When Parents Fail
Part One: My mother abandoned our home...and me.
My parents separated days after I arrived home from my freshman year of college. At the time, I shrugged it off and tried to soldier on with my summer. Deep inside my heart, though, their break-up metastasized. As a family with monstrous communication issues and broken emotional processing methods, we did not share our feelings freely. We ‘talked’ in cold silences when upset, and kept emotions bottled up until they reached a boiling point. Then we might engage in a few raised voices and accusations.
I went back to Bard College that autumn for my sophomore year. My best friend there, Kate, dropped out a few weeks into the semester. I found it difficult to form new connections, and I no longer found joy in dissecting Victorian literature. In February, I left a nearly full scholarship to return home to “take care” of my mom and younger brothers. Mommy and Daddy legally divorced later that year.
My brother Brian also dropped out of school and rented an apartment with friends, living on the money he earned making pizzas full time. My youngest brother Jacob and I looked after our mother as she struggled through the breakdown of a twenty-year marriage. She wallowed in a depression for months, but when reality broke through—he wasn’t coming back, she did not really want him to, she was free to do what she wanted but was penniless, bills were piling up—she pulled herself out of it. Therapy helped. Mommy resumed making teddy bears and their elaborate costumes, and bear collectors, shop owners, and even large collectible toy companies demanded more of her fantastical soft sculptures. We went from worrying about where our next meal was coming from to cranking the volume on her new surround sound stereo system. She bought new clothes. She tacked vacation days on to her trips across the country. She flew to the UK for a bear show and toured England. She bought a brand-new car (a purple Saturn) which really stuck it to my dad since he had always fixed up “winter rats” and jalopies for her to drive.
What she didn’t do was save money, fix up our house, or address its infrastructural needs. “This is the first time in my life I’ve ever had money to enjoy,” she reasoned. If she wanted a purple car and could afford the payments, why not? As her offspring, my brothers and I did not yet understand the extreme importance of saving money for a rainy day or maintaining good credit history. We did not know how to protect her from her own spending habits.
Since she was producing work at a record rate and her finances, though unmoored from responsibility, were in the black, I felt secure enough to return to college away from home. I had no interest in any of the local schools, mostly because they were local. I needed to get away from Clinton, no question. I applied for and was accepted to the most Bard-like of the inexpensive SUNY schools, the College at Purchase. I was only three hours away from home but had easy train access to the playground that is New York City.
My first semester there counted as the second half of my sophomore year. I shared a room with a straight guy from somewhere (Binghamton?) and made a small group of friends. Since I had wasted a year and a half at home, I was older, more mature than most of my fellow students. When at Bard, I made the mistake of confining myself to its esoteric world. To fix that, I bought my friend Holly’s mom’s Ford Escort, and with my own car, I needed to work to afford it. I landed a job at Toys R Us in White Plains. Nightly and weekend shifts kept me out of trouble and away from the dorms. I hung out with a few cashiers from work and maintained a somewhat healthy balance of college and the real world.
For that winter break I returned to Clinton, with help from my father, then hurried back to Purchase for my junior year. While I delved into studying Edwardian literature, at home my mother developed stronger relationships with gallerists and big corporations in the doll/bear world. She was a featured artist with a solo show at a shop in Fredericksburg, VA, and traveled down for the opening night. She met more people. She made several visits down there, spent hours on the phone gossiping and yucking it up with her new cadre of friends, and, unbeknownst to me, started looking for a new place to live.
As summer break approached, I put in for a transfer from the White Plains store to the one in New Hartford, where I had worked during my gap year-and-a-half. I puttered home in my Escort once the dorms closed, knapsack filled with dirty clothes and a hatchback packed with books, ready for a summer in Clinton. I had a job and its impending financial benefits, my old friends to hang out with, and almost ninety days to stretch, grow, and save up money for next semester. I had my old bedroom in our house on Brimfield Street as a solid base for whatever the summer offered.
“I’m moving to Virginia,” my mother announced the night I arrived home.
“What? Where? Why?” I spluttered. She had not mentioned anything about moving during our brief, irregular phone calls that spring.
“Fredericksburg, where Fay Lee’s gallery is,” she said. Her involvement with the doll/bear gallery on the main drag of that town had turned her into a minor local celebrity. “They all want me to move down there. I’ll have a group of friends all around me. I found a house to rent down the street, near the train station, with enough room for a sewing room and a bedroom for your brother.”
“So Jacob is going too?”
“Yes, that’s why we have to wait until the end of his school year. He’ll go to the middle school in Fredericksburg in the fall.” She calmly sipped her coffee and flicked her lighter on another cigarette.
I gripped the edge of the kitchen island. “How does he feel about this?”
My mother flubbed her lips as she worked up a response. “I don’t know. I think he’s happy to go to a different school. And he doesn’t have much choice. I have custody,” she said defiantly. Though mandated in the terms of their divorce, my dad had yet to make a single one of his child support payments for Jacob’s care. He was the only one of us still under eighteen. I added this to the pyre of resentments towards my father. We were back on speaking terms, but we were not quite back to our normal aloofness.
“What about this house?” I asked. This old house with its cistern water, lack of insulation, and a half-finished addition. “Are you selling it?”
“Nope. A few weeks ago, I ran into a friend from high school.” She told me the circumstances, but I don’t remember where they reunited. “Bruce is moving back to the area with his two daughters. He said he was having trouble affording a place with three bedrooms. I told him I had a house for rent. What he pays me in rent will cover the mortgage.”
“Did he see this place before he agreed?”
“Yep, gave me a deposit too.” She reached for the sugar bowl. “That will cover the cost of the movers.”
“Movers?” I spat. “You’re paying for movers?” My family did not spring for things like moving companies or insurance policies or doctors. “Bruce saw this place and he still said yes?”
“What’s wrong with this place?” Mommy let loose a column of smoke.
“Uh, we all know what’s wrong with it,” I said. “You told him about the water you can’t drink? And the wood furnace heat in the winter? Is someone finishing the new bathroom?” I pointed at the ceiling. My dad had never finished the bedroom nor the ensuite which held a functioning shower stall but nothing else, not even sheetrock on the walls.
“No. If it bothers him, he can fix it up,” she said dismissively. “I already cashed his deposit check.”
All this talk of movers and tenants and Virginia put me in a swirl of emotions. I admonished myself to be more specific when making wishes: I had urged her to shake off the shackles of depression, not the shackles of family. I wanted her to reinvent herself as a single, strong, successful artist who didn’t care what society thought…but remain in place, where I had always known her.
Then it hit me: I wanted her to care what I thought. She had made all these plans alone, without giving me any hints or warnings over the past few months I had been at college. Mommy had cut me out of the process. Had she included Jacob at all? Did she really schedule her big change for the end of his school year?
Wait a sec. “When are you moving? We’re talking about August right, before a new school year?”
“No,” she said casually as she picked up an empty mohair bear body and started to push stuffing into the floppy limbs with a crochet hook. “Like I said, when Jacob’s school year ends in June.”
“In a month?” I belted out. “Where—where am I going to go? What about me? I have a job in New Hartford. I can’t go to Virginia!”
She tilted her head, appearing to think. “You can come. If you want. They have Toys R Us down there. Wait till you see it, Fredericksburg is a lot like Clinton. Very artsy. Lots of cute shops along Main Street. You’ll like it.”
If it’s so much like Clinton, why move? “I can’t do that. I was planning on being here this summer.”
“Welp, it’s an open invitation. Bruce and his daughters will be moving in on July 1.”
“So I have a month to find a place to live,” I said, with a crack in my voice.
“Or come with me,” she said. She concentrated on her bear assembly.
“I can’t afford an apartment on my own.” I retreated to the other side of the island. I would not entertain the idea of moving to another state for the summer. “And it’s impossible to find a place to live for such a short term.”
“Go live with Brian.”
“Ew!” My brother was a free spirit, for sure, and his new place was dirtier than our house. He and his roommates lived like vampires, partying all night and crashing during the day. It was a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party of cheap beer, pizza, and, on occasion, LSD.
“Go live with your father.”
I grimaced even more. “That’s not happening.” I did not know where he lived, and presumably his girlfriend—the MacGuffin of my parents’ separation—was there, too.
Who was this person? Why hadn’t she broached the subject with me before I made my summer plans? Why had she kept it a big secret? And how would she be able to move out of our family home of twenty years in one month? She was a collector of all sorts of things—bears, dolls, celestial themed knick-knacks, and more. The property had a garage and a pole barn, both packed to the rafters with stuff. When my grandfather passed, we shoved his belongings into the pole barn loft—he was also a collector: his kink was Revolutionary War and bicentennial crap—to be sorted later. Wasn’t this “later?”
My mother sewed the bear’s seams closed with an upholstery needle. She pulled the thread tight, tied a knot, then trimmed the string. “Welp. You’re twenty-one and you have a job.” She moved on to the next teddy carcass and jabbed more polyester stuffing into an arm.
I dug a spoon out of the silverware drawer. “Why? Why are you doing this? This is our home.”
She took a long drag on her Virginia Slim. “Too many memories. Just…too many memories. I need a clean break.”
Perhaps that was why she had not brought me into her confidence.
When a Mayflower moving van and attendant crew arrived a few weeks later, Mommy instructed them to load up the boxes from her sewing room, her sewing machine and worktables, her clothes, Jacob’s computer, his personal effects, and most of the furniture. The movers left behind the wooden colonial armchair, a mattress, and the oak stools we used to eat at the kitchen island.
In the intervening month, I had not solved my huge housing dilemma. I circled a few apartment listings in the Utica paper, even a few month-to-month leased places, but I chickened out on calling or visiting them. I went about my work schedule as my mother threw things in boxes she purchased in stacks from UPS.
I barely spoke to Mommy. It hurt me to refer to her by that childish name. In my head, she became Mother. Jacob, who was (and is still) quiet and repressed, helped her pack here and there, in between his computer hacking or whatever he did on that beige desktop PC of his.
Mother packed her clothes in garbage bags and loaded up her purple Saturn for the drive to Virginia. I was mortified the state of the house she was leaving for her new tenant. Bruce and his daughters would have to unpack into closets and shelves full of decades of family heirlooms, paperwork, childhood toys and books, and anything my mother regarded as non-essential. The yard and garages still held multiple dumpsters’ worth of assorted tools, construction supplies, and paint cans. Mother abandoned it all.
“You can still drive down and stay with us,” my mother said, leaning against the doorframe of her car.
“Bye,” Jacob said as he brushed past me on the front steps. He got into the passenger seat.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, Mother,” I sighed. She had used up all the drive and ambition in our family. I was stuck, unable to cope with another tectonic shift in our lives. When she had been mired in her post-divorce depression, I thought of her as an energy vampire, sucking up our love so she could survive the heartbreak. Her sadness and grief created a funnel cloud large enough to pull me out of college a few years prior. I returned home to support her and my brothers, and she drank in that energy until I was depleted. My father betrayed his family, and then Mother betrayed me. I was trapped in a ghost of a home.
“Welp. Bye,” she said as she opened her arms. I gave her a quick squeeze. My mother tossed her purse onto the car’s console and climbed in. They followed the Mayflower van down the road.
I bought new dishes and cookware at Bradlee’s: she had taken all the kitchenware. I made my bed on the mattress on the floor of the new bedroom. For entertainment, a coworker gave me an old TV, and I hooked up the VCR my mother left behind. We never had the luxury of air conditioning, and as the days warmed up, the house soaked up the June heat. I barely slept from the oppressive temperatures and the storm in my mind.
One evening after work, the phone rang shrilly. I cradled the receiver against my ear. My aunt Nancy said “hullo?” on her end. “I can’t believe your mother just left all of Daddy’s stuff in that pole barn!” She fumed. “All those stamps and coins and slides he made. That barn’s not climate controlled at all. Is it even waterproof?” I assured her it was not.
“I’m going to have to come over and have you help me unload that from the loft. It can go in my shed. Will you be home—”
“Can I go in your shed too?” I said, half-jokingly.
She sputtered. “Not in my shed, but you can live in my camper. It’s just going to be parked in the yard all summer. I’m not spending all that time and money to get it ready to go camping again. What can you afford for rent?”
My aunt used to charge us money for holiday dinners, so her request for rent did not surprise me at all. I considered my paychecks and stubbornly minuscule bank account and gave her a lowball offer. “Sixty bucks a month?”
“OK,” she said. “Move in whenever you want.”
I squatted in the Brimfield Street house until my mother had the power company cut the electricity. My TV, the fridge, and an assortment of antique lamps shut off in the middle of my dinner.
That’s how I came to live in a camper in my aunt’s backyard one summer.
To be continued…