I have trouble with people leaving. My leaving, others leaving, the whole process just makes me very uncomfortable. I should be at ease with it though, having moved so many times throughout my life, you’d think it would be second nature to pack up everything you own and head for someplace new. And though there is something so liberating about starting over in a new environment, it is also frightening, sad, and final. I sometimes secretly become attached to things, to people, to places. Outwardly, I try hard not to care about anything. Caring and becoming attached in my mind leads to disappointment, rejection, and pain.
It’s a well honed skill I suppose I learned early on and it’s a vow I’ve tried to keep. Try as I might to remain impervious to love and caring, I have “weakened” many times throughout my life and allowed myself to love or be loved. I have lost more times than I care to admit and I have also won. It’s a constant struggle; I wrestle between wanting love and repelling it at every turn. To conveying love to another and bitterly withholding it like a miser.
I feel ashamed when I allow myself to love and starved when I don’t get enough.
Watching people I love or care about just pick up and leave has left me with a hole I’ve yet to fill thus far. It has left me feeling unworthy and incomplete. It has created this intense secret need to be loved, to be held, to be nurtured, to be wanted. It has made me “needy” and I hate more than anything to feel that way. I try and reject it, to push it away, to push it down.
Who’s to blame? Mother? Father? Me? Am I leaveable? Unloveable?
My father left my mother twice. The first time took place shortly after my sister was born, my mother initiated the split as she couldn’t take the drunken violent episodes my father would engage in on a nightly basis. They reconciled not long after, vowing to give it another try and as a result, I was conceived. I was unplanned, an “accident” as they say. My father did not want to be married to a “baby maker” and the financial burden was unthinkable.
My mother’s pregnancy with me was difficult, she was told that she would probably lose me, that it would all be over in a matter of days or weeks. For whatever reason, I held on. My thirst for life, my desire to live, was strong. My mother calls me a “miracle baby”. I was born a couple hours after Halloween(to which my husband says that explains alot about me) and though I was healthy in terms of weight, I came with a multitude of other problems. I was born with something known as Hyaline Membrane Disease. In layman’s terms, it’s basically a respiratory disorder. I was immediately placed in some type of ventilator where I would remain for several weeks. In addition, it was discoverd I had a Club foot which would result in “casting therapy”, and my left foot would remain in a cast for months in hopes of encouraging correct placement.
These issues devastated my poor young mother and instead of returning home with her newborn baby, she went home wracked with guilt and fear that I might not survive. She was given a sliver of hope by a compassionate nurse who confided in my mother that if I did manage to make it through these ordeals, I would most certainly be blind, deaf, and “dumb”. My father upon hearing this news, decided that it was my mother’s fault and openly chastised her for giving birth to such an imperfect child and blamed her for all of my disabilities and disorders. He was angry that this was going to cost him “every penny” he had made so far.
You see, my father was just starting his ascension in the corporate world and while his financial status looked promising, it was no where near enough to provide for his growing family unit, much less one with problems such as mine. Not only did my father have to provide for his wife and daughter, he now had the added burden of providing for “damaged goods”.
Financially, this was considered a loss.
This situation did not sit well with my father’s plan, what he had intended on when coming to America. My father struck out on his own, into the world and was intent on making a name for himself and to prove to his parents what a good boy he was. He faithfully and diligently sent home a portion of his earnings every month to his parents as a show of support and proof that America was the land of opportunity and he was intent on getting his slice of the pie.
While my father may have been generous with his family back home, he was Ebeneezer with his wife. My mother told me once how when the car needed gas, he would go out with a measuring stick and insert it into the gas tank to see exactly how much fuel was needed and would then give her the precise amount of money for gasoline. Not a penny more, not a penny less.
My father was so exacting in his thriftiness, he would literally allot a number of squares of toilet paper my mother was permitted to use when going to the bathroom. This was all too much for my mother who though she was used to being ruled with an iron fist by her mother wasn’t used to “rationing” and the extreme measures my father enforced. Still, with all of the craziness of the drinking, the tight-fisted ways, the icy reception my mother received, which she chalked up to his being “European”, my mother loved my father and saw in him a sort of brilliance and intelligence and was intent on being a loving, supportive wife.
With her blinders on, fully encapsulated in the womb of motherhood and the promise of a second chance at reconcilliation, my mother never saw or sensed that she would be left, abandoned once more as she had been before so many years ago. My father would leave my mother a second time, ultimately for good. He not only left her, he left us as well. And while I may have been too young to realize what was happening, it somehow left an indelible scar, an ache that hasn’t been alleviated despite my various efforts to do so.
Were there clues to my father’s departure? Perhaps it was inability to be close to my mother, his rejection of her affections. Perhaps it was his cold and business-like demeanor. Perhaps it was his nightly drunken episodes where he would cry like a baby over his beloved homeland. Or maybe, it was the love letters my father had written to the Japanese dental assistant he fell in love with while on his travels as a young man.
My father met this enchanting creature before my mother but kept in contact with her even after marrying my mother and having children. My mother discovered the letters in a drawer, tucked in among sheets of paper and other miscellaneous items. In the letters, were words she had never heard my father utter. Written lovingly and tenderly by a man my mother didn’t know existed. The letters spoke of longing and promises to bring his love to America and begin a life together. The dreams my mother had were shattered, innocence was truly lost at that moment and a lifetime of pain would ensue and cease to exist to this day.
Putting all the pieces together, my father’s goals were not my mother’s. Obviously. He had plans of climbing the corporate ladder, of achieving financial success and stature and that could not be done with a wife and two small children in tow. Instead of seeing my mother as an equal partner, someone to go through the trials and tribulations of life with, he saw her as a burden. Instead of being thrilled at having a beautiful, loving family that would further complement his success, my father saw us as baggage.
Like a skilled surgeon, my father precisely, cut the fat.
My father never did end up bringing his Cherry Blossom to America. Instead, he ended up moving across town to a small apartment where he set up camp as a bachelor and weekend parent. He quickly rebounded from this unfortunate event and proceeded to carry on business as usual, marching up the ladder of success. My mother however, was not as easily able to recover. This rejection and abandonement by my father would set off in my mother a decades long war against him and more poignantly, against my sister and I, his offspring. We were constant reminders of our father, her abandoner and for a time, our savior.
She would in the years to follow, until we escaped, use us as pawns in her game of torment and retaliation. As a result, I learned from a young age to hide my love, to disguise my feelings lest I be punished for exhibiting the most basic of human emotions. It is only until recently that I have begun to attempt to rid myself of this self-imposed prison I find myself in. To recognize and realize that love is not something to fear or run away from, but to actively seek out and give freely.
It’s a “flaw” I’m learning to live with.
