“You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.” ~Maya Angelou
My mother left when I was five. Dad told me that for a little while I stopped talking, which is hard to imagine because now I never shut up.
Apparently, I disappeared into myself. The doctors called it selective mutism. Two years later, my father’s second wife, Trish, would try to hug me, but I froze, arms pinned to my side, rigid against her affection.
When I was older and I asked Dad what happened, he said he and Mom had been having problems, so she went on a bird-watching cruise to the Seychelles. During a stopover, she met a rugged, bearded, successful world wildlife photographer in the lobby of an African hotel. Frank and Patricia fell in love and immediately left their spouses and kids.
In time, my mother became a talented photographer in her own right. She and Frank traveled continents to capture award-winning photos of animals for National Geographic and the like. Together, they published beautiful coffee table books.
In 2004, both Patricia and Frank died within a month of each other. Frank from cancer, Patricia in a fiery car crash. My sister told me state troopers found a blood-stained snapshot of all five kids inside Patricia’s wallet. The picture was of my three brothers she’d had with my father and my sister and me, who she adopted as babies from two different moms, years after she got her tubes tied.
“Girls,” she told my father. “I need two girls.”
Years ago, I looked up Patricia’s obituary online. I found one attached to a blog written by a fan. At the end of a glowing description of her renowned career was a mention of Frank and that she was “mother to three boys.”
No mention of me or my sister. Whoever wrote the obituary decided we didn’t exist, or maybe they never knew we existed. My sister, who’d stayed in touch with Patricia, seemed okay with the omission. She insisted the picture in Patricia’s wallet proved she thought about us.
“And your comment on the blog was mean,” she told me.
“With all due respect,” I wrote in the blog comments, “Patricia left her five kids” (I’m her youngest daughter) “to go sow her wildlife photographer oats. So yes, she was a talented photographer, but she wasn’t a mother.”
In one picture I found of Patricia and Frank online after they died, Frank had his arm around her in front of a small white tent in Africa.
She was leaning her head against his shoulder, smiling and content. Her face was plump and ruddy and naturally beautiful. Her short, dark, curly hair was windblown, and she was wearing a tan photo vest, khaki shorts, and chunky hiking boots.
In her former life, Patricia was a full-fledged Audrey Hepburn type. An upper-middle-class, small-town New Jersey suburbanite with cinch-waisted elegant dresses, black heels, and pearls. In one Polaroid, my mother smiled for the camera as she carried a paper-footed crown roast to the perfect holiday table set for her husband and five kids.
I was two months old when my parents adopted me. I never once resented my birth mom for giving me up (I found her in 2016, and we’re close).
When I was old enough to understand how hard it must be for a woman to give up a child, I felt sorry for my birth mother. I knew women who gave up their baby did it out of love and desperation. And that it probably ripped their heart out forever. I knew long before I knew anything about my birth mom that giving me away wasn’t personal.
It was selfless.
But mothers who roam the globe with a lover, who give birth to three boys, get their tubes tied, and then adopt two girls to complete the set don’t leave their children for selfless reasons.
They leave because motherhood was a mistake. Because domesticity felt like prison.
“The ugly ducklings” Patricia once told my father about me and my middle brother. Mike stuttered and, like me, wore thick glasses.
When I was older, I’d drag information out of my dad about Patricia. He never wanted us to know Mike and I were her least favorites. That we weren’t perfect enough.
During my sophomore year in college, I sent my mother a short letter. “I never understood why you left the family. Please help me understand.” Then I told her what was going on in my life.
“It was your father’s lifestyle,” she wrote back. “The drinking and fancy parties and spending too much money. It wasn’t you. We were fighting all the time. It wasn’t about you kids.”
Except that when you leave your kids, it is about the kids.
That was our only contact until my late twenties during my youngest brother Chris’s wedding. Patricia smiled awkwardly as we walked toward each other in the hotel reception hall.
We stood in front of each other but didn’t hug. She smiled, looked nervous, and told me, “Look how beautiful you are!” For the next few hours, we chatted about the wedding, my job, and my husband, who sat next to me.
Frank sat between us at our table. Polite but protective. Privately, I was furious at how nonchalant my once-mother seemed. Of course there was too much to unpack, and a wedding wasn’t the place. But Patricia acted like we’d simply lost touch.
A few years ago, when my husband and I were talking about that day, he told me that at some point I whispered to Frank, “Tell Patricia I want nothing to do with her.” I couldn’t stand the façade for one more second. So I went silent.
I don’t remember saying that. But I’m sure I did. Because if my mother had wanted to be in my life, when she got my letter during college, she would have said so.
In 1998, when I became a mom, the resentment for Patricia I’d managed to mostly bury resurfaced with a vengeance.
I was horrified that a mother would leave her children. I felt a maternal protectiveness with my own daughter so visceral and overwhelming that rage bubbled up for my own mother.
I pictured my five-year-old daughter coming home from kindergarten. Getting off the bus and running to hug her dad. I pictured her giggling and holding her vinyl Blue’s Clues lunch box. My husband handing her gummy snacks and a juice box in the kitchen. I pictured him scooping her up and sitting her on the couch next to him. My daughter’s happy feet swinging.
“Where’s Mommy?” she asks as she sips her juice box and her blueberry eyes sparkle.
“Honey, Daddy needs to tell you something. Mommy is um, gone, and she’s not coming back. It’s not your fault, honey, really, it isn’t. You didn’t do anything wrong. But Mommy is, well, Mommy is confused even though she really, really loves you.”
Years ago, I decided that I can’t do with my mother what therapists and clergy suggest when someone hurts us.
“Work to forgive. It’s not about saying what they did was okay. It’s about letting go of anger and resentment. When you do, you’ll feel better. Stop giving over your power to bitterness.”
But the abandoned five-year-old child in me refuses to forgive my mother. I could, but I won’t. Not because I’m consumed with anger. I’m not. Because forgiving, however that looks (journaling, prayers, letters to Patricia I never send), feels disingenuous.
“I forgive you” feels like a lie.
Over the years my hurt and anger toward my mother have shifted. Not to forgiveness exactly, but to a new understanding that only ambitious woman-turned-mothers understand.
Because I was that mother.
After I had my daughter, I left the workforce as a career professional, ambitious but constantly told daily during my pregnancy, “Once you see that baby, nothing, I mean nothing else will matter.”
Three months after maternity leave, I went back to work part time. Six months later, I left for good.
I’d been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and was racked with chronic body aches and brain fog. My babysitter and I were at odds, but mostly I left because I “should” be at home. My husband never pressured me. I pressured me. Judgmental parents didn’t help.
During my mother’s era (the 1950s), after women graduated college, they got married and had kids. They never talked about their own needs. There were no mom group confessionals. Ambition and having an identity crisis weren’t things. Taboo.
Women sucked up their angst and exhaustion with coffee and uppers, with martinis and Valium (“Mommy’s little helper”). Smile. Nod. Suffer.
It wasn’t until the nineties that books came out about motherhood and ambivalence. About loving your kid but hating x, y, z. Suddenly the floodgates opened, and mothers got raw and honest. (Remember the book The Three Martini Playdate?)
I struggled with being grateful but bored at home. With craving an identity outside of motherhood. Of course I loved my daughter. I went through surgery and months of infertility procedures to get her.
My child was everything to me, but not everything for me. When I became a parent, gradually, a tiny part of me understood why my mother left.
And in that, accepting my mixed bag of emotions softened my pain and rage.
Unlike my mother, I’d had a thriving career and my own identity for over twenty years. But Patricia went from college to marriage to motherhood. She’d skipped over herself and who, it turned out, she wanted to be. Unburdened by domesticity, free to roam the world.
I realized that if my mother had stayed, she would have resented her kids and the life she felt called to embrace. Her resentment might have been more damaging than the abandonment.
Still, forgiveness isn’t always the answer. Saying “I forgive you” has to feel sincere. It has to come from a place of genuine release. A willingness to see the harm and accept its wrongness, then fully let it go. Into the ethers, washed from our heart and psyche.
My vision of my mother is less villain now and more a woman who should never have given in to society’s pressure to have kids. As soon as she got married, she pushed my dad to start a family, even after he told her over and over they weren’t ready financially.
It’s ironic that after she died, she left a chunk of money to Planned Parenthood. She knew. Motherhood isn’t for everyone.
Forgiveness is nuanced, yet it’s been taught throughout the ages as magical in its transformative powers. “Forgive, let go, and you’ll be free.” And more often than not, that’s true.
But for me, I owe it to my five-year-old self not to completely forgive my mother. Gentle non-forgiveness is what I call it.
Most of my destructive bitterness is gone. But if I’m honest, some anger still sits in me. Because I want it there. Protective. Righteous. But no longer seething. Anger wrapped in necessary truth. That my mother was selfish. That my mother did real damage.
I guess holding on to some anger feels like I’m choosing to be an advocate for my five-year-old self. But mostly I think it’s to avoid the harder emotions of pain and rejection. And because letting go of all my anger feels fake.
For me, being authentic sometimes means accepting that not all anger fades. And that it’s okay. (In fact, allowing anger instead of repressing it can actually be beneficial for our health, according to psychologist Jade Wu, so long as we don’t act aggressively.)
In the wake of my mother abandoning our family, she left behind five broken kids, all of whom bear emotional scars. Scars that showed up in devastating ways. Addiction, cruelty, despair, loneliness, low self-esteem, hoarding, attachment issues.
I know ultimately my mother needed to be free. That staying would have done more harm than good. But children aren’t puppies to surrender when caregiving gets too hard.
There were dire consequences to my mother leaving to find happiness. Irreparable damage. I saw it. I felt it. Trust destroyed. And because of that, I can never fully forgive.
“I pray you heal from things no one ever apologized for.” ~Nakeia Homer
About Laura G. Owens
Laura G. Owens is a Florida-based writer obsessed with human behavior. Hr focus is social commentary and personal essays with stark honesty. She has fifteen years of experience writing about mind and body natural health. Blog: Human Nature Huffington Post
