My Mom and I used to go to open houses for fun. We
would walk through empty bedrooms with my little brother and play at asking
just enough questions to make the realtor think we might actually be
interested. We would plot out which room was whose and where the kitchen table
would go. I'd ask the realtor if there was a pool and then I would shake my
head disapprovingly. There was never a pool.
We would collect fliers for homes we couldn't
afford. She would pull over to the side of the road and have me run out to grab
the usually damp piece of paper from a container hung on a splintered wooden
post. She would look at it carefully, like she could actually consider it. I
knew that we weren't moving into any of those homes. But somewhere there was
always the hope.
I don't remember ever believing in magic or Santa or
fairy tales. Reality always took up too much space. But there was hope. Perhaps
it was just an endless faith in my mother. I thought, yeah, we're not gonna
have that now....but someday. Someday we'll do it. So we might as well start
looking.
By the time I was 10 I moved about 14 times. Give or
take. Luckily I mostly bounced back and forth between the same areas so I only
had to change schools 4 or 5 times. Sometimes I lived with my Mom, sometimes with
my Grandparents. Sometimes we all lived together. Sometimes I was in foster
care.
When it was just my mom and I we would live in
apartments or condos. We would move when she couldn't pay rent or a dealer was
looking for her or after the court mandated it so she could regain custody of
me.
We made coffee tables out of cardboard boxes, milk
crates and contact paper. We shared a room or we didn't. I don't remember ever
feeling tied to a place. Somehow it just felt like an adventure, a life. Maybe
I even felt lucky. Lucky that I wasn't stuck in the same shitty school all the
time. Lucky that I had beds in different places. Lucky to have just one friend
waiting for me down the street at my Grandparents.
We didn't start looking at homes until after I had
made the big move from Southern California to Ohio. My Grandparents had started
going to Al-Anon. They came to realize that tough love was the only love they
had left to give a child who hurt them, stole from them and was not so slowly
destroying herself. My Grandpa grew up in a small Ohio town and wanted to
return. This meant deciding to move me and my new baby brother across the
country. They told my mom that we were leaving and suggested that she finally
stick to one of the many rehab facilities they'd checked her into. If she
didn't then she would have no contact with me or my brother again. If she did
then she would be welcome to move to Ohio and live with us after being clean
for at least 3 months.
We said goodbye in a Denny's parking lot. It was dark
outside, probably about 5 in the morning. I don't think we even ate breakfast
first. And I don't remember if I cried. After all, in my 10 year old brain my
mom was no longer a free spirit or a hard worker, the two narratives I'd used
to explain our constant moving and her absence. She was just a drug addict.
6 months later she was waiting for me in my driveway
after school. My Grandparents didn't tell me she was coming. The story is that
they wanted it to be a surprise. Really I just think they wanted to make sure
she showed up first. She moved into my room with me. My trust in her was broken
so I made her sleep on the floor.
6 months after that my Grandparents moved into their
own house about a mile away from us. My mom, brother and I remained in the
small brick house on one of the two main roads in town. We listened as the
trains rushed by on the tracks across the street. The town was divided by those
tracks. There really was a right and wrong side. We lived on the wrong side.
Still the wrong side there was a hundred times better than the wrong side of
San Diego or any other California city I'd lived in.
It was the first time I lived with my mom when she
was clean. Consistently clean, I mean. I hated it. I hated it because her
effort to step up and be a parent made it clear that I’d never had one before.
Her desire to build a home made me realize that maybe that was something I was
supposed to want all along. Something that could have been possible but was
taken from me. My pre-teen self wrestled with wanting to have this new fairy
tale she tried to present and knowing that anything I'd ever clung to before
eventually disappeared. So there was no use in pretending.
But resenting my mother, actively hating her, was
exhausting. So I tried. I allowed my faith in her to remain intact. I treasured
our nighttime drives on the right side of the tracks. That was when we could
collect fliers and let ourselves dream like we'd never been torn apart. We
would pull up quiet in front of beautiful houses and whisper to each other about
what life might be like if we lived there. We would write new versions of
ourselves and took pleasure in playing those roles when we walked the halls of
the home the following Sunday during it's open house.
A few years later we moved again. This time to the
right side of the tracks. My mom re-married and her new husband was not
accustomed to wrong side living. So they moved into a two story home on a
street with a cul-de-sac. It even had a pool. But it was not the dream home I’d
been waiting for. By that time I hardly lived at home at all. I stayed with
friends, slept in my car, stayed at my Grandparents, kept myself busy with work
and a dozen or so after school activities.
Faith is a layered thing. My faith in my mother was
never lost. I knew she would get what she wanted. I believed in her power. But
as the years went by I grew to understand her limitations as well. I knew she
would not know how to hold her new fantasy and my old reality. Not at the same time. So I moved on
from her. I’ve watched 4 new siblings grow up in that house. In 11 years they’ve
never moved. Not once. They have a pool and a swing set in the backyard. They
play softball and soccer with the other kids in the neighborhood. They have a
dog and pet rabbit. I live 2,500 miles away.
This Friday I will move out of the home I’ve lived
in for the past 4 years. That is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere in my
entire life. I’ve lived with 2 good friends who are sweet and sane and steady.
The room is small, small enough to touch both walls if I stuck my arms out. But
it was mine. And for a time it was my dream. Living 3 stories up on Haight
Street in San Francisco felt like success.
But now I am ready for something new. Ready for more
space to grow. To dream. To build a future and a different kind of family. Something
slower and sweeter. Something that isn’t trying to distract me from what I’m
missing. So this Friday I’m moving into a new home in Oakland. I’ll live in a
studio in the backyard. I’ll have a large bedroom all my own, a bathroom, a
mini kitchen. And I’ll still be connected to the larger house with its porch
swing and gentle community. And just outside my door, right beside my breakfast
nook, is the pool.
In many ways my mother and I are nothing like. But
in many ways we are. And maybe this next step is a step towards better
understanding my own power now. A
power worth having faith in. A fantasy that might still come true.
