Did you ever wonder about me the way I wondered about you? Did you look in the mirror say to yourself "I wonder if she has my eyes, nose, lips...."? Did you find yourself daydreaming about who and what I was becoming? Did you wonder about my school performance, my friends, or my home life? Did you ever think about coming back? Did you think of me or only of yourself?
I thought of you. I thought of you every single day. I convinced myself that there was a legitimate reason you weren't there. I was sure that one day you were coming back, and you'd tell me how much you loved me, and explain why you'd been away for so long. Surely you loved me. People here in town who had known you told me this.
"Honey, you were the apple of his eye."
"He worshipped the ground you walked on."
You named me after you mother. My middle name was your tribute to the mother taken from you in a tragic car accident when you were barely more than a baby yourself. I've always wondered why you would give me the name of a woman you grieved over, then abandon her namesake.
Over the years my feelings for you have changed like the seasons. There was the spring of hope. The warm days when the sun would shine and I just knew that you loved me and you were coming back. The seeds of hope blooming in my heart, that if I could only make it through today, you would be here to rescue me from the hell I lived through everyday. There was the scorching heat of summer. My anger so hot it was almost too hard to breathe. I blamed you for leaving me here with no one to protect me from the monsters that threatened to destroy me. I hated you. I wanted to scream at you, I wanted to hurt you. There was the fall, watching those leaves and flowers dying, the trees becoming bare, the hope and the anger dying, the harvesting of the grief I felt. Then came winter, and I was so cold. I placed layers of ice around my heart, convinced myself that I didn't care. I was fine without you. I didn't need you, and I was getting too old to believe in fairy tales. You were not coming. I would not be rescued. You didn't love me.
I'm no longer a little girl, I'm an adult with a family of my own. You have four grandchildren, two teenagers and two toddlers. When the teenagers were figuring out family trees and such, they'd ask about you, and all I could tell them was your name and birthday. So I decided to find you instead of waiting to be found. I was a single mom, raising two kids by myself on a teacher's salary, I didn't have the luxury of extra funds to pay someone to find you. I had to do the search myself.
It took years to find you. I'd like to tell you those years were good ones, but one shouldn't lie to their parents. I was a rock star in spite of my home life as a child. I excelled at academics. I was an honors student. I'm fluent in sign language. I won awards for academic excellence. I wrote the paper that won the grant to rebuild our high school's greenhouse. I won the regional competition for my FHA project, and placed second in the state. I wrote for the school paper, and was vice-president of FHA. I wrote an essay about bullying special needs kids at school and won a literary award. I stood in front of my peers and family and read that essay on awards day and received a standing ovation. I was soaring, but you weren't there to see my wings.
I fell in love. He was everything to me. So much so, that I gave up going away to college to get married and start a family. Guess what? He abandoned me too. I started to blame myself. All of those feelings I thought I had frozen away began to resurface. My father abandoned me, and now my children's father had abandoned them, and they were going to grow up just like I did, wondering why daddy didn't love them. It had to be my fault, right? I hadn't chosen wisely. So I killed myself trying to include him in their lives. I made sure they saw his family, and took them to eat in the restaurant where he worked at least once a week. Then he did something horrible and was locked away, but still I continued to foster a relationship between him and his children. Spending weekend after weekend in a jail/prison visitation room, until one day he said he didn't want to see them anymore. That it was too painful for him. I was furious, with him, but also with you.
Fast forward ten years and two babies later and you'll find me in an abusive relationship trying to keep my head above water. People always ask why the victim stays. I'm working through this now. For me I think it's two very toxic thoughts forever ingrained in my psyche. The first is the lesson learned from my stepfather. Love hurts. Yes, I kicked you across the room, but I love you and you did something wrong. I only did it because I love you and I want you to do better. The second is the lesson learned from you. Love leaves. So I stayed, because somewhere in my sick way of thinking I accepted the abuse because at least it meant he was there. One night he came home with a friend. Not a walking, talking human friend, a sell your soul to the devil, take everything you love type of friend. And thus began my dance with the devil. Hello Cocaine, nice to meet you, glad you came.
I spent the next few years juggling being a mom, hiding my addiction, lying to family and friends, isolating myself from the world, and denying that I had a problem. I didn't have to feel anything. This is the lie that addiction leads you to believe. Just one more hit, and you'll forget you even had problems. Stay here and stay high. He loves you when you're both high. There's no fighting when you're high. Everything is better when you're high. Until it all comes crashing down around you, and you don't even know who you are anymore, and everything that meant anything to you is jeopardized. So you end up in rehab trying to figure out how the hell you got there. And you're forced to face your demons.
So this is me facing one of mine. You hurt me. You walked away and it hurts. I needed you and you weren't there. I blamed myself. I tortured myself wondering why you didn't love me. I've been mad at you for most of my life. I wanted to meet you and tell you these things, but my search for you ended at your obituary in an Orlando newspaper, so I never got the chance. You've been laid to rest, and it's time to let you go. So I forgive you for leaving and not looking back. I thank you for the gift of life, and for teaching me about the kind of parent I wanted to be. I thank God everyday that my kids know how much they mean to me. I thank God that they feel safe coming to me with their problems and insecurities, and that in spite of my two year field trip with cocaine, I have always remained there for them, and that's something they don't question. I've been clean for a year and a half, and I'm fixing the damage I caused. I wish we had had the chance to fix the damage between us, but as that's impossible, I'm just going to say I forgive you and thank you for teaching me by absence.
Emily Ann
