So Far Away

'What have I done?' I ask myself as I sit  here and look around at my life.  This question is not an easy one, either.  Perhaps I am afraid of the emotions and the answers I feel creeping up the back of my neck like fur on a spooked dog's scruff.  

My oldest, Molly, was invited to a friend's house this weekend for an overnight.  She and Amelia have been friends since Mrs. Eaton's class, when Molly was sent to first grade several Januaries ago.  Amelia  immediately took Molly under her studious and sometimes-solemn tutelage.  Now that it is Sunday night and we are preparing for the week ahead, the twins are asleep and Molly comes downstairs.  I am sitting in an armchair, my back to the door, but I sense that someone is near and so I look over my left shoulder, the very shoulder I always throw salt over when some spills out of the shaker with the too-big holes.  I see that she has been crying.

"Molly, what is it?"  I ask, putting my pen and notebook down.  I get up and walk behind the chair to join her in the middle of this room.  

"It's just...I just miss Amelia."  My poor baby.  I reach out my arms to embrace her, and she puts her ear to my heart.  She smells of lavender shampoo and my mind's eye immediately beholds my mother.

"I know you miss her, sweetheart," I start.  "I'm so sorry."  Her tears are falling.  I cup my hand to her crown and kiss her on the top of her head genuinely.  After a few moments she wriggles free and looks into my green eyes from the other side of her baby blues.

"I miss her because we've been together since first grade, it was just me and Amelia...and now that I'm in a new school I've even met another Amelia, Amelia Forrester, you know, and she's great and all, but it's just not the same..."  More tears.  I reach to her with one finger and draw her hair back out of her eyes.

"I know it's tough right now, baby. I'm really, really sorry."  And I am.

Molly and I are so much alike that sometimes it seems surreal.  She feels things BIG, and normally puts enormous effort into things that mean a lot to her.  Sports she is trying to learn, competitions she is striving to win, awards she wants and fairly deserves.  Relationships are no different.  I have watched her and listened to her, I mean really listened to her, and there is so much wisdom in her words usually.  Her golden hair is shiny under this lighting, and I immediately notice and cling to this as a beacon of hope that this sadness will work itself out of her, and in the right manner, too.  

"Can you maybe text her and tell her again what a good time you had at her house this weekend?"  I tilt my head slightly to the right as I ask, trying to squeeze into the little door of her heart.

She looks down at the gray carpet, then back up again. Her bobbed haircut falls perfectly just past her little chin.  "I can, but her phone turns off at eight so she won't get it until morning."  

"Well, then, what a nice surprise for her to wake up to," I offer.

"I guess so." Molly shrugs.  It isn't rude, the way she does this.  What it is, is indifference.  Detachment.  

"Molly, mommy's sorry she moved you to a different school.  I didn't realize how apart from your friends you would feel.  Please forgive me."  My tears are big now, too, and now we are the twins.  

"It's...okay...I just feel like I should fit in better than I do there.  I don't have as many friends as I had at Nowata, and that's really hard for me."  My girl.  Always honest.  

I hug her tightly again, only this time just one arm reaches up to hug me back while the other  dangles helplessly at her side.  Defeat.  

"I understand how you must feel.  Missing someone you love is hard, even if they are just across town," I say.  She acknowledges this with a hard swallow, one that I can feel clear through to the center of my chest.  Loneliness knows lonesome.  In fact, they are allies.  

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When we last dropped Joe at his hotel in Kansas City, I cried nearly the entire way home wishing he would have cancelled his flight the next day so that he could come back with us, and for good.  I had it all scripted out in my mind, too, but obviously this is not the way it happened.  There was no dramatic Hollywood grandeur of him chasing after my car, waving wildly and calling us, "Elizabeth!  Wait!  I'm coming with you!" Then, in this little thought sequence of mine, I punch reflexively on the brakes.  The kids squeal in both disbelief and delight and pile out of the car.  We rush him.  The five of us are smiling big and it is easy; natural, just like it has always been with this man.  

And tonight, studying the bare walls of this apartment and the stark and ugly way in which the cords of the electronics jut out from the outlets in the wall, I realize once again that I have single-handedly managed to rock my kids' world again.  First, the move out of their birth home, the only home they had ever known.  Then, another move for six months into a house that was in familiar territory but still just as new to us, and into an apartment with an upstairs just for them.  And, now, this.  A new school.  This mother has caused her own children to undergo four major life stressors over this past one year.  I lose my breath when I think of it.  

What exactly have I done to them?  How will these decisions I have made affect them in the long run?  I envision runaway teenagers with stringy hair and dirty backpacks that hold a favorite stuffed animal alongside a few changes of clothes, hard drug use and abuse, dropouts, promiscuity, falling into a cycle of domestic abuse simply to adhere to the odd satisfaction of predictable behavior.  Again, I am overthinking this situation and I recognize that, but the anxious person inside of me whispers that no matter what happens in their futures it is because I have made these decisions for us.  It is almost too painful to bear, too, when I only wanted a better life and more happiness for all of us to begin with.  What if all of this blows up in my face?  What if my kids were better off staying put there?

I feel I should clarify I do not miss our "old life," the one in which my kids' dad and I fought and argued hard and constantly.  I do not miss any of that.

What I DO miss is looking at my children's faces and seeing the security they felt before everything became so intense.  They had parents who tried to eat dinner at the table with them.  They had parents who tried their bests to keep them learning, reading to them and trying to enrich their lives with meaningful moments and budget-friendly road trips now and again to fun museums.  They had a mommy and a daddy who both worked and whom they could count on to provide for their needs and some of their wants.  At first, they had a special place to color at the kitchen table, but then when things became chaotic and the fighting intensified, keeping the Crayolas confined to one room and corralling the kids to stay in their chairs for the time it took to draw pictures became just one more thing we felt we had to battle.  So we got lax.  Pretty soon, a box of 64-count sticks of colored wax dwindled to 57...then 41...then, bam, 27!  The next week, I would be putting the couches on their backs to vacuum underneath and would find the many random crayons there.  A telltale sign of how life was going for us, it was a messy oil spill nobody had the energy or the desire to clean up because it would be too hard to make everything right and clean again.  To keep the peace where we could, we neither one offered much resistance to boundaries such as these anymore, keeping the art supplies in the kitchen.  Not long afterward, I found graffiti in thick black Sharpie scrawled across the wall, hoping to go unnoticed.  In this manner, life truly did imitate art.  But I do miss that safety my kids had when we were all in one place.  

Today at a birthday party for the twins' friend, Samuel, I was asked about my relationship with Joe.  I explained it as best I could.  My friend, Kelly, who also knows the kids well from school in Nowata, interjected and told me she could see my face light up when I talk about him.  Oh, wow, I just miss him so much, I whispered to Kelly.  Here we have known each other for fourteen or fifteen years, only I met Todd at some point early on and, well, my clock was ticking.  I did not get the vibe that Joe wanted the same things, and so I introduced him to a coworker and former friend of mine at the time.  And here it is, fourteen or fifteen years later, and he is not yet ready to move here from over 1,000 miles away.  I try to understand, I really do, but just like Molly and her sentiments about her best good friend Amelia it just is not the same here without him.  Joe brings joy into our home.  He brings laughter.  He puts his telephone down and looks at us while we are speaking.  We are all intrigued by his travels, his willingness to volunteer in areas not many others would, his generosity with his friends.  I know nobody is perfect and Joe knows this, too, but he seems to want to love us without an agenda.  He takes things as they come.  He gets down in the floor and on the kids' level and then rises up and meets me at mine, all while juggling something to read and a cup of coffee.

I miss all of this and more when he is so far away.  And while I know I would rather he be here with us, I feel he will do what he needs to do when he is ready to do it, and when it happens that way it will be him being true to what he wants rather than acting out of a false sense of obligation or feeling depended upon to fill in somewhere that he may not yet quite be ready to.