My biological mother, Mary, was 17 when she married my dad and had me. 9 months later, she left us...for the guy down the hall. She got her divorce, then had my little sister, who never knew I existed until she was an adult. I grew up with my da d, who raised me to feel sympathy for my mother's rough life (he was her second marriage, her parents were awful, etc) instead of hating her. Even when she stole money from us...twice. Even when she told him she wanted to get back together, only to go out for a bit and never come back. Even when we learned she was a drug adict, stripper, and prostitute. After a time in 5th grade when she called because she first wanted to get back together with my dad (no dice, we were about to move in with my stepmom and my dad knew better than to trust Mary now), then needed to "borrow" from my college fund and my dad to drive her all over the place so she could get from Virginia to a guy in Florida, we didnt hear from her again. In Florida she managed to rack up multiple felonies before moving to the west coast and getting a few more. She moved on to her 5th husband, and we didn't hear a peep from her until I was 23.
That year, my little sister found my father and we got in touch. We'd met once when I was about 4 and my mother actually showed up for a visit. She put us in some guy's truck together and told me this was my sister. Very confusing for so young a child, and my sister was too young to remember it at all. So we started a relationship. A few months later, my sister heard through other family members that our mother was within days of dying from liver cancer and wanted to see her. My parents, my dad and my stepmom, hired an investigator and found Mary for me. We began to talk, and my sister and I made plans to go to Oregon and see her. My sister, who had already been abandoned by our mother twice, ended up bailing, and I went alone.
I went to see my mother 3 times, I think, and we talked al the time, on the phone and on the internet. Though I was very sick at the time, being hospitalized twice for migraines that I couldn't get rid of, and I ended up losing my job and having to sell my house and move back home, Mary kept up the story that she was on death's door. She was very involved in my life, sending me stuffed animals at holidays and my birthday, getting upset if I didn't return her calls promptly. I became horribly depressed, not knowing if my migraines would get better and believing that I finally had a relationship with my mother only to lose her to liver cancer. At my dad's house, I started getting better and moved to Alabama for law school. My mother stuck around for a month or two of school, about a year after we "met", before disappearing again. Abandonment #2.
I still don't know what happened. My best guess is that she knew the jig was up; it was pretty hard to believe that she really had end-stage liver cancer when she wasn't getting treatment and was still drinking. She'd gotten off the crack and heroin and pain pills and whatever else, but she was still falling over drunk a lot and slept most of the day during my visits. It' makes me unable to believe all the answers I thought I'd gotten from her about why she left and the reasons for the way she'd lived her life since then. I know that a lot of things she said were wrong, others were flat out lies. She frequently confused me and my sister, and was adamant that things that had happened to my sister had happened to me. She'd claimed that she stopped calling because she'd been told that I'd died in a car crash and my sister had been murdered. I do believe that my sister's dad might have made up a lie to protect my sister from her, but I don't believe he would have included me in that lie. I do believe that my mother's addict brain honestly believes a lot of what she said, or maybe she just repeated the lies so much they became the truth to her. I'll never know.
Thanksgiving, my birthday, Christmas, and New Year's all passed in 2006 with no word from my mother. Her internet presence disappeared. She stopped calling. In January, I happened to catch her online, and she acted like nothing had happened, like we'd been talking just the day before. I was dumbfounded. Then, she fell off the face of the earth again. Meanwhile, I had met relatives on my mother's side, cousins and an aunt, who are still a part of my life. Word would come to me that my mother had died; for awhile, I'd been able to laugh off the rumors because I was talking to her, but now, I didn't know. In the fall of 2007, I heard again that she had died, and been dead for awhile. I panicked because I didn't know. I ran internet searches. I called the police station, asking if her name had come up. It hadn't. My dad called, trying to find out for me. She claimed that she didn't have my phone number after I'd moved (which had never changed). My dad gave her my number again, and she promised she was going to call on Saturday. Of course, the call never came.
The holidays and my birthday passed again once, then twice. Still nothing. I graduated law school. I got married. My sister was there, as was my cousin, who is the daughter of my mother's brother, who had passed. Her mother, who had been a good friend of Mary's, was supposed to come but was ill. My "aunt's" son, who at 16 had visiting my mother and been offered heroin, never RSVPd. My stepmother fulfilled the motherly duties at the wedding, as she had earned the right to do.
After the wedding, it felt wrong to me that so much had happened - the wedding, graduation, 4 surgeries at that point - and my mother had no idea. So I called. She was angry at me for calling at first, playing the victim and accusing me of trying to make her feel bad. I guess she was drunk. She called me again the next day. We were in contact for a week or two, then she said she was going to rehab for three months. I called around a month later, and low and behold, she was home. She said her insurance had forced her to leave rehab after 13 days. She said she had a card for me. It never came. Months later, she emailed me, saying she wanted to tell me the truth. I emailed her back, and then she balked, saying that if I wanted to talk to her, I needed to call her. I didn't, not knowing how to react but being sure that I couldn't stay calm through a conversation. And that was it. I haven't heard anything else. I tried calling her last night, wondering if she even realized it was my birthday. She didn't answer; maybe she was out, but it seems more likely that she didn't want to talk to me. She hasn't called back. I called her again this afternoon, and again, nothing.
I know all the obvious things - it's better that I grew up with a relatively normal father and stepmother, who are protective and honest. I know logic says I should just let her go and stay away, but I can't. I can't bear the thought that she won't know when she's a grandmother, that I won't know if she's ill or dies. I hate that I don't know what's true, and that maybe I never can whether I have a relationship or not, because she doesn't know. She's an addict, and she clearly thinks like an addict. I don't know what her games are - why she came into my life, only to cruelly pretend to be terminal when I was going through so much, and only to walk away yet again. I don't know why she read from a webpage of mine that had jokes from college between my friends and I, to my father and told him he should look at it himself because she was concerned, when she had told me the page was hilarious. It was full of the kind of stuff you don't want your dad to see. I don't know why she told me she wanted to talk to my dad, who is a recovering alcoholic, because he was the only one who would understand what she was going through, only to yell at him instead and accuse him of trying to keep her away from me. I can't understand her motivations.
And it sucks that she's chosen not to be a part of my life. Whether or not Im better off for it, I have no doubt that these decisions are about what's best for her, not what's best for me. She's never given me a choice.
Here's the people that have chosen to be my family and be in my life. I love them all.
I guess I'm still trying to earn my mother's love, and I don't know how, and it's dumb because the woman that has always been my mother, my stepmom, Suzie, loves me unconditionally. But the heart wants what it wants...and if you're reading this, Mary, all I've ever wanted is for you to stick around.
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