a·ban·doned/əˈbandənd/
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| Synonyms: | derelict – deserted – forlorn – forsaken – desolate | |
I remember feeling abandoned when I was about 6 years old. My mother had a job about an hour away working at a national forest, helping campers. She started sleeping there, not coming home. She told my brother, he was 4 then, and I that it was easier for her to sleep there and not worry about the drive and gas. We didn’t like it, we wanted to be with her, and we wanted to camping too. We love camping as a family. My father didn’t say much about it. When it started I had not seen the connection, my parents would fight with such passion and noise and goodness the emotions my brother and I had while watching or listening. We would be told to go to our rooms but would sit on the stairs to listen where they could not see us. We would cry together scared. I am not sure what I was scared of then, just that I was scared and sad and upset.
The fighting stopped when Mom started to sleep at work and soon she was not coming home for weeks. I remember my parents meeting at a cafe for lunch. They talked about things they did not think I could understand, they talked as if my brother and I where not even there. It was civil enough. I grew up in a Roman Catholic house hold so I knew to be quiet, children where to be seen but not heard. I remember the utter horror of realizing what was taking place. Mom was not living with us anymore and like a commodity, like the house, my parents where planning how the separation and division of assets would go. My brother and I would stay with our father, it would kill him not to have us. I never knew my father back then to be emotional when it came to us kids, but he was often emotional about our mother. I didn’t know he refused to let us go, but I knew that Mom left, that is what I knew then. She left us, and she left her half of the house so she would not have to worry about child support. She left with near nothing. Not even her cat, she left him with me.
I had no idea when I started this post that I would end up in tears, but here they are. I felt abandoned. None of the reasons why she left mattered to me then. Everything in the world was wrong and some how it was all my fault. I didn’t tell them that day at lunch that I understood what was going on. I kept it in till weeks later when Mother came to get my brother and I to spend the weekend with her camping. I remember being alone with her after Dad left and we where cleaning up in the public bathroom. I remember breaking down and screaming at her that I knew she was leaving us and that she didn’t love us and how dare she break Dads heart. Dad had not showed emotion about this then, he had not told us she was gone even, but I knew how I felt and I could not help but think how abandoned and heart broken he must have been. I refused to stay with my mother that weekend, I cried until she called my Dad after he drove an hour to get home to drive another hour to come get me. He did. My brother wouldn’t come with me. I remember trying to explain it all to him but he wanted Mom. And that is how it was for years. We would visit Mom when ever she wanted us, Dad would bring us and pick us up. I would go because I missed her. I was however on Dads side, and my brother was on our mothers side.
So the fighting had stopped, the scary times on the stairs over. I think the abandonment was worse though honestly. I had such empathy for my father who tried so hard to hide his emotions. He was a strong man, and often scary and easy to anger, and very strict, but I just could not help feeling so badly for him. Nothing in the world seemed ok, we where both abandoned by the one person that was never supposed to leave us.
