The Glory of Love

I used to believe my mother just up and moved away. I just knew she didn't want to be my mother anymore. For whatever it was I did wrong, I thought, she just got up one morning, dropped me off, and never came home. She dumped me out at her sister's house that morning. I remember she was dressed in a billowy lavender dress, hair and makeup given careful attention, as usual, and a cinnamon toothpick resting between her pigmented lips. Her reason for having to go, she said, was a business meeting in Oklahoma City. Back then, she was 28 and we lived what is often misconstrued as "the good life." We'd spend time at Cocoa Beach, where she had access to a beachfront condominium on a fairly secluded beach, save for the neighbors. We'd visited Disney World and stayed in the Contemporary Resort there. While the outside didn't amount to much, inside lay a whole other world. That monorail, suave and bullet-like, glided around that place, noiseless. A beautifully high ceiling for almost as far as you ever wanted to look. Yes, we visited Boston, Mount Rushmore, Galveston, Padre Island, parts of Mexico, and everywhere in between. Dallas, Houston. Kansas City. Chicago, but only once, and she swore to Pete (whomever that was) she would not ever go back there. She would rent a convertible at the airport when we landed, and we'd take it from there. Days were spent apart, and I would usually be left with a sitter someone she knew in the area had scrawled the name and number of on a pastel Post-It, the numbers cryptic and offputting, like a clue found in a box of Cracker Jacks. At the end of her day, we took Polaroids in photo booths, swam constantly, dined in some of the fanciest restaurants imaginable. Her, with her perfect white teeth and unknowing, wide-set eyes, and me with freckles sprinkled across my face, gapped teeth and pageboy haircut, not very different than any other 7-year-old little girl in the early 80s. We had it all, she and I, just like Bogie and Bacall.

Being a mom was obviously a very stressful undertaking for her. She spent her days in her office in Sapulpa, where she had a secretary named Brenda who had both a husband and a fluffy gray cat waiting on her back at home, and an open area with a wide table and high-backed chairs for investor meetings. There was a Xerox machine in there, too, and I would spend my time raising the top flap to copy my hand a thousand times, bored. I would quick! make a copy and then, paper still hot from all that copy machine commotion, I'd put the page immediately to my face and take a big whiff of that glorious, expensive black ink. She just let me do it, too. Not once did she complain about wasting toner or paper or minutes. Not once! She would talk on the phone a lot, speaking with a fair amount of authority and only a hint of reason. Sometimes I would hear her laugh and look around the corner to see just what was so funny. She'd do it again, only then she would lean her head back as she was laughing. She never did laugh like that with me, and I never knew why. The things I would hear her say, well, it was all Greek to me. I certainly understood nothing about rigs, drilling, or why I was left in the car for extended periods of time outside a metro Love's with a coloring book and stuffed animals propped up all around me in the back seat. She had her company, and in these plush friends, I had mine. That time at Love's, though, she'd returned to the car looking worried and beautiful, and we drove home. It was nightfall by the time we got there, and I never asked her any questions. Indeed, I was unsure I wanted to know the answers. I tried to keep quiet, I absolutely did. I guess it wasn't enough, though.

Through the years, I held onto different ideas about what REALLY happened to her. I did not want to believe she was dead and gone forever, so I protected myself by daydreaming about the day she would come back for me. It gave me hope, you see. One of my favorite fantasies involved her coming back for me when I got older, because that was when she knew that being a mother would be easier. I figured maybe she just wanted someone else to do all the hard work, maybe manage all the chaos that came naturally with having a child. Let somebody else do it, and then she would want me back, right after someone else explained to me the birds and the bees, and broke the news about Santa Claus and the Easter bunny. Oh, in my mind she was alive, and she was only living 20 minutes away. I just knew she knew all the details of my life, though. I imagined her standing back, watching me from afar while I was playing at the park, and so every time I went to the park, my eyes would scan the fence, the picnic area. I looked for her. I sure did. How could I not? She was my mother, the very person who gave me life. She just could not be gone from my life, just like that. I imagined at my school plays, she would show up and just watch from underneath the red EXIT sign, and then quietly retreat back to her immaculate, quiet, and kid-free personal space. Onstage, I would search for her face out in the crowd of parents, overweight older siblings, and screaming babies. Alas, she never surfaced. Never. But I never stopped looking.

My favorite scenario was one that was bound to happen when I was eating Lucky Charms with a too-big spoon, sitting at my GrandMaud's cluttered 50s-era Duncan Phyfe dining table. I would be reading the side of the cereal box, and ding! would sound the doorbell. I would make my way to that heavy wooden slab and reach for the golden knob that had begun to erode from years of uncareful contact. Opening the door to reveal her would be the clencher, the very detail I dreamed up that would always give me a catch in my throat: There she would be before me, back turned, looking out at the rented convertible parked at the bottom of that long flight of concrete steps.

Turning my head slightly to the right, "Mommy? Is it really you?"

Slowly, she turned toward me. She was wearing dark brown dress pants and a red camp shirt made of linen. Red, the color of power! What had she been thinking?

"Hey, baby. I'm back. Let's go home now." She held out her hand and made a gesture with her head toward the car down front.

I would run to her, bury my face in her tummy and kid-hug her waist. She smelled of Gloria Vanderbilt and cinnamon. Familiarity reigned again. We would lock hands, mine chubby and kiddish and hers, delicate and small. We would climb into the car and she'd take me back home to my princess canopy and stereo system, but only this time all my furniture would be white wicker.

My mother. My mother had come back for me! My wildest dream had come true. This thought was a dangerous one, but I let it have me like quicksand. It was my saving grace some days, and gave me a great amount of peace to think she was always nearby. A mother, once removed. She had only left me so that I could benefit from learning the toughest lesson in life early enough so that I would be able to overcome everything else hard in life that I encountered. After all, being without a parent from such an early age was definitely hard to top--everything else would be just gravy, easy, and so I would be able to tackle all of it with a "can't break me" attitude. It was boot camp for real life: If you can handle THIS, then you can handle ANYTHING. Why, I was more prepared than a Boy Scout! Maybe I couldn't tie a slipknot, but by age 8, I could tell you everything you wanted to know about sorting whites from colors and what to do if someone kidnapped you away from your family. Plus, I could order for myself at any restaurant I went to. See? Prepared for real life, indeed. When you lose a parent at a tender age like this, all the other stuff you come up against is merely bonus points in a game of Pac Man. Eat 'em up and get on with it, making sure to avoid the ghosts in pursuit of that smidgen of hope you have left inside of you. You can't have the good without the bad, and you most certainly cannot have the love without the loss. A tradeoff. In a sense, it was my theory that my mommy had separated herself from me so that her own brokenness could not touch me. A selfless sacrifice, like giving a baby up for adoption. Like letting your husband have the last Oreo in the place because his happiness and satisfaction is more important to you than than your midnight sweet tooth. It's that moment you feel so much love for something else that you would do anything to keep it innocent and pure and precious, even if that meant giving it over to another for safekeeping. That's true love, you see. That's the glory of love.