Leaving Abandonment Behind

I’ve been thinking about how healing happens. What it takes to stop telling the story of how awful it was, what a horrible mother I had. And the reason I’ve been thinking about this is because I seem to be circling around the spiral of mother-wound stories. Again. I thought I was done with it. I thought writing LOVE, FINALLY and the depths to which I plummeted and the heights to which I soared in the process meant that after seventy-five years of wearing the badge of what a neglectful, narcissistic, abusive mother I had, I’d forgiven her which really meant I’d forgiven myself for concluding that I was the kind of a girl a mother couldn’t love. Might as well not exist.

(Note: when I write these sentences, they sound, as David Sedaris says, “dramastic”—a word he made up that is a combination of drastic and dramatic. And it’s true, there was a lot of drama in my family and it was often drastic but even when these feelings and patterns surface now, there is the awareness that I am snagged. And when there is awareness, there is witnessing, a subtle disengagement from what I am aware of. There is also a nascent willingness to do those damn Six Steps. Because, although I forget this sometimes, more than wanting to be a candidate vying for the worst mother in the world (and if you read LOVE, FINALLY, which I hope you did and if you didn’t, why not, you will remember that I googled worst mother in the world and found that Charles Manson’s mother traded him for a can of beer which I realized was a worse offense than my mother calling me fat), I want to be free from identifying myself by my history). By the way, those Six Steps are the most brilliant tool I know to unwind any wound and they are part of what we will practice in my September retreat. Come join me.

Which brings me to the piece about healing I want to share with you today. I wrote it for When Food is Love, which was my first book in which I dared to write about my mother and how it affected my relationship with Matt. I didn’t have The Six Steps then. I didn’t realize that it was possible to lighten and dissipate the decisions I’d made about myself—but I knew that healing was a process. And I know it still is:

In January of last year, Matt and I flew into Phoenix. While he was waiting for the luggage to arrive, I walked over to the American Airlines desk to purchase a ticket for another trip. The line was long; I waited for half an hour. Matt and I had not been specific about who would meet whom and where we would meet. After my business was done, I began waiting for Matt to show up. Fifteen minutes passed, twenty, thirty minutes. This was the story I told myself: “He forgot about me. He left the airport. I don’t know the name of the hotel we are staying in, or even the city. Maybe it’s not Phoenix, maybe it’s Scottsdale. No problem. I’ll just take a cab to an airport hotel, keep calling my answering machine to see if he calls, and we’ll connect sometime this evening. If we don’t, it doesn’t matter, I’m flying out tomorrow anyway.” Doesn’t matter? My heart was racing. I was bewildered that Matt had left without looking for me, but I did what I had done as a child: I figured out how to care for myself and pretended none of it mattered. That decided, it occurred to me to page him on the white courtesy phone as a last effort to find him. He showed up at the American Airlines desk within three minutes.

“I thought you forgot about me and left the airport.”

“You what?”

“I thought you forgot about me.”

“You’re kidding, aren’t you? I live with you, sleep with you, talk to you every day of my life—and I am schlepping thirteen pieces of your luggage. How could I forget about you? I’ve been waiting for you by the luggage counter for an hour and fifteen minutes.”

“Oh.”

I am an abandonment person. Three years ago, I stopped talking to Matt when he was about to leave on a trip. Then we created a “going-away” ritual in which we sat with each other for half hour before he left and talked about our feelings. Mine were always the same: I told him that if he loved me, he wouldn’t leave me, and that if he was leaving me, he couldn’t love me, and if he didn’t love me, I didn’t want to make myself vulnerable and love him. He told me that he wasn’t my mother or my father, he told me that he was coming back in two days, he told me he loved me. The ritual worked for about a year. Then my fears caved in and I started creating distance when he returned.

Wounds are never permanently erased. Being an abandonment person changes from year to year, depending on how conscious I am about that piece of myself. How much I am willing to risk, how patient I am willing to be, how much mercy I can give to the part of me that is forever frightened of being left. The way I work with my fear of abandonment shapes the curves and colors of my life the way a river shapes a canyon wall.

Healing is about opening our hearts, not closing them. It is about softening the places in us that won’t let love in. Healing is a process. It is about rocking back and forth between the abuse of the past and the fullness of the present and being in the present more and more of the time. It is rocking that creates the healing, not staying in one place or another. The purpose of healing is not to be forever happy; that is impossible. The purpose of healing is to be awake. And to live while you are alive instead of dying while you are alive. Healing is about being broken and whole at the same time.

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