourself in the bedroom with Carrie’s mother. It was late, I don’t know where my dad was — perhaps he was working, as he did, to keep food on the table and shoes on my feet. Carrie and I had made beds on the living room floor. I was at least five years older than her, but you tried to paint it as a slumber party, I suppose in an effort to get me to babysit a seven-year-old while you and her mother did drugs in the bedroom. This small child, long brown hair, dark eyes, and pale skin, looked at me with wisdom beyond her years and said: “you know they’re smoking pot in there.” At the time, it truly never occurred to me that you were using drugs. And not just “pot”, but harder stuff too. My mind exploded. It was breaking news. Something I never expected to hear in my own home. And when I told my sisters, expecting them to be shocked, they, being older than me, already knew. Suddenly, my childish innocence was gone and the purity and simplicity of my perfect childhood had gone with it.
Over the next few years, you grew distant. “Mommy” was gone, and now you were “mother”, or perhaps only “mom.” You knew less about me than I did you, and we lived together in the same house the way planets exist in the solar system — always in orbit but never passing into the same atmosphere. Dad was over the road driving truck to provide for us while you were home, enjoying the company of other men, most likely in his bed. We ran wild and even though you pretended to care, you never really did. When my sister and I had friends over, you’d dance through the room, crack jokes, take a beer and a bowl of popcorn and wander off to your bedroom for the night. If we didn’t bother you, you didn’t bother us. As a child of sixteen, I found this convenient. It was only when dad came home that I actually had to act my age, hide my drinking, hide the sexual relationship I was in with the boy who would eventually become my husband.
You didn’t care if I went to school, and eventually, I dropped out. You didn’t care if whether I was being careful, how many times I easily could have become pregnant. You didn’t care about the fact that I often went out drinking with friends, passed out somewhere assuming the kids I was with were trustworthy. You cared only about your own self-interests.
I remember the days when you gave us a little money and the keys to your car. I didn’t have a driver’s license, but you wanted privacy. You’d say to me “I figured you were bored. You might want to get out of the house.” — In reality, you were entertaining men, smoking meth, or both. But at the age of sixteen, I wasn’t asking questions. I didn’t have the tools then to make the right choices. Every choice I made was without oversight. Without guidance. I wanted to be my own person, live my own life, and unless my father was home, I did. You simply couldn’t be bothered with mothering. The switch had been flipped well.
Then came the days when dad had to put my eighteen-year-old sister in charge of the bills. The bank accounts. Had to start leaving us money for groceries on gift cards so you couldn’t blow it all on drugs and cheap whiskey. Then came the days when you were only a ghost, haunting the walls of our house, there only in spirit, in passing, but never in mind or body.
Then, out of nowhere, you started trying again. You started making an effort to change your life. You started going to drug counseling and couples therapy and you and dad were going to work things out. You were going to get clean and sober and I thought maybe, just maybe, you could un-flip the switch. But the struggle you had with drugs was always stronger than your desire to be my mom and you were only clean and sober until you weren’t. And then everything changed.
I came home from a weekend trip and you were gone. My sister told me you refused a drug test and when dad gave you an ultimatum, you chose to leave.
I never actually said goodbye.
We spent days cleaning out your bedroom with my father. Telling stories about his childhood, his youth, laughing and sharing in an effort to keep him from falling apart. In the end, it held us all together. Made us stronger. Your departure from our lives unified the three of us in a way nothing else ever had. But it also broke a part of me that until that moment I didn’t know existed. The child in me was scared, she was alone, she wanted her mother to make her a bed on the living room floor, to lay by her side and tell her it would all be OK. It wasn’t.
I spent the next year writing sad poetry in my bedroom. Hating my father’s new girlfriends, desperately trying to find joy somewhere in my broken heart. My sisters, who were older, had both resigned themselves to hate you. To choose anger. But I was younger, more attached to you, or at least to the version of you I had known in my childhood, and so I suffered the loss of you alone. I felt abandoned. By choosing to leave the family, you had chosen a life without me. You had pictures of your friend’s children in your wallet, but not of us. It never went unnoticed.
Occasionally I’d call you, occasionally I’d visit you, but those occasions grew fewer and farther between until eventually we had moved out of orbit and were existing on entirely different solar systems.
Time has changed us both over the many years since I sat on my bedroom floor, legs crossed, scribbling through tears into my journals. “She’s sleeping while I cry,” I wrote into its secret pages.
I married and moved out of state and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen you since then. I had children of my own who have almost no memories with you. Who will never know the good part of you I knew when I was a child. Who only know you by the name on the cards you send in an effort to maintain some semblance of existence through the mail.
As an adult when I think back on the decisions I’ve made, the mistakes I’ve made, the lessons I’ve learned, I can honestly say the only ones I’ve learned from you were in not wanting to repeat the poor choices you’ve made.
Watching drugs destroy you made me fearful of drugs, so I never took them. Watching your marriage fall apart made me hold fast to love. I married my first love and we have nearly eighteen years together — the only part you played in that relationship was in staying out of my way while it blossomed. By never stepping in when things were, perhaps, going a little too far for a girl my age.
I am the woman I am today because of the mother you weren’t. I have learned to be strong, independent, self-reliant. I have learned to comfort myself in times of sadness and to find courage and resolve in times of fear or uncertainty. In that sense, you have made me a better person.
I am the mother I am today because of the mother you weren’t. I think about the words I say, the actions I take, in an effort to be more to them than you were to me. To maintain a sense of stability and security in them. To be impeccable in their eyes so the memories they make of me are good and fair and kind. In that sense, you have made me a better mother.
I have always said that every lesson I’ve learned was learned the hard way. “The School of Hard Knox”, my father called it; I graduated with honors. I suppose I also have you to thank for that.
On an outing the last time you came to visit, I trailed behind you. In an effort to catch up I called out “mom!” The words, so unfamiliar to you, didn’t even resonate, and you kept walking without ever realizing it. In many ways, that moment has represented our entire relationship.
You still write, even if it’s only on text or social media, to check in once in a while, to send your love to the kids. You live on the other side of the country now, a complete stranger to me. I couldn’t say the jobs you’ve held, the men you’ve loved, your favorite food, or even your favorite color. I’m unaware of your dreams, your fears for the future, whether you’re happy in life, whether you’re stable, whether you’re sober. And as oblivious as I am to the life you lead, you’re equally in the dark about me, the woman you gave birth to 34 years ago.
I suppose addiction is truly to blame for the mistakes you’ve made in our relationship. As an adult, it’s easier to blame it on an illness that was out of your control than the idea that you chose selfish desires over your children. Over me.
As a mother, it’s harder for me to understand how you could so easily dismiss us and be OK with leaving behind the lives of the three women you bore, leaving us nothing more than the lessons we’ve learned as a result of the mother you weren’t.
The Mother You Weren’t
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