In my second year of college in the fall of 1977, I stopped being with so many boys and settled with someone new.
In one call, I told Mom I was dating a new guy.
In one call, I told Mom he wasn’t in college and that he worked at the place where I was doing work-study.
In one call, I told Mom he was older than me.
“How old?”
“Thirty-one.”
Silence. White space filled with simple math: I was nineteen.
“That is old.”
“I’m moving in with him.”
Silence.
“I’ll save money.”
I didn’t say what seemed as true as it had with all the boys before him: He loves me. I love him. I didn’t know that the first hot breathlessness wasn’t love. I couldn’t see that I was confusing my loneliness and this man’s attention with love.
In Condon, the kids I’d gone to kindergarten with were the same kids I graduated high school with. I’d never learned how to make new friends. I felt shy and different in this college town, and by my second year, my loneliness grew. This man washed away the loneliness.
Years later, Mom would tell me she worried. “I was afraid I’d lose you,” she’d say. “I didn’t know what to do, but I thought if I tried to stop you, you’d turn away, so far away you might not come back.” She’d tell me she always worried about me, through those years of high school and college and my early twenties. Worried I would be the child she’d lose. Not through death, but that I would turn away from family, be drawn into something she couldn’t pull me back from, and I’d be gone. “You were always trying new things,” she says. “Things I didn’t understand. Pushing up against the edges.”
But she didn’t tell me this during that phone call. I wouldn’t have listened anyway.
Maybe it’s only possible to speak of the hardest times in a family long after they are over. Maybe it’s only possible to know how bad it was long after the time has passed.
During that winter, Mom wrote me letters and I went home less. Going home meant feeling the disapproval and tension behind Mom and Dad’s unasked questions about this older man.
Mom wrote letters that came empty of the monthly checks she used to send, an emptiness filled with the disapproval she wouldn’t speak of.
In her letters she wrote of the terrible winter they were having in Condon. An ice storm on top of snow. Frozen water lines and broken power poles, and a weeklong power outage. Everyone with the flu. Nana was sick and getting tests for what would turn out to be lung cancer. Mom was taking care of Nana, and Dad’s drinking had gotten worse. Mom wrote that Dad was no help to her at all.
In those letters Mom never asked about my new living situation or about the man I was with. A man I’d let into my life in the same casual way I’d let all the boys up until then in, without thought about the long term.
Instead of asking about him or my plans, or telling me about the disappointment I knew she had, Mom sent articles by women like Judith Viorst, who wrote about womanhood and aging and grief and love. Mom said how good Viorst was at presenting all sides of things and “makes no cut-and-dried conclusions.”
When I read Mom’s letters now, I see her words, like tracing paper, barely covering her worry. She was trying to reach me. These letters, the articles, the books she mentioned she was reading, were enough to keep me to her. She saw possibility in me and would hang on until I found it myself.
Even though I fought her quiet disapproval, it leaked into me and into my relationship with my boyfriend, leaving dark trails that drew my attention to our differences. The twelve years between our ages made him not fit with the few friends I had, or me fit with his. Me pushing toward a degree and a career, him happy to get high each night and eat two bowls of chocolate chip mint ice cream in front of the TV.
I stopped wanting him to touch me or look at me with all his love. I couldn’t tell if this was me falling out of love or me wanting my parents’ love more than his.
Summer.
“I have to go home and work,” I said. I had a summer job in Condon, driving truck for a wheat harvest crew.
“When will you be back?” my boyfriend asked.
“I’ll be back at the end of summer. We work long days. I won’t have time to get away.” I didn’t know if this was true or not.
All through the summer Mom and Dad and I stepped around the big fat question of my future. The question I knew they had but gave them no opening to ask.
I worked my harvest job, went out with friends, went to parties. Spent time with other boys. My boyfriend called from Eugene every week. Long silences in long-distance calls that held the distance I felt but couldn’t explain and didn’t want to admit to anyone because it would mean I’d been wrong.
On a Saturday night in August, near the end of harvest season, I was in my bedroom getting ready to go out to a party. Curling iron cooling on the dresser, hair feathered back, eye shadow dark, beaded leather choker around my neck. Mom and Dad came up the stairs and into my room. They’d never done a thing like that before. Both of them together. To “have a talk” with me.
Dad said, “Your mother and I want to know what your plans are this fall.” Serious. Formal. Sober.
“I’m going back to Eugene.”
“Are you still going to live with him?” Mom said, more to the point. Tense. Sharp voice.
The air they exhaled had a need in it, a need I could almost breathe into myself.
“I don’t know.” The push and the pull. I didn’t want to go back to him. I didn’t want to tell them they were right.
“You need to decide.” Mom folded her arms. Took a position. “We’re not going to send you any money if you’re living with him.”
“Fine.” I set my legs solid. Folded my own arms. “I can take care of myself.” I hoped they couldn’t hear the shake in my voice.
“How?”
“Summer money. Work-study,” I listed on thrust-out fingers, raised-up voice. “I’m paying for school anyway. You already told me I’m the one who has to pay off the loans.”
The flinch in Dad, the shake of his head.
Mom made her own list, used her own thrust-out fingers. “There’s the gas card you’ve got, plus the fill-up you do every time you come home. The food we send back with you, your car insurance, your health insurance, your car. All the money we’ve sent already.”
Her voice raised, my voice raised. I started to cry.
“You stopped,” I said. “You’ve hardly sent any.”
Dad stepped toward me. “Babe,” he said, “we want to know if you’re going to keep living with him.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” I yelled. I grabbed my purse and went out of the bedroom, down the stairs, out the door, and through the front gate to my car. My tires spit gravel as I drove away. I went to a party and stayed out late enough that my staying-up-late-mom would be in bed.
She’d left the lamp on in my room. The light shone on two small pieces of notepaper sitting on the dresser. Mom’s big loopy lettering.
I was a little drunk, but the words were clear.
All I want is for you to be happy.
A) Make your own decisions.
B) Live your own life.
Just don’t shortchange yourself in the process.
I love you and that’s what counts— (we only want to
be proud of you).
Do what you are big enough to do.
Love, Mom
Maybe it’s possible to know a moment when you are changed. To recall that moment for the rest of your life. The shifting, like all my cells moved to a new place. Blood, tissue, heart, stomach, brain. That moment when a girl takes the step from being a teenager to being an adult. To stand in someone else’s shoes, see the world from that place, to understand that all Mom was doing (the arguments, the worry, the silences) was for this. For me to be happy.
I kept that note, tucked it away in an envelope.
All I needed to do was figure out how to be happy.
To show her I could be happy.