Wonderland

         She’s the only one in the neighborhood that actually bothers to lock her doors when she leaves the house, and we’re the only family without anything worth stealing. She’s afraid to go outside when it’s raining, and she steadfastly refuses to travel alone. The police have been called three times in the past year for what have been written off as “false alarms,” but her sense of fear was quite real. I suppose that a curious observer might wonder what had made my mother so cautious, but I was unfortunate enough to know the entire story.
         When I was very young, my mother would tell me to close my eyes and make a wish. I wasn’t a troubled child, and you mustn’t get the impression that our home was plagued with violence or dangerous substances when I was a boy. But she knew that I enjoyed imagining that I was a cowboy or a superhero or what have you, and she was always very busy. Somehow, my siblings and I were never quite enough to occupy her time, and she was always searching for the next distraction, which would invariably fill up her days with too many working hours to tend to us in any real way.
         Perhaps working isn’t the right word. She made quilts for about three years, before moving on to knitting socks and sweaters, and then graduating, through what I’m sure was a bizarre and unorthodox ceremony, to making puppets. She tried her hand at woodcarving, spent three thousand dollars on an in-home pottery-throwing station, and even became quite good at creating miniature landscapes out of clay and paper mache. I would like to say that she worked rather hard at some of these pastimes, but she never sold her final products, and my father would always say that work without an income was a hobby. My mother didn’t like that.
         I would often spend hours inside my own head. It started out as a necessity to avoid crippling boredom and a constant lack of attention, but it turned out that I preferred the fantasies that I could create over my own mother, even when she decided that she wanted to spend time with us. I didn’t dislike my mother especially, but she couldn’t compete with my life as a famous actor, or the most beloved president since John Kennedy. And if I ever felt bad, I relieved my guilt by telling myself that it was her fault, her idea, and that she was the one being ignored now. It wouldn’t kill her to have to figure something out for once.
         I began to grow distant from my family, and from all of the occasions in my home. When my younger sister came home with her hair dyed red, I didn’t notice for three days. My grades never wavered, because I had nothing to escape from at school, but I only realized that my mother had given up charcoal drawings when she started knitting again, which should have been the first red flag that my mother was moving in the wrong direction. But I was winning gold medals in Beijing when my father insisted that my mother find a job, and I was curing cancer in a day when she refused point blank to do anything that didn’t utilize her hands. When she disappeared for four days after another argument, I was climbing Mount Everest, leading my fellow mountaineers back to base camp when she turned up, rambling about her spiritual renaissance. My father began to come home later, and I to sail the seas. He began not coming home at all on some nights, and I was alone in space, the first man to walk on Mars, or visiting Venus. My mother was doing her best to get by, living day to day, and I already was ten thousand years in the future.
         It is widely believed that a mother’s love for her children is greater and more complete than any other feeling in the world. I can testify that this rule is not absolute, nor is it applicable to every woman on the planet who decides that she wants to have kids. When my mother lost me, she was too consumed in her own life to notice, or to care. When she lost her husband, she was driven mad, and her grief spiraled out of control. She flirted with anger, got drunk, and took him home. Bargaining couldn’t satisfy her for very long, and she would often turn to depression to occupy her time. When she became tired with that relationship as well, she found a steady, reliable partner in denial. Her long-dormant energy was finally given a constructive outlet, and she postulated for years on how my father, the investment banker, had manipulated the legal system to cheat the IRS and had been hiding 500 acres of land in upstate Montana for over forty years, since he was in elementary school. She never quite made it to acceptance, not even for her children, and instead of losing one parent, we lost both.
         I alone had developed a coping mechanism for this sort of situation. My brothers both took to skipping class to huff paint and snort cocaine, were invariably expelled, and landed themselves in a juvenile detention center for six months. My sister took a far more reasonable, traditional approach, and was found hanging from the rafters in the school gymnasium a week after she turned 15. All the while, my mother and I were driven further into our own heads, although I like to think that I found happiness while my mother descended into insanity.
         After nearly three years of a sadly diminished home life, I left for California. Westward, towards the setting sun, as far away from my past and present as possible. I was determined to make a few of my old fantasies into reality, and I abandoned my mother, the only remaining member of my family. I’ve been working in retail at an office supply store, and I haven’t spoken to either of my parents in over a month. I feel better, now that I’m in control of my destiny. I don’t need to escape anymore, and while my mother is trapped inside of that old house, I’m free to travel the globe. So far, I haven’t made it outside of the country, but I’ll get there some day, and in the mean time, I’ve taken up making stained glass to calm my nerves.
         And every once in a while, when I’m feeling alone, I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and go back home.