I’d never wailed before August 19, 2020. I suppose I never really considered it but after the mountains of pain, loss, regret, betrayal and heartbreak in my past, I just kind of assumed that I’d covered all the bases on crying. Wrong again.
Arriving home from work on Wednesday night to find my daughter’s room cleared out… You know how you see people on tv who are in some desperate situation and then something terrible happens and they just stand there in shock while the building is falling around them and you just wanna yell at them “Snap the fuck out of it!” That’s how I felt standing in my daughter’s closet staring at the eight empty hangers that remained. Shock is like an out of body experience. Even as I remember it now, I see myself in the third person stumbling dumbly from the empty closet to my bedside in the living room where my knees gave out at the command to lie down and instead I found myself kneeling on the carpet squeezing myself in a hopeless embrace and wailing without tears at the top of my lungs. I doubled over, screaming questions I can’t remember, and while I could breathe fine, the hot breath of my sobs made me feel like I was suffocating so my body would shoot up and yell at the ceiling. Surprisingly, my manners still hold sway in deep agony because something would shame me for being disruptive to my neighbors (probably a result of my hospitality profession) and I would bring my cries back to the floor until suffocating again. And so I cried.
To be fair, I had received a call a few hours earlier from her mother stating “[the kid and I] talked and she’s going to move back in with me.” I’m sure she thought that was a courtesy and not a kidnapping. I spent the last three hours of my shift desperate to get home in the vain hope that she was bluffing. She wasn’t.
There’s nothing worse than the feeling of being powerless. Having your world ripped apart in the blink of an eye and being unable to do anything about it but nod and say “okay”, that is a feeling of which I am all too familiar. There is no healing from that. There is no forgetting. There is no replacement for the hopes and dreams that you spent years building up.
I haven’t eaten anything in more than 48 hours (unless you count the Trolli gummi worms that were the last thing my daughter gave me). Been napping a lot. Doing a lot of wallowing but trying to avoid the self-pity. I’ve been cycling through the first three stages of grief like a broken clock but the anger is subsiding.
My daughter is 16. She’s naive and highly-sensitive, but she is also and almost a woman. Which means I have to respect the decisions she makes as a woman. It’s easy for me to blame her mother. She’s manipulative and she’s kidnapped my daughter three times in the past, so number four is no surprise but honestly, I’m so over being mad at that woman. The most hurtful part of this loss is that my daughter made the decision this time. I’m not mad at her for it because what teenager hasn’t wanted to run away from home at some point? In most cases, there’s just nowhere for you to go that wouldn’t ship you right back. So I suppose the Kid was just taking advantage of the dysfunction in our “family” but I’m still hurt that she felt like that was her best option. Now she’s not talking to me, claiming she needs space. I still have no clue why she left. No idea where her head is at or what her heart is feeling. The sobering truth that I haven’t wanted to admit to myself is this:
Maybe she didn’t run away from home… she ran back home.
And I have no idea where that leaves me… now I have to go to work and somehow coexist in a world that has no meaning to me.