If I had to describe my life so far in one word, I would use unplanned. I don't believe I was part of my mother's plan any more than my son was part of mine. Looking back on the last 40 years, I wonder whether a plan would have had me end up in some other place with some other set of circumstances. As a teenager, I struggled to fit in as much as I struggled to abate my sadness over my mother having left. Equally consuming for a girl just experiencing puberty, each guided me down a path, which has led to extreme self-loathing. Had I naturally felt a sense of belonging and had good self esteem, perhaps I would not have allowed so many people take advantage of me. Nor would I have likely been so dammed confused about my role in relationships.
The snow was falling all around me as I wept. The flakes flitted here and then there. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I felt as if God was here with me right at the moment. Yet, I also felt so totally all alone. Abandoned. Rejected. Forlorn. Here I was, 40 years old, alone, afraid and searching for meaning in the woods I used to frequent as a child. It made me think about my life in terms of not just memories but building blocks for who I was yet to become.
~~~
It was fall in Morgantown. The brilliant stands of robust hardwoods; maples, oaks, sweet gums and cherries were ablaze. I slumped myself down between a tree trunk and the rock lined wall circling Woodman Hall. It was about 10 pm. I had been drinking. A local bar that notoriously turned the other cheek for freelance freshman ID's had provided ample opportunity for me to drown my thoughts with $0.10 pints. Tears ran down my cheek. Wallowing in self pity, I picked at the wet leaves around my feet. I inhaled deeply and smelled the scent of rich, decomposing earth. It had rained the night before and the ground was still wet. Autumn in West Virginia was a melancholic time. It was by far my favorite time of year. The forest unconditionally celebrated autumn's annual return with magical, colorful, and captivating displays for all to see. It marked another season for change, but not like the others. No, Autumn was about death and going into hibernation and darkness and shedding that which is no longer needed. It was just this time of year, about seven years prior when my mother left my father, me and my brother to find herself.
I was about 12 years old. My mother and I had just returned from a grocery shopping trip. I say trip because I grew up in a home about 40 miles from everywhere. We had gone to the Tops Friendly Market in Olean because they were honoring double coupons and because we had gone to visit my mother's 'friend' in the hospital. He had had a heart attack a few weeks earlier. My mother was a home health nurse for the regional to hospital system. She cared for elderly and home-bound ill patients who had no one else to care for them. Frank, her friend, was a 70- some year old man she knew from when she was an intern at Sylvania back in the 1960's when the town was actually a town and Frank wasn't an invalid but a handsome engineer. Frank had since grown old, and for some unknown reason to me at the time, his family had abandoned him. She had had a crush on him back then, yet now, it seemed to me that things had evolved. I wasn't the only one who thought so as well. My father, now home too confronted my mother in the kitchen.
"Where the hell have you been?" He asked in a perturbed tone.
"Shopping at Tops" she retorted.
I am uncertain how the conversation progressed, the details are hazy, but at one point he asked her, "do you plan on being a wife or do you want out?"
Grocery bags and various toiletry products lay scattered across the floor; yet to be placed in their respective places. My mother dropped the bag she was folding and simply walked back to her bedroom. The silence was palpable.
She soon appeared with a few items and then walked out the front door. And that was it. She was gone. I didn't know it at the time, but that was the end of my parent's marriage.
~~~
My butt was getting wet and I noticed I was shivering. The tears had stopped and I was hungry. I got up and crossed the street. The lights of the student union seemed overly luminescent and gave off a slight hissing noise. Clanking of doors opening and closing caught my attention. There were about ten doors on the front the building and it always seemed as though someone was walking through each one of them at any given moment. It was a threshold crossed by hundreds of young people every day. Some rushed, some languidly savoring the free time college life afforded them. Some sad. Some happy. Some older. Some quite young. All of us moving independently yet as one collective, the student body. As if we were one body, one flesh, one soul on this campus for a short time with a collective purpose.
I opened a door, crossed the threshold as a sucking wind whooshed over me and I went from the chilly fall evening into the vast, florescent, fabricated living room for 20,000 20-somethings. Taco Bell seemed like a good choice. And the savory, salty, fatty goodness served up for a mere $.99/taco was too good to pass up at this hour.
I had never eaten at a fast food restaurant, other than McDonald's prior to arriving to Morgantown. I lived in rural Pennsylvania in a county of less than 3,000 located in the middle of the Allegheny National Forest. It was a hunting and fishing Mecca. As a young girl growing up, outside my bedroom door was a gun cabinet, which was always left unlocked. A few antlers and stuffed fowl decorated the basement walls where we kept jars of canned vegetables, sauces and fruits from our garden. I fed chickens at 6 am before the bus came to carry me the 30 minutes into town to our school. For fun, as teenagers, we'd steal beer left in the back of trucks parked outside the various "hunting camps". It was a very wild and safe place to explore the limits of rules for community. My grandfather had been born, spent his whole life and died in this town. My father would too. I would not.
The juicy, salty, fattening burrito filled up my belly and cleared away a bit of the drunken haze. But my heart still felt burdened. Just as I was getting up to leave, a hand grabbed my shoulder. "Bean! We were looking all over for you!" Yelled my 5’ 2” tall roommate. Pickles, as we all called her, was a brave and sturdy blonde from an Polish heritage out of Pittsburgh. She had crystal blue eyes and a contagious laugh. She was, in short, the only person I trusted at that time in my life.
“Why do you do that?” she asked, mothering as she emphasized the word ‘do’ emphatically. “Do what?” I casually asked, pretending not to understand her question. I had a habit of leaving bars, social gatherings, parties alone, and wander off, to cry. It was sort of the way I was. Damaged. Sad. Wounded to the core. I was not sure how else to behave.
All these young kids that attended our university came from all over the country; some even from Europe, Asia or Latin America on student exchanges. All over campus you could see dark skinned boys with thick dark hair and glasses just as thick. Or thin, exotic Asian girls laughing boisterously. There were the jocks, the ‘sciency’ nerds, the fraternity guys and sorority girls. They all seemed to have a plan. They all seemed to know what they were doing here. They all seemed to fit in. But I was different. I didn’t have a plan, nor did I know what I was doing here. And certainly, I didn’t fit in anywhere.
I was my mother’s daughter and she was my grandmother's daughter. My grandmother was an orphan. My mother was a child of neglect. Unwanted. Unloved. Given away. Shuffled away. I was abandoned. Left to figure out life without the guidance of a mother's love. An heirloom handed down to each of us as young woman. A badge to wear that marked us as such. But we had nothing to do with it’s presentation. We didn’t necessarily want it. We didn’t know what to do with it. But it was ours nonetheless.
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