My mom left when I was about 6 months old and entirely by the time I was 2. She wasn’t in a right state to take care of me, and the truth is I might’ve died if left in her care.
When you’re 8 or 9 or 10 and start gaining your own sense of self, you realize everyone else has moms, why don’t I? And then the confusion and the rage and the ache follows.
I remember watching cartoons in the morning, I was probably 7. The phone rang and grandma was still asleep, so I didn’t answer it like I usually would. I hear a voicemail being left by a woman named Vera.
Something about jail and child support.
“Vera?
Who’s Vera?
What’s child support mean?
This can’t be my mom.
My mom’s name is Heather.”
I don’t know why, but I thought my mom’s name was Heather for the longest time. So obviously this was the day I found out my mom’s real name, at 7. I sat wondering whose life I’ve been living.
I wasn’t aching yet, but I was confused. The kind of confusion that festers in your body and starts carving a void that doesn’t reveal itself until years later.
In Christmas of 2009, I got my first laptop. My dad made me a Facebook. Eventually, curiosity got ahold of me about my mom, so I looked her up on Facebook.
I found a “Vera”.
I saw she was pretty,
looked a lot like me,
and she had another son.
One who she didn’t leave.
There were pictures of him all over her page.
Now the void is revealed. And the envy that arises isn’t violent, it’s helpless. It sits in your gut like a fucking anchor.
The void revealed its erasure.
Its loss of self.
It’s fragmentation of psyche.
To have a mother drop out of your upbringing and watch her raise another son’s is exile of the most primal and existential kind.
A violent helplessness.
Maternal bonding is the first thing a child has, and the only thing a child has during the first moments of its life. It’s supposed to be the first tether to existence. My tether had frayed before I could even speak.
I was told the day I was born, my mom just wanted to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. I was born with neonatal abstinence syndrome. I was told I didn’t latch for breastfeeding and slept a lot when I was first born. I wonder how much that affected my development, even my adulthood. Lasting scars of a mother who didn’t care. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she couldn’t.
The general narrative that was spun to me was one of a mother who just didn’t care. Who was addicted to drugs. Who was reckless and impulsive.
Now I know that’s not the case, and she was in the midst of losing her own mother (her mother had died shortly before I was born and her father died only a week or two after I was born as well). From what I heard, now how I frame it is she was someone who was very troubled. She unraveled, and who could blame her? She was drowning, and who could save her?
But I have my own memories too.
I was 12 and messaged her on Facebook. Then we met. I didn’t tell anyone. I met her in the bowling alley parking lot up the road. It was awkward. I put coins and sticks in the cracks of the pavement, and she gave me a stuffed animal. I ended up burning that stuffed animal within a year, not out of anger, but estrangement and hurt and the distance between us was too much. I didn’t want a relic, I wanted my mother.
In 2015 and 2016, I saw her on the 4th of July downtown when I was with my friends.
Walked right past her both times,
within arms reach.
We made eye contact,
didn’t say a word.
Happened 2 years in a row.
I surely wasn’t going to be the one to say anything, why should I? And surely she was scared and confused too.
We still talk occasionally through text messages. Very rarely do I keep the conversation going for longer than maybe 10 replies. A few times a year. I don’t know why I don’t respond. I shut down. I numb out. I tell myself I’ll try later.
She’s like vapor.
Something that’s there,
but can’t be grasped.
It’s present,
but gone.
That’s how maternity has always been for me: partial, mythic.
My favorite memory of her though, was when I was about 2 years old. We were on the beach, running and laughing. I remember so vividly running behind her, and looking up at her smiling at me. In this memory it’s sunny, and sand is being kicked up everywhere by her in front of me. She was so pretty. Blonde hair, warm smile. I feel the love of that memory. The warmth, the kinship. The belonging.
And now, when I go up to the same shore of Lake Michigan, when the waters sitting flat and the waves are reverberating a soft hush against the sand. I look across the mostly still water, backdropped against a purple sky as the sun sets. I see a little movement. A little greenish blue comes out the water, not intense, subtle.
And then,
I see her.
She’s still pretty and still familiar.
It’s not illusion, it’s recognition.
I see her, she sees me.
And in both of our eyes;
fear, longing, grief, love.
She smiles,
I give half a smile back.
She cries,
I do too.
The love is there, it always was. But it’s bound; by distance, by time apart, by grief that might just be too fragile to crack all the way open. Neither of us can cross the chasm between us.
She doesn’t call out.
I don’t either.
It’s a moment of presence, of witnessing.
The archetype isn’t that of a siren or savior, it’s remembrance.
Of what was,
of what wasn’t,
of what should’ve been.
My mom is a mermaid, and she’ll always be beautiful to me.
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