Mother’s Day For An Abandoned Child

Raw, stark confession--childhood pain and abandonment--haunting memories on Mother's Day.

Mother’s Day

I ‘ll never forget the day she drove away. I watched as she loaded up her station-wagon with the few things she was taking with her. I wasn’t one of them, and that was confusing. I was sad beyond any sad I ever had. Of course, being 4 or 5, I hadn’t experienced a lot of sad, but this was the one. I spent what seemed like forever lying on my bed, tears unwilling to stop, soaking my pillow and shirt, trickling into my ear canals. My heart was ripped from my chest, cast to the floor and stomped flat, repeatedly, day after miserable day. I didn’t know how I was supposed to live without my mommy. I was much too young to ask the right questions and my dad was not a man given to answering questions anyway. My grandmother lived with us and she did her best, but she wasn’t mommy. The following, I’m going to say two years, is a sparsely populated time in my mind. I guess I didn’t want to think about the hurt of what I saw as rejection, although I didn’t know that word then, I only knew my chest felt funny all the time, and I cried for unknown reasons over the most infinitesimal things. Even now, sixty some odd years forward of that miserable time, I see the movie playing in my mind. My eyes well with tears as I drip this ink. I’m not at all sure I can write this. I tried to write it for a mother’s day prompt but I couldn’t force myself to relive the pain. Mother’s day is the worst day of the year for me. It reminds me of the horror and the uncertainty that life can crush a child with.

I remember my mommy walking around in our house in Mississippi like she was a zombie, gathering things as though she were cleaning up messes. My younger half-sister in tow like her shadow cast from the one o’clock Sun. I didn’t realize my day would soon become an evolving nightmare, plaguing my mind, day after miserable day for years to come. I tried to be normal, honestly, I tried, but I was no good at pretending. The feelings I had, although I had no name for them at that time, eventually turned to anger and I would act out from the hurt, trying anything to bury reality as I was experiencing it. Trouble was now one of my middle names. I already had two, what’s one more. I had an older sister, but I don’t recall much of her until several years later. I don’t know why. Too young to fathom the complexities of relationships, I had to invent my own answers to my torturous questions. They were crappy, insufficient answers. I have fragments of memories of my life before that day, fragments that leave more questions than answers. Sitting on a sidewalk in my diaper, crying, lost — walking through some long tunnel in tow of my sister who was a year and a half older than I was — the sound of burnt toast being scraped over the sink — bowls of bread and milk with a bit of sugar for breakfasts.

In first grade I had a Teacher we called Ms. Sam. Her real name was Samantha. She was very beautiful and I fell in love with her, wishing she could be my mother. Of course that was only the imaginations of a broken hearted boy, desperately looking for some woman to fill the void of a missing heart. I never got that void repaired. It’s still in there, a cavern of lonely nothingness, dark and cold. The rest of my life now crowds it and crushes it smaller so the pain is hidden under the good memories I have packed around it, lain over its surface, hidden most of the time, except on Mother’s day.

Good grief, here now I’m an old man and still, as I carefully drip these words from the cracked stone, I fight back the tears, unable to reconcile because she’s dead and buried somewhere in Florida, or somewhere. It’s 3:30 A.M., I made coffee that sits on the writing table, replaying the same short script. I write for a few minutes and remember it’s there and immediately I’m drawn back to the pain screaming at me from this confession. I write more and the coffee sits there turning cold. I look at it a few minutes later and repeat until my stomach gets so angry it bites me, forcing me to make the short trip to the microwave. Warm, sip, write, repeat.

I have my own family now, nothing like my broken childhood family. We don’t abandon children or anything else. I keep everything until it either breaks or disintegrates. This laptop is well over ten years old, the battery won’t hold a charge so I keep it tethered to the wall sucking life from the grid lest I lose my thoughts to the darkness, the oblivion of lost words crouching around me, waiting, laughing, clawing at my mind. “Let us have those miserable childhood thoughts, the words of torment and anger, the despair of those days.” it boasts. But I keep them all locked in a box, stored in a safe, bolted to a wall, in a room that’s buried under a massive rock.

Shoot, my coffee’s cold again. What do you do with these marauders, these thoughts that stab you in the dark of night, draining the life from your mind. Perhaps they are the reason I can’t sleep through “the witching hour.” Speaking of that, I do have one indelible memory my mother left me with. I remember her telling me she was a witch. Do I carry her curse in my mind? I doubt it, I am a not prone to superstitions. It’s merely coincidence, and the overwhelming desire to write about something, anything. It’s now 6:15 and I’m watching the morning light brighten the darkness, pretending to burn away the pain. I’ve broken over the top of the thousand word limit, I don’t care, I’m not gonna participate on this day anyway. This has now become yet one more confession I’ll be embarrassed about tomorrow, embarrassed that I released it for all the world to see.

—Noisy Wren