“Detached”

I remember the day she left the hospital I looked all over for her. When I came to pick her up she was gone, later she said I never came to pick her up and that’s why she left with a group of strangers…can’t remember who they were or how I found the house where they took her. But the street was wide and there were steps up to the front door. I can’t shake that anxious feeling I have it now I had it then fear…fear of rejection. They stood behind the screen door and told me she wasn’t there. I knew they lied. It happened so long ago that some of it is very vague and keeps fading in and out of my memory. I close my eyes and see the house like a colorless photo taken through a dusty lens.

At night I dream of that day over and over. She is riding in an old chevy sedan peering at me through the rear window her face sad unfeeling glassy eyes cold and distant. The car moves faster and faster I can’t keep up with it. I’m running in the street as fast as I can reaching out to her trying to touch her. She begins to cry. I want to soothe her. The car speeds ahead and soon disappears in the distance. I wake and try to drown the anxiety I always feel in strong black coffee.

I know I’ll never ever be close to her. She doesn’t trust me. Would you? What if I brought you to a huge, grey building, cold and unfamiliar and told you you were going to live here for a year or so? Would you ever trust me again? You’re just seventeen and have never lived away from home, except for the times you ran away like that one Christmas when I found you hold up with five other lonely creatures. There you were huddled around a pot bellied stove in the dark because there was no electricity…no light…not heat…probably no food. But you were all too happy to come home with me. I saved you from your hippy haven and brought you into the light where we, the ones you were trying to escape, were celebrating the birth of Christ, of all things.

I imagine telling her I was not only fighting her, I was fighting a whole generation of “her. I remember the day I was watering the little plant in the living room. She had placed it on the floor in front of the fireplace and asked me to take care of it. How was I to know what it was? I was so oblivious then…so naive. Pot and drugs and sex all around me and I couldn’t see it until it started spilling over. Do you know how guilty I feel? But I’ve gotten over crying and trying too hard. For years I tried to make up for it…for not seeing what was happening to her. It took her continual running away and finally getting pregnant by God knows who to jolt me into reality.

And finally the realization that I could not deal with this on my own…her father living miles away with someone else…me struggling to make a living…something I never had to do before the divorce. I had no insight, no energy, no understanding and, I wanted her to love me…I am her mother…but all I felt from her was indifference. She was so uncommunicative that I was beside myself…not knowing what to do with her. And so the big decision was made…a psychiatric hospital…the family agreed…it was the best thing to do. But I had no idea at the time that it would ruin our relationship forever. It taught her to cope with life on your own…they gave you some tools and sent her out into the world…still lonely and unhappy, but at least not anguishing over leaving her mother. She learned to detach herself and with that came a closing of part of her life…the part that included me.