The Child Left Behind

The Child Left Behind

    I remember the last time I saw my mother walk. With her loose fitting dungaree jeans and full figured hips, she walked matter-of-fact-like.  We kids walked wondering-like. We wondered with each step when she’d leave or ever come back.
    Afterward, on the toy-strewn living room floor where we played, I gathered up all the junk from the mess we’d made.  I hid them out of sight in the closet.  Then I vacuumed the cookie crumbs and potato chips, picked up the empty cups and plates and wiped the dirty coffee table.  I didn’t realize it was this bad.  I was nine and hid my childhood in the closet with the toys. 
    My mother no longer walks now.  Matter-of-fact, she sits in the living room where we used to play and watches TV, just like we kids used to all day.  The junk is gone, as are the toys, cookie crumbs and dirt.  But the potato chips from my step-father still lodge themselves in between the recliner’s cushions where my real father used to sit.  I look at the recliner as if he’s still there and check it constantly to see if I can find a coin or two for good luck.  I feel the tension on the armrests as I sit down and pull the back lever, just like he did when he came home from a long day’s work.
    “Why don’t you get up and fix the house!” my mother nagged.  “All you do is sit and watch TV”.
    “I’m trying to relax”, my father retorted.
    “The sink needs fixing”.
    “I will, honey”. 
    Then later, as we lay in bed, it erupted.
    “Kiss my a_____, Nancy!” he bellowed.
    “Don’t you swear at me, Ron!” my mother yelled.
    “God d_______it!” he shouted again and CRASH, BANG, THUMP, his fist hit the wall.
    “Don’t you hit me, Ron” she said plaintively.  Of course he wouldn’t, being an officer and a gentleman.  Hitting was usually for us kids.
    “ God d________it!” my father cursed again.
    “Don’t come any closer!” she said fearfully and then SLAM! she barricaded herself in the bathroom again as the door was slammed shut.
    But she barricaded herself from us that cold December evening even more so as she walked out that same bathroom door with her Jane Fonda hairdo smelling of perfume and wearing her fur coat.  She met the Swede in the gold Cadillac in our wrap-around driveway.  I squinted and waved, my brothers threw snowballs, and my older sister pouted.  My sister had to iron all my father’s shirts now, my brothers eat TV dinners and I see my father cry as he did to me saying “Sunny, what am I going to do?” 
    I wondered at the distance between us and what to do, too.  I also wondered at the dishes and the junk that seemed to be islands growing around the house, and us.  There were Lays Potato Chips to eat and cans of Spagettios and Fluffy peanut butter minus her, which meant dinner.  My father bought us pot pies and TV dinners and sat on the same recliner watching TV, smoking and drinking beer.  His day had finished at the office and he knew she was gone, forever.  She had walked out of our lives for good and we made a snowman in effigy of the Swede and smashed it.  My father’s image loomed larger.
    But I don’t see his image now.  He remarried and made CEO.  Then he retired at fifty-five and moved to a cabin in the north woods of Wisconsin.
    Yet my mother’s there just as real.  She’s also retired.  She’s a retired school teacher, yet they gave her the golden glove due to her multiple sclerosis and since she couldn’t walk.  She said goodbye and the school board gave her a severance just like the settlement my father did after the divorce.
    Not long before she walked out I remember seeing her naked breast as she fed my newborn baby brother that spring day.  I didn’t realize that was it.  The separation between them began then.
    He was the last baby of seven.  The blanket hid him.  There was nothing tangible for the 6 mo old brother to cling to and she left him clinging to the crib.  We all pitched in to change his diapers as we set him on our father’s bed in their bedroom and watched TV.  We rolled him on his tummy to make him smile as we clung to each other for support. 
    But one by one we fell off.  One brother fell into dope, a sister bulimia, and I, into emptiness.  The emptiness I filled with the bottle at the age of thirteen.
    Thirty years passed until I saw her as I see her now sitting in a wheel chair that I push her in along the seaside park some mornings.  There’s hope in the morning by the sea unlike any other place on Earth, for here you can see the horizon and breathe afresh and know there’s nothing but expansiveness out there.  Your bill of health is clean, too.  The journey of the day is just waiting.  All you need to do is get up and walk.
    Just as I thought I had to.  Only I walked through Asia.  There was night there horrifically dark.  I touched its darkness.  A knife could cut through it easily as flesh or a sword its ideologies.  I learned the separation between people begins inwardly though.  All our choices begin here until they cut us asunder and you feel no longer one flesh, but two.
    I was caught between them lying on a concrete prison floor in China.  You can’t see either side of alcoholism.  The window’s iron bars and screens divide and obscure them.  The clanging iron doors tell you when to awake, that something’s wrong here and you can’t return because the sword’s pierced you and there’s truth to bear.  The 6’ x 15’ cell hides you from seeing the public face you displayed and the one in the mirror, though you know the stubble’s gray and you’re not a kid’s anymore, or that the wanderer you once were is gone because here you crawl and sit and sleep on the floor again.  You crawl to the hole in the prison door for your life to return and this in the form of daily bread.
    That’s when you think there’s something real on the horizon in all that expansiveness by the sea and not just apparitions.  You see it.  You see through those 6’ x 15’  walls as far as you can and call with your heart.  You wonder if you’d wandered too far for taking revenge on them and the ignoble savages you saw outwardly and inwardly meaning, you see the face within yourself even clearer.
    It’s changed and you cross over.  You return to yourself and them.  So you sit again as a man on the same recliner next to your mother and watch TV as your father did.
    “How are you feeling, honey?” she says, just like when you were a kid.
    “Good, mom”, you say repetitively.
    “Are you doing okay?”
    “Yeah, everything’s great” you say truthfully, because you know she’s still there and just as real and tangible as that blanket between you and your baby brother.  This is where you belonged.  There are fine cookie crumbs littered all over and snowflakes covering your tracks and darkness dividing the way back home but spring came and released you from that cell and you know that on the living room floor is one toy left you didn’t put away.  It was the child you left behind.