My relationship to abandonment is like economists’ relationship to recessions: I always see it lurking around the corner, even when it’s nowhere in sight. Of course, unlike economists and recessions, my actions have a direct relationship to whether abandonment actually/eventually occurs, and there’s an iterative, dynamic process in which my reaction to perceived abandonment leads to actions which, in turn, make abandonment all the more likely.
I respond to perceived abandonment with a desperate, cling-y neediness that’s out of keeping with my general way of being. I whine. I moan. I complain. It’s unsighly. Undesirable. Un-hot.
And it takes… nothing… for me to perceive abandonment. A text unanswered for a few hours. A question un-responded to. A minimally misattunded response to something I’ve said or done.
It doesn’t take me long, generally, to make meaning of such a situation: when Marina would disappear on a camping trip with W, it’s no wonder I felt abandoned; I was. But when she didn’t – when any woman doesn’t – respond to a text promptly? Well, then, it’s not “abandonment” that I’m experiencing. It’s fear. [Note to self: write a post or three on how “abandonment” isn’t a feeling, any more than is “rejection.” Those are verbs that locate me as the object of another’s actions; the feelings associated with those experiences, the subjective experiences associated with those feelings, are what I really fear; not the verbs, the actions, themselves.]
In that latter circumstance – an unanswered text, a text not responded to as quickly as I might hope – I’m being reminded of my childhood experience of my mother‘s abandonment of me. That abandonment – the template for all others – was complicated. She didn’t, actually, leave my life at all, even though it felt to me as if she was doing so.
When I was four, she left the home in which we had lived, and, from then on, I was to see her, essentially, on weekends.
When I was five, there was a brief period when my father and I lived 3,000 miles from my mom, and when (although my father tells me this memory is distorted by time and by my age), I wasn’t sure if my mother ever would return.
When I was ten, my parents had a low-key custody fight; my mother, somehow, lost. In spite of my father’s homosexuality. Somehow, I think I knew that this was a sort of abandonment, as well, that, had she really wanted me, she would have won custody of me.
And then, when I was nineteen, my mom died – the ultimate abandonment.
No wonder I’m sensitive to perceived abandonment.
As I grow older, as I get more experienced, I’m better able to remember – in (or at least really close to) the moment – that often, when I’m feeling all the sensations and emotions I associate with abandonment, what’s happening is something more akin to a memory than to a contemporary experience. In those moments, I often find it paradoxically soothing to revisit the memories I have of my mother’s disappearance: turns out, doing that causes me less pain, both in terms of quantity and acuteness – than does (unconsciously) using my contemporary experiences to revisit, to remember the feelings associated with that experience.
Your life experience is difficult. Hence the fears.
Our mothers are essential to our self-worth, our way of viewing the world, feelings of safety and also creating the feeling no matter where we go, we always have a home.
It is unfortunate that you had your time with her truncated. But none of it was your doing.
Your blog is interesting! You write good!