The Motherless Muse

“Not to take one’s own suffering seriously, to make light of it, or even laugh at it, is considered good manners in our culture… Many people are proud of their lack of insensitivity toward their own fate and above all their own childhood.”
~Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge

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I lost my parents when I was 19. It wasn’t a car accident or a plane crash, it was something much simpler.

That year I researched the effect of divorce on children, a relatively new field in the early 80′s; and  I presented my findings to my sophomore psychology class, repeating what the researchers said (instead of what I was feeling): Divorce is hardest on the youngest children; older children cope well with the loss.

Since I’d long relied upon my thoughts, instead of feelings, I put my focus on my younger siblings whose needs were greater than mine. I became the guardian of what remained of our family: our history, our traditions, our memories.

My parents moved on- if not physically, emotionally; reinvesting their lives in new relationships–new loves, new family, and abruptly turning their backs on what came before.

Thus my siblings and I were left in what amounted to a No Man’s Land, highlighted on that first Easter Sunday in the year following their divorce; when each thought the other planned to have the kids for dinner, or perhaps didn’t think of it at all.

We did the divorce-kid shuffle that morning: waking at Mom’s for an Easter Egg hunt and then heading over to Dad’s for a late morning brunch. Lucky for them, I did all the driving so they could avoid any contact.

In the afternoon, our father sent us on our way, so that he could rush over to his prospective in-laws for dinner.  We arrived back at home to an empty house. There was no ham in the oven, no Parker rolls, no applesauce with cinnamon, no mash potatoes and peas that our father once forced us to combine at the holiday table.

Somehow, we had been forgotten–all six of us. We wandered around the house aimlessly, wondering what we should do. I searched the refrigerator and cupboards for something to approximate an Easter dinner, but came up empty.

The “babies” (who were now actually toddlers) searched the house for “Mommy”, while the middle two fought over candy.

My second-in-command, at the tender age of 16, offered to shoot us all with the toy gun she had pointed at her heart.

I called my mother at her future in-laws house, and she quickly abandoned her dinner there, arriving home with frozen chicken from the convenience store.

Things didn’t go well for my mother in her second marriage–she had two more children–and her husband, twenty years her junior, was unfaithful.

Our father fared better, at least on the outside. He married a tall, attractive OR nurse (he was a surgeon), and began the “jet set” life he had never embraced with our petite, down-to-earth mother.

Right away, however, there were fireworks between his new flame and his oldest daughters. And once married, our stepmother vowed that she would never let any of us come between them.

These plans were foiled when our own mother began drinking, and the youngest four children moved into my father’s condo, making him a full-time parent instead of an occasional weekend one.  Soon after his wedding, a mansion was built the bay, and my siblings were swallowed up into a new life without the rest of us.

With the family fabric further frayed, I took on the crusade of knitting us back together at great odds–two different households, myself off at school, and the second-in-charge, married and expecting after two weeks at college.

My stepmother worked to do the opposite. Although, at the time, I did not grasp the concept of “Alpha Female”, she was most certainly asserting her place.

-I was to knock before entering her home. I was not to come there with friends, uninvited. I was not included in special family celebrations–my dad’s birthday for instance.

-I was no longer asked along on family vacations. There was no room set aside for me in the new house, not a bed, or any form of welcome, not even a photo on the wall.

-And I no longer enjoyed free reign over my youngest siblings who I had practically raised, and who had suddenly become exclusively hers. I would need to make an appointment to “have” them for an outing, scheduled well in advance, subject to gross delays and sudden, heart-breaking, cancellations.

-Finally, she made it clear that she saw no need for my sisters to spend time with what she dismissed as their “half” siblings.

A decade of anguish ensued as I watched everything I knew and loved slip from my hands. My mother, hardly able to hold together the new life she had created, was reluctant to insist on visitation and in self-pity preferred to let her daughters enjoy their new, “richer,” lives in coordinating Gap outfits and matching pigtails.

We all grew up. Even the “babies” did, finally escaping the tyranny of the mansion, even though there were moments when it felt like their time would never come.

Funny, that once married, my stepmother refused to accept that I kept name. Maybe she didn’t want to share it with me. I always thought it would have made more sense for my father to have shared hers. He had so little to do with us after the divorce–always following my stepmother’s lead and enjoying life’s special occasions with her family and friends.

To his credit perhaps, he did try to include us now and then. “Why don’t you join us,” he’d say, somewhat feebly, as if he remembered that we had once been connected, but couldn’t remember how. It seemed to pain him to recall his former life with us, and so it felt easier, for all of us, not to try.

For years, it felt impossible to reach him. Letters or presents sent were never received, and he was rarely available to come to the phone. Our stepmother would answer and we could never quite figure how to circumvent her. He was busy. They had important, prestigious lives, and we were the reminder of the children they would never have together, a fact of which my father regularly reminded us since he had a vasectomy while married to our mother.

We were also in some strange way held accountable for my mother’s shameless relationship with a younger man, and for the new half-siblings we loved, but were supposed to eschew.

It’s pathetic to admit, but during those years we untinentionally formed an underground hotline on our father. If one of us were to discover him alone, either by phone or in person, we would notify the others immediately, so that they too could grasp at his attention.

“Hey, she’s at the mall for the day,” we’d whisper to each other on the phone, or “She’s at the gym for the morning. Dad’s here at the office, alone.”

Occasionally there would times, even when she was there, that he’d notice us as his children, and we would relish in his fatherly affection for one bright moment; but it was always followed by an awkwardness, as if he was embarrassed to love us in the presence of his wife–as if we were his exes instead of daughters.

It’s been twenty years since this time, and I still feel the pain of my parents’ separation, and the loss of our family. It’s as if we were once held in a beautiful blanket, with each parent holding two corners, only to be carelessly dropped.

We’ve each woven new blankets, my siblings and I–with each other, as we gathered around our mother as she died, and within our own families, who themselves have suffered some of the ravages of infidelity and separation. As parents, I think we each hold onto a little too tightly to our corners of love and responsibility–not wanting our children to plummet to the ground like we did so long ago.

There has been healing for me–for all of us–for sure, but our bottoms are still sore from that fall.

At forty years old, I’m ready to give it all up–all this tight holding–but I am afraid; if I let go, will we have ever existed?

Kelly Salasin, 2004