I don't remember exactly when I was orphaned. I know we are all orphaned at some point; recently for some of my friends it has been in the seventh decade of life. The first inkling for me came when I was three or four, standing in front of a picture window in an empty living room wishing someone would come home and take care of me. The second time was the summer I was thirteen, this time sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor crying as I listen to my mother call me a whore. In front of my aunt and uncle while my father stands silently by.
Thirteen year old girls are not easy but mothers of those not quite women can be brutal. The year preceding that summer, my eighth grade year, was especially difficult for both my mother and me. She was turning forty and finding herself back in the work force as a way to steady the income my father had always played fast and loose with. At the same time I stubbornly drew a line and refused to wear the little girl clothes she preferred to buy; twin versions my younger sister, by eight years, was also wearing. I drew the line and she left me out there in no man's land; none of the new income would flow my way for clothing or much else for that matter.
So I began babysitting to earn my own wardrobe, and the sewing I had played at since I was nine was put to use copying skirts other girls bought at the new mall in town. With a new sense of freedom those earnings gave me I took advantage of my mother's absence to range farther afield after school, and along with other girls my age developed an interest in boys. Playing basketball, baseball, meeting at the bowling alley and the occasional movie were new ways to pass the time when not in school. In the summer those activities were augmented by trips to the beach on the army bus provided expressly for that purpose. That bus became a source of independence and we used it to hang out; many fun filled hours were enjoyed as we rode back and forth to the army recreation center. Still in all I was not a bad child.
This particular Saturday I was playing baseball with a group of kids at a field near our house; it was mid morning and we had managed to corral a not too large group and field two teams. It was noteworthy because if there were enough boys the girls would be relegated to the sidelines to watch rather than join in the game. It was 1964 and women's lib was but a phrase in Life magazine; it had no place on the playgrounds of my youth. My Aunt Bobby and Uncle Andy were visiting from Illinois and while in years past I rarely left their side, things had changed over the winter and my uncle had embarrassed me by singing "Peggy Sue" the previous night at a little league game. So I escaped the house bright and early that day.
The game was just getting under way when my parents drove by with my aunt and uncle in tow; my father stopped the car and my mother ordered me home. I was not sure what I had done or why my brother was allowed to stay but I left and, embarrassed once again, returned home. It would be several hours before they came back but before I could say a word my mother tore into me; me and my "little whore friends" and our forays into the nearby woods was the subject of her diatribe. I fiercely defended myself and although in retrospect I know it sounded like sass I didn't care at that point. Horribly embarrassed the damage was done; never again would I derive any pleasure from those family visits. Never again would I feel the same need to please my mother.
As I sat there on that floor, where I am sure I landed partly out of my own drama, all I could think about was how I did not need these people; how I did not need anyone. I knew I was nothing like the people who were raising me and indeed would never, ever, aspire to be anything like them. And while I understood that I could not leave, there was no escaping the hold they had on me, I also knew in that instant that the only way out was education. And that I could, and indeed would, work four more years to get the grades I needed to go to college.
I am not sure how exact those thoughts were in my head at that moment, but the gestalt understanding of what it would take to survive the family, the parents, I had been born to was completely formed at that time. I was orphaned again in the kitchen of that house and it was my own doing.
Almost twenty-five years later when my mother died, followed shortly by my father, I was orphaned for the last time. I had become educated, married well and had two beautiful sons, but the desire to be someone's child never left me. I went away to school but came back time and again seeking a mother and a father. They were not there; not the way I needed them. The visits were short lived but always I came back trying to be the good daughter, giving them the opportunity to be the good parents.
I am not sure we ever stop needing to be someone's child. At some point, in order to achieve some real kind of maturity, we have to become the parent to our own little orphan. Luck was on my side the winter my mother died; it was the right time and place to learn to love the abused little girl I carried inside. It was not easy and it did not happen overnight but I know now that my parents were just orphans themselves, suffering from their own brokenness, and that they had neither the energy nor the skills to heal themselves. They just passed that wounding on to their children. But what I also know is that the greatest gift they gave me was dying young. I do not grieve for those lost years.
The Christmas before my mother died in February we were once again standing in her kitchen and she was telling me about the chest pain from which she was suffering. She knew she needed a cardiac cath but she could not leave my father long enough, trust him enough, to go and have the procedure that would have saved her life. She died two months later of a massive heart attack. My father was drunk when I arrived for the funeral and except for the actual day she was buried he remained drunk until the day he died eighteen months later. It was his drunkenness that forced me to face my demons and enabled me to become the parent to my own child.
It was not easy and I am not sure it is ever finished, this work of raising yourself, but it becomes easier over time and the results are incredibly rewarding. However what I have come to understand is that while being a parent to my own child had to be learned, trying to parent my parents was a job I had assumed early without thought or preparation. So now, even as I find myself healed from those early parental wounds, I realize I am drawn to parent other orphan children. The mother in me cannot stop. And it is not the loving mother but the disapproving mother that often takes over. Because while I am compelled by the orphans staring out of the eyes of friends and lovers I am also frustrated and irritated with them for not being their own good parents.
Forgiveness is the underlying desire of this place I find myself. Forgiving my parents, forgiving myself, forgiving my friends and siblings and lovers. But also seeking the forgiveness of my children for being the imperfect parent I was and am. Because while I have come to understand that all parents are flawed it has been especially difficult for me to accept my own imperfections. I do think my sons and their wives are light years ahead of where I was at their ages, and certainly where my parents were at any age; they understand forgiveness in a way I have only just begun to appreciate. And I, their mother, find myself the beneficiary of that wisdom. Children and parents...the circle of life. Easy to embrace, challenging to hold.
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