The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(19)

We drank. It singed our throats.

*

We were drinking tequila because I was driving from Seattle, where my dad lived, to San Francisco, where my mom and stepdad lived, and she’d decided to join me for the road trip.

When I was two, my mom left. We were living in Seattle, my mom, my dad, and me. And then she left for California. I don’t know for how long.

I don’t know for how long because how long depends on who is telling the story.

In my mom’s story, she was gone just a few days, a few weeks at most, to scope out a new apartment for us to live in. She was leaving my dad, see.

In my dad’s story, she took off and there he was, a big burly bachelor man with a two-year-old baby girl, and did he know how to braid hair? No. And would that become a problem when that girl child became insistent, furious, that she have her hair braided the way her mama braided it? Did she throw screaming tantrums so that the bachelor man had to plead with some coworkers later that day to show him how to braid hair and he spent the afternoon practicing on women in his office, getting tips from the flock of expert braiders? Well, yes.

In my mom’s story, shortly after she arrived in California, she received a letter from my dad. It said, Bye, I’m taking the baby and we’re moving to Canada. He is Canadian, so he can scoot right over and back pretty easily, knows a lot of folks over the border. Not just Canadian, but French-Canadian, and not just that, but Catholic, so he’s related to most people. Anyway, there he went. “It’s not that he really wanted a kid all to himself,” my mom said the first time she told me this story. “It’s just that he knew what would hurt me the most.” She sighed. She’d decided that my college graduation gift was this truth and told me a few weeks before I finished school. She hadn’t told me before, she said, because she wanted to protect the person I believed my dad to be. “Your face could have been on a milk carton. He could have been in prison.”

In my dad’s story, she left to go have an affair with someone she’d known for a long time, someone she might have been having an affair with forever. She was done with my dad. With me. A few weeks before she left, before he knew anything about the leaving or the divorce or any of that, she’d thrown my dad a surprise party. As they were driving there—he didn’t know anything about it—she said she was going to leave him, that she wanted a divorce, wanted out, that she’d be taking off soon. Then they arrived at the party. “Surprise!” everyone shouted as he walked in the door.

I believed his version for a long time. Probably because I didn’t see him much. It was easier to be on his side. Each time we talked on the phone, I pleaded for more pieces of the story, wanted to know the ways she’d wronged us. The stories spooled on. Trying to get me legally removed from him. Taking and taking child support, but never using it on me. Not letting me visit when I was scheduled to visit. Leaving me behind, and then deciding to take me back months later, because she’d been guilted into it. Each piece of information was like a wound I couldn’t stop filling with salt, an itch already scratched open that I did not want to stop digging into.

And I developed this real allergy to her love. By the time I was ten or eleven, when she touched me, it felt like there was a hot searing poker scalding my skin. I felt like my organs were failing a little bit when she’d hug me, like it was a big fake act she was putting on and somehow my body knew the truth and withered in response to her proximity. I didn’t trust her. I didn’t think her love was real, because she’d chosen to walk away from my dad and left him all alone, so sad, and angry. Because she’d been able to walk away from me.

If she didn’t need me, I didn’t need her.

At eight, eleven, fourteen, eighteen, and all the years in between, the more I heard and then embellished in my head, the more deeply I became attached to the story. The more I invested in it being my own story, the clearer it was that the only way to get through life was to be on my own. Me against the world made up of my mom.

When I was a teenager, I spent some time trying to verify truths. Cross-referencing stories, finding outside sources.

What I discovered is that there are even more versions of what happened, who did what, and who was to blame.

So I stopped.

In my own story, I decided that there might be truth somewhere in the middle, and that the two stories could both exist as half fictions, as versions of what each of them felt, of how hurt they were by the other.

What matters most isn’t actually related to any of their truths. They were trying their best, my mom, my dad, and my stepdad. I love them for that.

What matters most is my cruelty.

I don’t love you, I’d told her. I never have, and I never will.

*

It took me so many years, until I was in my early twenties, to figure out that what she wanted from me was love. That she wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe she’d made mistakes, but she’d spent years afterward trying to pour that love on me, trying to make me sure I knew that she loved me—always had, always would. It seems so obvious from a distance. But I figured it out so late.

How do we arrive at our realizations? There wasn’t any sparkling, trumpet-sounding, aha moment of recognition for me, no tidy turning point. Just a gradual understanding, as I became an adult, met more people, saw some of the world, that the person my mom was did not align with the person I had believed her to be.