The Big Goodbye
The Continued Chronicles of Divorcing a Narcissist
The final version of the agreement I have been negotiating, the one where I lose everything, comes to my inbox. It is time to sign it, just seven months after my dad died of a heart attack and eight weeks after my brother overdosed on fentanyl. Grief upon grief, layer upon layer. Sadness piling up all around me. Like Madge, I’m soaking in it.
So I sign it because it's the next step in getting through this hell. The next step in seeing my kids for two weeks before they move. I am terrified to see them. To look them in the eyes and send them away. What they must think of me. The shame I feel. If I can get through this I can get through anything, right?
All of a sudden I am getting texts from my children. A symbol that the agreement is permanent and we are all moving through it. A stipulation was added that B was to provide the children with cell phones for “daily access” to the parents and family in the other household. Getting a text from my daughter felt like an electric shock to my system. “Hi Mama.” This was really happening and my kids now know.
Flash forward to the kids being put on a plane after months of torture over the decision I made. It feels sudden to have to face the consequences. Like I am traveling through a wormhole to pick them up at the airport. When I see them I barely know what to say. I had never felt more uncomfortable around my own children. I want to tell them how ashamed I feel instead I ask them about how the plane ride was. I know there are rules about what I can and can not tell them and yet how can I lie to my own children. Especially about this? It is absurd. The lie alone that B and May want me to propagate is parent alienation.
We spend the two weeks trying to find closure without really saying much about the why. My daughter and I take a few days to comb through her room. She decides what to keep, what to take with her and what to throw away. This is a process we would have done anyway had she been staying now that she is a teenager and she has outgrown the contents of her room. The unicorn poster, her dolls, a treasure chest full of plastic costume jewelry. I felt like a room makeover would give her something to look forward to when. We pick out paint and I promise her a big reveal when she comes back for Christmas. We cry a lot while sifting through her childhood. The boys just play and play trying to soak in every last minute together. As if their time together can be stored up for later.
I watched my daughter struggle to decide what would stay in our house and what would get packed into her suitcase never to return again. She separates her clothes, her toys, and takes down all the photos and cards she had strung up on a jute string with little colorful clothespins along her wall. The hardest part is watching the stuffed animals that have been sitting on her bed her whole life get packed away too. Elephanty, Wolfie, Pony, Sealy. When she goes away, they will not be waiting for her return with me like vigilant soldiers. Now they are leaving too.
My son won’t touch a single thing in his room. He showed up with an empty suitcase and will be leaving with an empty suitcase. He makes me promise I won’t get rid of anything while he is away.
This visit is so hard to navigate. We don’t do “visits” so we don’t know what to do. We have no patterns to rely on. Normally this time of year, we would be getting ready for school, buying uniforms, sneakers, and school supplies. It is hard to have fun with so much grief hanging in the air. Fun feels grotesque, like playing Uno at a funeral.
The two weeks come and go so fast. As much as we don’t want to be apart, none of us want to prolong the inevitable. We know the goodbye is coming. We can feel it sneaking up on us, closer and closer from the darkness. We try to make the best of it. We have little conversations here and there dancing around the why of what is happening. Then poof, it is time to drive back to the airport. We decide Hank will stay home with our youngest. This time I will go it alone.
My daughter and I have had as much closure as are going to get sifting through the memories of her room but my son always waits to unpack his emotions until the very last minute. It is when we load up into the car for the drive to the airport when everything comes out. He tells me how mad he is about moving. He demands answers. Better ones than the ones he has been given. Answers that make this move make sense in his brain and his body. I explain that there is nothing I can tell him that can make it make sense. I tell him I know this because there is nothing I can tell myself. I desperately want to make it better for him. I instead tell him I love him more than anything. Moving won’t change that.
I once again give him the answer I have been supplied but both kids know this is bullshit. My son asks if it was because he refused to go see his dad for so long. Yes and no. I tell him it’s mainly because the guardian believes I have tried to separate them from their father. Both kids know this is bullshit too. So the three of us just drive. Sometimes it is silent, sometimes we laugh, sometimes we cry, but mostly we just dread what is coming next.
We do our best to take in all the moments we have while twitching in our own nervous energy until we are at the gate. It is time. The big goodbye is here. The one I have been wondering about for so long. How does someone do this? How does someone send away their kids? Then the moment is upon us. I am getting first hand experience. Knowledge I didn’t ever want to have.
We don’t have much time at the gate together. By the time we make it through the special services line and security it is time for them to board. I hug them as hard as I can not wanting to let them go. I kiss their heads and smell their hair one last time. Then they walk away down the jet bridge. This time for good.
I can’t leave yet. I must wait until the plane leaves in case they need to deplane. I sit in the airport surrounded by strangers while my children text me. Heart emojis. See you soon. I will miss you. Sad face. I am trying to keep my shit together. I have done so many public transitions but this one is so much harder. This time I let the floodgates open. I sit and sob. People stare. I let them. I keep sobbing. I don’t give a shit. I cry for all the mothers who have had to send their kids away. I cry for everything I am going to miss from here on out. I cry and I cry as I sit glued to my seat, waiting for their plane to leave. The texts stop. The plane rolls out of view. I walk away from the gate, leaving my kids and part of myself behind.
My youngest is supposed to start kindergarten the following week. This was the year he was going to get to ride the bus with his older brother. Now it is hard to even convince him to go to school. On the first day we are allowed to walk in with him and there she is, the teacher who told the guardian my son was better behaved when he was with his dad. She smiles a crocodile smile at me. In my head I punch her in the stomach.
I sometimes feel like a rabid dog. My husband rubs my back while we are eating. I want to bite him. Don’t touch me while I eat is what I’m thinking as he looks at me needing me to need him. He’s doing his best. He’s trying to comfort me. It’s not working. At all. A rabid dog cannot be comforted out of rabies. I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want hugs. I want to kill.
I hate the world. I want it all to burn. This is what I tell my therapist. Her face reflects back alarm at my honesty. She asks me if I want to die. I can tell she is probing to see if I am suicidal. No, I want them to die. I want my kids back. Yet there is my youngest son, watching me as we go through our days, taking me in. This is his life too. His childhood I am shaping with my grief.
I have to somehow not drown and keep fighting even though secretly I hope I have breast cancer and it is beyond my control to just die. I know how crazy this sounds. That there are so many women who would hear me say that, full of my self pity and anger, and judge me for it. Rightly so. Thinking, stupid woman, you don’t know how good you have it, as they themselves fight to live. I am at a pain level I cannot tolerate. Nothing dulls it. Nothing numbs it. Nothing is going to ever make it better. I am slowly losing air and giving up on living. Then I see my son’s face again.
He has a rage of his own. Moving his siblings away changes his personality. He fights transitions. Bedtime, teeth brushing, stopping screens, stopping reading, sitting down for dinner. All of them. He yells at me for no reason, blaming me when his builds topple over or he falls off his bike and hurts himself. Even when I am nowhere near him, not even in the same room. He screams, “You did this to me!” I did do this to him. I blame myself completely. “Everyone leaves,” he says to me at bedtime while he cries himself to sleep. I promise him I am not going anywhere. Which means I have to actually work on not going anywhere. FUCK.
My son refuses to ride the bus because his brother isn’t on it. This turns out to be a good thing. Driving him to and from school is the only part of my day that has routine. It forces me to leave the house. Sometimes I even wash my face. I have no idea what the fuck to do with myself all day. It all feels meaningless. Every. Little. Goddamn. Thing.
Days pass. I don’t want to see anyone or do anything. Ghosts are everywhere. At the school, in my house, in all the places I pass as I drive around town. The places I used to take my kids. The piano teacher's house, soccer fields, doctor’s offices pass by my window haunting me with my own memories. I don’t want to be in this town anymore, in our house anymore, in my own skin anymore. Sometimes, most of the time, I want to be more of the me I was before, but she is gone. Bleeding out in a ditch somewhere as the other parts of me pick up the pieces.
I feel like I have to have something to show to my family that I have accomplished something while they are gone. Something that will show I am not a complete piece of shit. I force myself to clean, to do laundry, to pack lunches. I somehow manage to put on pants. I walk the dog. I smile and nod through my days. All the while gritting my teeth.
I wake up remembering everyday that I have lost two of my kids. Not in a busy mall like when my brother was seven and we were on vacation with our parents in Michigan and he decided to play hide and seek in the clothing racks of a department store while our mom was shopping because it was raining and our tent was soaking and we couldn’t spend the day at the beach. Not in a crowded amusement park like when my Uncle David took us to Kings Island during the summer when we were staying with my grandparents and we got separated from the adults. This was before cell phones were invented and you had to go to the service desk to tell them you were lost and they would make an announcement over the loudspeaker saying your names for everyone to hear.
I have lost my children in a game I wasn’t playing with their dad. I fucked up, (or so my lawyer likes to tell me) by being authentic, telling the truth, trying to protect my children when he wasn’t. While I was busy doing the work to raise them, he was trying to win. Every move calculated, every lie planted perfectly. He had backup from May who loves pulling the strings from far above watching us all dance for her so she doesn’t have to remember that she is on marriage number three and her two grown kids want nothing to do with her. Now she plans on getting it right with mine. She is saving them from my bad mothering. Or so she tells herself.
Now my children are eight hundred miles away and they aren’t coming back. Not to live. Not to go to school, not to fill my house with chaos everyday and fill up the laundry hamper with clean clothes they didn’t feel like folding again. Just to visit. I am now the fun parent they go to for the summer. Except I am not fun. I am the one who is good at scheduling appointments, making them do their homework and folding their clothes like Marie Condo taught me so they fit perfectly in their drawers. I make sure they both brush and floss even when they lie and say they have already and I know they haven't because I felt their toothbrushes and they weren’t wet. I make sure my daughter practices her saxophone. I throw the football in the backyard with my son for hours on end. I don’t do Disney parenting. I have never even been to Disney.
Sitting in my grief, I am farther away from being a fun parent than one could ever be. I am living in a layer cake of grief. Tall tiers piled on top of one another, reach high into the sky. Like the kind I saw at so many weddings my dad officiated when I was growing up. Cake stacked taller than I was with a flowing fountain in the middle, surrounded by twinkly lights and decorated with little plastic doves. Cake covered with icing so sickeningly sweet it made your teeth hurt just looking at it.
The difference between those cakes and mine is that no one wants a piece of this cake. It will rot you from the inside out. Ooze through your organs and fill every cell of your body with hate until the anger seeps out of your pores. Don’t eat this cake I tell myself. But it’s too late. I can’t help myself. I want more the moment it touches my lips. Every day I remember they are gone is a day I want more of that sweet sweet poison. I keep telling myself there will be a day I will wake up and be able to choose something else. If not for me, for the one who remains. The boy who showers me with his artwork everyday after school. Heart drawings that have his name and my name, Mama, connected by a plus sign. I have to wake the fuck up from this grief coma. I have to create an after. I have to. Or this was all for nothing.