Moving On

There is a job I’ve been putting off for months: sorting boxes of old photographs. Moving seems like a great reason to go through all the photos, separating them so that Jessie and Jenn have their own record of their lives. I have avoided this because looking at all those happy times is more pain than I want to face. But I take on this task, flipping through them in five hours one night. There’s a large pile I will send to Jenn, along with all her clothes and books and DVDs she left behind when she moved to her dad’s house.

I hope she may look through these and each image will be a love letter to her from me: We loved each other. We had good times together. Come back.

* * *

Jenn comes silently out of her Dad’s house when Joe rings the doorbell. She doesn’t greet us or speak to us at all, and I don’t know what to say, either. We unload the garbage bags full of clothes and the boxes of papers I’d saved from her school days. It’s good that she was home, because we worried about leaving her custom acoustic guitar out in front of their house.

When we bring the last load to her door, Joe finally speaks. “We’ve been trying to contact you for a while about your things. We didn’t want to just throw your possessions away, and we’re moving in two weeks so we had to do something with it all.”

She thanks us. As we drive away, I realize that she has not asked to see the house that she grew up in, just one last time. And she has not asked where we are going. Once we move, she will never know where to find us.

Joe squeezes my hand and gives me a compassionate smile. “How are you doing?”

I look out the window for a while. “I don’t know how to describe how I feel.” When the writer runs out of words, what is left?

Normal

At night, the normal people of this world have teenagers who are out with friends or watching some TV reality show, eating pizza rolls or Wendy’s, having sleepovers and going to the beach.

My 19-year-old has been missing for ten days.

Her cell phone is disconnected. Her friends, the ones I know about, don’t answer my calls. I’ve checked the hospitals and the police reports, but her name does not show up. I used to see her every day;  I used to share in her life. Now I don’t know which is worse, the not-knowing or the knowing.

My ex-husband talks to me more often than he did when we were married. Day after day he asks me if I’ve heard anything. We go over all the events and try to figure out what we can do, if anything, to fix this broken child.

Her older sister, who responds to pain with anger, sheds her anger on me. She wants Jenn to straighten up, immediately, and stop all this suffering. Underneath her anger I hear the fear…that fear that I feel too, that we are losing our Little One.

I cry every day, and Joe hands me napkin after napkin and tries to comfort me. All these tears have produced a massive sinus and double ear infection. At night I imagine the worst nightmares are happening to my daughter, and maybe if I stay awake and pray, she will be safe. These are desperate thoughts that come at 3 a.m. I know that she is God’s child, but I am starting to think that God needs to step up his game.

—————————————————————————————–

She opens the door casually and I run to her, crying out, “Hi, hi, hi!” like a silly fool. She tries to get away while I embrace her and inhale the scent of my baby.

Jenn finally gets away from my arms. She’s just here for some papers, and she doesn’t want to talk about anything else, even when I get angry and tell her how worried I’ve been.

“I’m an adult,” she says. ”I can live my own life. I can handle it. Why should you worry when I’m fine?”

Then I think, it’s a good thing she’s not dead, because I’m gonna kill her.

We follow her out to her car and there’s a strange guy in the passenger seat, who she doesn’t introduce. I greet him, but Joe just glares at him. Her back and side windows are completely missing. Shards of broken glass line the back window. She doesn’t want to talk about it, she repeats this several times.

I tell her it’s illegal to drive without a rear window and she disagrees with me. She says she has to find a new place to stay and is going to check out those low-budget motels that rent by the week.

Throughout this entire encounter she has been moving smoothly from the front door to her former bedroom to the car, walking right through me and around me. She has planned this, I imagine, to avoid any scenes or long discussions.

She drives away after telling me she loves me. Then I start to wait. Again. This is my normal.

Storms rolling in

That night a big storm was racing in. The sky glared with silent lightning, and I could see the trees outside our apartment window beating each other in the wind. I rubbed my aching belly and paced the living room like a nervous cat. False labor? I thought. Or am I going to have to deliver my baby all alone?

They were out in our car in the storm, maybe, or maybe they had gotten a motel room again.  Ray had gone to “straighten things out” with her. My contractions came and went, and the storm roared inside my mind and outside my creaking walls. Why is he doing this? What’s going to happen to us? How can he hurt me this way?

My three-year-old was sleeping in her room in her new “big girls” bed, and the cradle was ready. I was a mom, but I wanted my mother. She would call a taxi or an ambulance and hold my hand during the hours of labor ahead of me. And indeed, Jenn was born 26 hours later.

Last night was another storm of biblical dimensions. Hard rain smacked our windows like angry little fists, then hail pounded the deck. The lightning turned night into day, momentarily, and we saw the poplar bent almost sideways. The lights dimmed and glowed under the howling wind. I watched the light show and thought of Jenn.

She was out in her car, maybe, looking for a safe place to park for the night. Maybe she was afraid and wishing for her mother. Maybe she was wishing she was dead. Or maybe she was at a friend’s, oblivious to the fear and anger she caused by going missing for days. It’s not that she left home; she simply never came back home one day. And she has ignored our texts and phone calls since then.

This storm reminded me of that storm, the one the night before Jenn’s birth and my divorce. How wonderful that the wind screamed and cursed along with my own heart. I think I would have lost my mind to such internal storms raging on a peaceful night full of the soft chirp of crickets.

The storm is over, but there are raw broken limbs and flipped-over lawn furniture in the aftermath; orange cones mark some sort of disaster in the street. In the night I heard sirens and prayed again for my daughter’s life. She’s not in the news today. But the weather report says that a worse storm is coming tonight.

If love was enough

If love was enough, I would simply wrap my body completely around my daughter and absorb any blows or shocks that life brings her – or the blows that she attracts. I have wanted to do this ever since I held her tiny six-pound body the day she was born.

Our family agonizes over our Little Dark One, who is struggling to find her place in the world and can’t find a firm place to stand. Sometimes it is hard to believe the extent to which one person’s actions can affect so many other people. It’s hard to understand how she, in her own desperation, can claw at the hearts of the people who truly love her.

And now we are faced with a horrible decision. Do we let a little teenager live in her car in some random parking lot, or do we go back on our “tough love” decision and let her come back home?

If  good parenting alone was enough, we would not be in this situation today.

This ride is closed.

Life with my youngest teenager has been a rollercoaster for years – she’s here, she’s gone, she hates her dad’s house, she hates our rules. Last summer we all rode a loop-de-loop when she announced she’s an adult now and doesn’t need any rules. ‘Member?

Within weeks she’d had a falling out with the friend she lived with, and then she was off to her dad’s house, to his great satisfaction. Because every bad choice, every bit of misbehavior on Jenn’s part, was the result of my bad parenting for the last nineteen years.

I fought to keep my self esteem from zooming downwards on this nightmare ride while this deadbeat dad ranted: “I keep telling her she can live here. We got rules in this house, I don’t know what it’s like over there.”  But by Thanksgiving she was BEGGING us to come home. Wasn’t that ride fun?

Cue the sound of rattling rails as our horror train climbs another rise. Joe and I weren’t sure we wanted another trip on this thrill ride, but at first she was the model young adult. Then slowly our tension mounted as we saw the signs of attitude and little white lies signaling trouble ahead.

It’s that moment when you are almost at the top of the precipice and you know that no matter whether you want to get off the ride or not, you’re going to plunge screaming down two stories with your head whipping around and your arms clutching the harness, praying it will hold and that the rails will take you through without flipping you off into burning oblivion.

This was the month of May at our house. During this time, Joe’s mother passed away, too.

And after one terribly long night of soul searching when I sobbed until sunrise and prayed that whatever else happened, I have the strength to do the best thing to help my daughter into adulthood and save our own sanity, I told her that she could no longer live in our house. She had to go.

I know there’s someone out their clucking his or her tongue at this decision. But a long honest look at my own behavior has made it clear that the things I did to try to help her were actually enabling her to remain a teenager rather than becoming an adult. And if she’s made three tries at living by our unchanging rules, chances are she’s never going to be able to live with us.

Ex-Ray charged in to save the day. He texted me:  shes going to stay with me now Sue’s not happy but shes my daughter and she will always have a place to stay with me shes not goin out on the streets.

Fine, fine. Joe and I lifted our harnesses and exited the ride to the left. Ex-Ray has rules, you know? He’s handling it.

Last night Joe and I turned on his Savoy Jazz CD collection and began making parsley pesto and drying our first crop of tarragon, oregano, and rosemary. Then there was a knock on the door. Joe opened the door to a cop, who was looking for our daughter.

Stop for a minute. Quiet suburban street. Cop looking for MY DAUGHTER. Because some underage friend of hers had gone missing and they were checking with his friends for information.

Reroute back into the loading lanes and step aboard the Family Rollercoaster of Hell.

We told the officer her new address and phone number, then called her ourselves. No answer. So we called  Ex-Ray to let him know that a cop might stop by his Memorial Day BBQ to ask for help. Of course he would want to help distraught parents find their runaway kid, right?

His last truly coherent words were, “You don’t be givin cops my address. The cops come here, I’ll tell them to kiss my ass. They got no business coming to my house.”

In vain I tried to make him understand that a CHILD is missing, our daughter might know something about it, and we should do all we can to help. But I believe he was mind-numbingly drunk, and Joe believes he was also frothing at the mouth as he began some kind of diatribe about…something. We both are pretty sure that at some point he switched to drunken Spanglish and we didn’t understand a word. Then he hung up on us.

Remove seatbelts. Exit the cars. Advance to the nearest control box and cut the wires. This ride is now closed. As a matter of fact, I don’t even like this fun park.