When I was eleven, my mom promised she would take me to the brand new zoo that had opened thirty minutes from our house. I spent the entire night before picking out the perfect outfit and researching the different exhibits I wanted to visit. Morning eventually rolled around and I waited for her to come home early from work. She didn’t show up until seven o’clock that night.
She stumbled into the house, smelling faintly like cheap alcohol and it took her a few minutes to notice me sitting on the couch watching her. She smiled at me and climbed the stairs to the bedroom she shared with my dad. I followed her and stood in the doorway. I dropped the backpack I had filled with homemade snacks and any necessities we might have needed at the zoo and left it there.
A half an hour later, she knocked on my bedroom door. She walked in, my backpack dangling from one of her arms. She sat down on the edge of my bed and sighed. “You promised,” I remember saying to her, only to be answered with another deep sigh.
As she left the room, she turned and quoted her favorite book, Alice in Wonderland. “I can’t go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
The quote didn’t resonate with me much, so I find it odd that Lewis Carroll’s words are swimming around in my brain as I watch my mother pack her car to leave us.
Mom has been threatening to leave for years. She thought she was doing it in private, during times when only my father could hear her, but the house had ears and so did I.
My sister, Paige, tries to pull my brother and me away from the window; with no luck. Deep down I know seeing this will only hurt me further, but I can’t help but think that maybe if my mom looked up at my window one last time and saw us, she’d be inclined to stay.
She doesn’t look up, though. She snaps at my father for the last time and climbs into her old, beat up blue Camry. My dad’s holding something in his hands, but whips it at the car as she pulls out of the driveway. “Mom’s ring,” Paige mutters. I don’t know how she knows that for sure, but Paige isn’t the type to make assumptions. She likes to know the cold, hard facts before saying anything about a situation. She’s always been like that.
“Lennon, where’s she going?” my fourteen year old brother Dylan asks me, stepping away from my window and sitting down on my bed instead. I shrug, because although I’ve spent seventeen years with the woman, I don’t really know my mom.
Paige excuses herself to go talk to dad, even though I doubt he wants Paige to start spouting out all the possible physiological reasons mom left. She’s starting doing that since she went away to college last year to get her degree in psychology. If he and I are anything alike, he’s probably wishing he hadn’t spent all the money just so Paige could become a bigger know-it-all.
Dylan disappears into his own room. As he’s leaving, he tries to cover up a sob with an aggressive cough. He’s too proud to cry in front of anyone. I’m now alone in my room, still standing next to the window. I think to myself that if this was a movie, my mom would realize a few miles down the road what she’s leaving behind and turn around. At first, I wish she would, but then as the anger sets in I know that if she did, in fact, turn around no one would be waiting with open arms.
We’ve never been a particularly close family. My dad, Michael Hastings, works as a journalist for the local newspaper and is interminably unhappy. He always wanted to write a novel, but my mom didn’t work so he needed a way to support the family. Being a troubled author with incurable writers block didn’t pay the electric bill. My mom wanted to be an actress. Her mother, my grandma, always told us stories about mom in dance classes and acting courses. She’d say, “That Annie, she was destined for something great.” According to my mom, ‘something great’ didn’t mean popping out three kids and settling down in northern Philly.
My mom actually went to college for acting. She made it all the way to last semester of senior year before she got pregnant with Paige. She was able to graduate, but now her degree just hung on the living room wall, unused. Secretly I think my mom blamed us for her lack of success, which is probably why Paige feels the constant need to be perfect.
The Lewis Carroll quote makes its way back into my mind and I wonder why mom liked it so much. Maybe because it was an easy excuse for her actions. She was a different person yesterday, today will be better. Today she will pick herself up and fulfill her many promises.
But today she wasn’t better. Today she left.
