The First Great Start-Over

My mother wasn’t a physically affectionate mother. She didn’t hug or kiss much and she 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 or 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 training toilet, I received a round of applause every time something hit the bottom. 



Of course she 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 and eyes that doted on me and blueberry cobbler and 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 dressed us both up and we 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. I was sung to, I was read to, I was blessed. But of course, things changed.



My mother says I was an easy infant. 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 over time, I noticed her face no longer looked as happy as it had... and she stopped paying as close attention to all the marvelous things I was up to. And then, 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, placing the final block on top of the biggest castle I’d ever built, when 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 searched and searched, until finally I found her in the basement on the phone, smoking a ciggie. “Where were you? I built a castle!” I said in tears. 



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

One moment, Honey? This was some foreign language to me. “But I built a castle! And you weren't there!” I cried.



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



Good job Sweetie? This was not gonna cut it. Where was my ovation?! Something was wrong. Very wrong.



At night my big girl bed, was no longer a source of pride, it felt more like a jail cell. Every night I screamed for my mother to rescue and hold me, but my mother, who was beyond exhausted by this point, consulted her Dr. Spock handbook instead, which told her 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 any 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. But whoever he was, he was there like a built in eye and ear to see and hear me when no one else did.



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 this woman was so mesmerizing. 

But more importantly, 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 she knew at that moment 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 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 and looked 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 just 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 have to 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 was fed up with his being on-call all the time, when really, his being gone had become his most redeeming quality. 



Though, 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. And after the divorce was final, he went 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."



I remember the day we left my father. I stood in the hallway watching my mother and father yell at each other. My mother was shoving blue towels in a suitcase and my father was begging please don’t go. And then my arm was yanked down the stairs and into my mother’s green Alpha Romeo. 



My mother said all she took were clothes, my Fisher Price little people, and a box of Wedgwood china she thought she could sell if she needed to. That she didn’t want anything else from him, except a private school education for me. “I could still shoot myself for not asking for more,” she says.



My mother set the cardboard box of Wedgwood under my feet and we screeched out of the driveway. And when I asked where we were going, she said on a vacation. 



We drove to my great grandma Jeanette's who answered the door attached to her walker. She let it go to hug my mother who was crying by this time, and I wondered to myself if we were going to Disney World. 



My great grandmother pulled a suitcase of sequins off a high shelf and I sat on the floor swirling those sparkly jewels all over the carpet while Jeanette and my mother drank coffee and while my mother cried some more.



My mother said she wasn’t upset because she’d just left my father. She was upset because her mother Eunice told her that marrying a doctor had been the only intelligent thing she’d ever done in her entire life and that by leaving him, she not only ruined her own future but mine as well. 



Thankfully Jeanette told my mother not to listen to such bullshit. That she would survive just fine without a man, just as she had. “I wouldn’t pay 10 cents for another,” she told my mother. “In fact, I wouldn't put my lips on another man's mouth if he needed my air to breathe.”



In our very first apartment together, my mother set up a mattress on the floor and we slept side-by-side, which was the best thing in the world, since I’d grown used to begging for her presence at night by feigning thirst. 



I remember one night, I was awakened by my mother standing on top of our mattress. Never had I seen my poised mother do any such thing. She then explained in horrified laughter that a mouse had just scurried across her face. 



We couldn’t go back to sleep after that, so we came up with an idea to cover the floor with flour so we could see where the mouse footsteps were coming from. And sure enough when we woke up the following morning, there were teeny tiny paw prints all over the floor. 



My mother pretended she was a detective, and I followed her around the apartment while she determined that the mice had come in through the kitchen cabinet below the sink. 

She told me to run and get my Fisher Price fire engine ladder which she taped against a pot of water and I remember thinking how marvelous it was that my mother was asking me for help, not understanding, the falling into the water and drowning part. 



My mother always called herself a poor thing when she remembers this chapter of our lives. "I was so naïve, Jess. I didn’t even know how to balance a fucking checkbook."



At some point, I realized our vacation was taking a long time to end. That's when my mother sat me down and explained we were on a permanent vacation. That we weren’t going home. Ever. 



My mother never outright used the word divorce. But she did tell me over and over that what was going on had nothing to do with me. “It has nothing to do with you, darling,” she’d say. 

I don’t know where people get the idea that this sentence is comforting. Up until then, I still kind of hoped that everything had to do with me. 



And just like that, my mother began pursuing her better life, and I began pursuing that feeling of being the most special girl in the world.

To Be Continued…

-JLK