Leaving Cleveland, a memoir by Jessica Laurel Kane

Part One

Chapter One

My mother wasn’t a physically affectionate mother. She didn’t hug or kiss much and sure as hell didn’t breastfeed, but she adored me through praise.

She made it her mission to make up for being ignored the entirety of her own miserable childhood by reminding me hourly, in the sweetest most believable voice, that I was the most special, most beautiful little person in the entire universe.

Every time I did anything—smile, eat, build a castle—my mother was right there to make sure I knew I’d done whatever I did better than anyone else ever had.

Even on my potty chair, I received a round of applause every time something hit the bottom.

Of course, my mother had no idea that to this very day, if there isn’t a standing ovation after I’ve released something from my depths, I feel I’ve disappointed everyone. But back then, there were no disappointments.

Life was wonderful.

There were arms that scooped me up, eyes that doted on me, blueberry cobbler, warm baths, and little Fisher-Price plastic people that did as I wanted them to do. And after my mother lost all that pregnancy weight, she’d dress us both up and we’d set off downtown on the Rapid Transit to the fancy department store restaurant, where I ate little chicken pot pies from little pretend cardboard ovens and then threw pennies in the fountain and kisses to all the glorious people passing by.

Even when I began to speak and ask questions all day long, right in the middle of her profound thoughts—Mommy, do you like toast? Mommy, are spiders happy? Mommy, can I have another drink of water?—my mother remained attentive, never allowed a single question to go unanswered.

But then things changed.

First, I noticed her face not looking very happy.

Then, I noticed she stopped paying as close attention to all the marvelous things I was up to.

And, sometimes, when I turned around to see her reaction, she wasn’t even there.

I remember one of these times. I was in my playroom. And as I was placing the final block on top of the biggest castle I’d ever built, I heard… nothing.

I turned around to see what was going on and saw… no one.

In quite a panic, I ran through the house looking for my mother, but couldn’t find her. I held onto the wood banister and step-by-step, climbed down to the kitchen, but saw no one. I checked the patio; I checked the bathroom. I searched and searched until finally, I found her in the basement on the phone, smoking a ciggie.

“Where were you? I built an enormous castle!” I said in tears.

My mother placed her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, “One moment, honey.”

One moment, honey?

This was like some foreign language to me. “I built a castle! And you weren’t there!”

My mother once again covered the mouthpiece and whispered, “Good job, sweetie.”

Good job, sweetie?

This was not gonna cut it. Not at all. Where was my ovation?!

Something was wrong. Very wrong.

At night, my big girl bed, which had been such a source of pride, began to feel more like a jail cell. And I’d scream for my mother to come rescue and hold me. But my mother, who was beyond exhausted by this point, consulted her Dr. Spock handbook instead, which said to just let me cry it out, that I’d find a way to self-soothe.

But I didn’t self-soothe. I held my Fisher-Price people close to my heart, and when they didn’t help, I did what every other desperate human being does to avoid the fear of not being loved… I found someone inside myself who loved me and wanted to talk with me.

I didn’t call him God. I called him Delroy. And my mother, with an endearing wink, called him my imaginary friend.

Well, whoever he was, he was there, like built-in eyes and ears to see and hear me when no one else did.

l l l

Of course, what I didn’t know back then was that my mother had been on the phone all those times figuring out how to get divorced.

My mother told me she came up with the idea to leave my father during an episode of The Gong Show.

That she was folding laundry when some beautiful woman came onto the stage to sing “No Moon at All.” And at that moment, my mother said she had to stop what she was doing because the woman was so mesmerizing.

More importantly, though, my mother said she knew she could sing it better. And upon this realization, she was filled with the longing of her childhood dream. The kind of longing that’s immediately followed by anxiety, because at that moment she knew she was going to have to either completely change her life or continue living miserably ever after.

And changing one’s life? Well, that’s almost as scary as being eaten alive by ferocious fang-toothed creatures.

But my mother couldn’t stop daydreaming about expressing her true self and shining, not merely like the sun reflected in everybody’s windshield, but like the sun itself.

Being married to a doctor, pretending to be fulfilled by people who behaved as though they were waiting for their own autopsy results—these weren’t her dreams. These were the dreams she’d inherited from her dysfunctional relatives.

So one afternoon, while I was busy building castles in my playroom, my mother snuck out to the kitchen for the yellow pages to look up divorce lawyers.

And when she told my father she was leaving, he was devastated.

My poor father. I think he was so happy having my mother as his wife, it hadn’t occurred to him it might be important to tell her so.

He simply didn’t understand that the moment you believe you’re living with the person you married is the moment they turn into a stranger.

He had no idea that you must constantly reintroduce your new selves to your old selves, before the new selves go off and find fulfillment elsewhere.

My father begged for another chance. He even enrolled in law school, figuring maybe my mother had gotten fed up with his being on-call all the time, when really, his being gone had become his most redeemable quality.

But after my mother and I moved away, my father wound up dropping out of law school and was so depressed, he decided he didn’t even want to be an obstetrician anymore. Once the divorce was final, though, he did go back to medical school and became an anesthesiologist. “Of course he did,” my mother said. “He was always very talented at putting people to sleep.”