Come Back (33 page)

“You know, I ran away once, too, before the war,” my mother mentions to me casually. I nearly drop the phone.

“You did? Why? How old were you?” This is so typical, doling her life out piecemeal, dropping a bomb every five years or so.

“I was about eight. My mother wouldn’t let me borrow her new shawl, so I got mad and left.”

“Just like that, at eight?”

“Oh, if I was mad, off I went. I climbed out the bathroom window at school when the teacher made me stay after.”

“You were in detention? What for?”

“Probably because I tried to drown his cat.”

“You did what?” No wonder she knew Mia’d get arrested, she knows how the criminal mind works.

“Well, not actually drown it, just give it a little scare; I hated that teacher. Boy, did my moth—see why I don’t like telling you anything!” she interrupts herself. “You turn everything into a history lesson! Let me finish my story. So, I left our village and kept walking and it started raining and getting dark and I got scared. I kept going until I saw a little house with a light on. So, I knocked on the door. In those days, I wasn’t such a chicken.”

“No, just a cat drowner.”

“Very funny. Anyway, a little midget answered the door. She was about sixteen, very cute except she was tiny. She said, ‘Oh, come in! I’m so happy to see someone!’ Her parents were gone and she was scared, too. She was very chatty, poor little thing. So, as we’re talking, it turns out that we were cousins. And that’s all I’m telling you. How is Mia? It’s about time you let
her take the bus to the college. You can’t control her every move, you know, she’s almost a grown woman.”

Yes, she is, and apparently, one even more like my mother than I thought—escaping out windows and taking off young. They both even found themselves hiding in plain sight from Nazis in one form or another. My mother was just thirteen when she left home. Her mother had died and she always wanted to see the big city. So, she packed her bag, got on a train, and, in doing so, saved her own life.

I remember the first, and only, time I saw the little girl that climbed out of her village school window. She and I were in the Caesar’s Palace shopping mall in Las Vegas, which is eye-popping. I had gotten separated from my mother and caught sight of her from a distance. She was standing in the middle of all the glitz and glamour, gazing around with big eyes, smiling, and at that moment all I could see was a girl from a little village gazing with excitement and wonder at the cosmopolitan city that was Budapest in 1942. I saw past the survivor’s face, the skeptic’s face, the bitter face. I saw a precious, innocent girl for whom the world was still safe.

I saw my mother as she
really
was, if only she would remember. This is who I want Mia to see, when she sees her mother, who I really am. It is how I have always seen her and always will, my One True Child.

This is how all mothers see their children, as they were when they still believed they were kings and queens with magic powers. They are that precious little being to us no matter how old they are, no matter what they’ve done or who they’ve done it with, no matter how much pain they, in their own pain, inflict.

Mia plunged us into a darkness that felt at times as if it would consume us both. But there is darkness in the womb as well; inside a cocoon only blackness is visible. Yet, the creature inside is exactly where it needs to be in order to transform itself. And there’s only room for one. I could put Mia into a cocoon called Morava or Spring Creek, but only she could put her broken pieces back together and emerge the winged girl she is. Mia was never really mine all mine, as I had once thought. Mia only ever belonged to herself.

And this, perhaps, has been one of the greatest gifts being Mia’s mother has given me. It has returned me to myself as well, allowed me to reclaim my own spirit. I think no mother is prepared for what happens
to her when she brings a child into the world. When our bodies open to release our children, what spills out behind them is light. Our children illuminate us.

Mia came home on Valentine’s Day, a little over two years after she climbed out her bedroom window. She’s been home now several weeks, and it feels like we’re in the happily-ever-after part of a fairy tale. Though she’s absurdly happy, the transition home has been gradual. She’s gone from one world to another and she’s still both wondrous and wary. The produce section and a hot bath still delight her and crowds and freeways still unnerve her. She adores traffic jams, “because then everybody has to go really slow.”

She still speaks with Mike about once a week and it’s obvious that they’ll continue to stay in touch. He’s been like an angel who appeared in her life when she needed him. An angel in cowboy boots.

Mia’s not yet made friends at school, which doesn’t seem to bother her. She’s happily thrown herself in her studies and is the pride and joy of the French department.

Paul and I had been worried that the drugs made a dent in her IQ, but I had no idea Mia was worried, too. One afternoon as she was editing her paper on the various depictions of “Judith and the Head of Holofernes,” she suddenly shouted, “I can’t believe I’m thinking these things! It’s amazing, my brain! I have a good brain, Mother!”

We normally spend years accumulating experiences before we gain wisdom. Mia’s done it in reverse, gaining wisdom before accumulating most of her experiences. She watches Dr. Phil and shakes her head. “He’s letting them off way too easy.”

There is a vulnerability and honesty between Mia and I now that has transformed our relationship. People often marvel at how open we both are to giving and receiving the kind of feedback and coaching most people pay a professional a lot of money for. Still, the relationship between any mother and daughter is both primal and complex. The same intimacy and intensity that brings such joy to our relationship will also bring the inevitable storms; what we’ve learned is how to stay connected and communicating through them.

We know how lucky we are, how close we came to losing each other.
Mia takes nothing for granted. And neither do I. And Paul’s just happy everyone’s getting along.

I came across my old passport photo today, the one taken in Utah before running away. Maybe it’s the program, maybe it’s being two years older, but I haven’t felt the way I looked in that photo for so long it was almost like seeing a stranger. I felt tender seeing how falsely cocky this girl was, how scared.

It’s funny how things come full circle. Morava and Spring Creek’s philosophy is based primarily on accountability, of being aware of your choices so you don’t wake up one morning miserable and wonder how you got there. But, it’s ironic that the most powerful lesson I learned, the awareness that you alone create your reality, is one that children instinctively know. It never occurs to them that there isn’t anything they can’t do or be. And it shouldn’t occur to adults either; we’ve just grown accustomed to living with limitation.

The program takes you back to where those limitations originated, to those first moments you were told, by someone’s words or actions, that you weren’t good enough, that you’re different, stupid, bad. Or invisible. To an abuser, you hardly exist; you’re right there while they’re doing it, but they don’t see you, not really. The very nature of the act erases identity. And it’s a double whammy because you’re not just punished by being abused but because you were abused—as a society we don’t know how to listen or talk about it. So you’re told you don’t matter twice, first by your perpetrator, then by everyone else.

No one says this louder than our legal system. In many states, all it takes to be a successful pedophile is to rape your own kid instead of the neighbor’s. It seems the concept that “all citizens are equal before the law” applies to adults only.

Perhaps that’s why abused kids so often act out, to force acknowledgment of their existence. The vast majority of addicts, street kids and people in prison were abused. I don’t find that coincidental.

Abuse of any sort forces you to grow up prematurely because you’re always aware that you know something about the world, about people, that most kids your age don’t. Perhaps at some point, you decide to reverse the clock, to reclaim what was taken and what easier way to do this than drugs, than running away, than escaping reality any way possible?

I often wonder if what I did at fourteen and fifteen was my way of pulling
the emergency brake, of bringing impending adulthood to a screeching stop. The “streets,” drugs, are as close as teens can get to never-never land, to a life free of both responsibility and supervision. Being high often feels similar to being a kid—spontaneous, happy, energetic, powerful, imaginative.

But drugs are also where the fantasy dissolves because the reality is brutal. Kids prostitute themselves or steal from those they love for a fix, some overdose, some commit suicide, some get murdered. First adults take their innocence, then they take their own to maintain its illusion.

I count my blessings that I was pulled from this cycle and placed in an alternate reality carefully constructed to elicit my best self. A self that has learned to operate from love and faith rather than fear and mistrust, and that no longer wants to run from the world. Now, I want to run toward it, and all the gifts it holds.

I used to hate how much my mother loved me. Every time I did something that hurt her, that angered or disappointed her, there was that unshakable knowledge that she still loved me. How she could love someone who, at the time, I couldn’t stand was incomprehensible to me.

But in struggling through the last two years together, I’ve gone from bafflement and hostility to gratitude and appreciation. My mother taught me something I didn’t have to travel anywhere to learn. How to love, and let myself be loved, unconditionally.

Growing up, I wanted a mom like all the other moms. One who cooked casseroles and apple pie, who made a cozy house. I wanted a mother who was soft and cuddly. What I got was a mother who accidentally incinerated my stuffed animals in a misguided attempt to kill dust mites and who gave entire art history lessons every time she dragged my seven-year-old self to a museum. I knew who Susan Sontag and Camille Claudel were before I’d ever heard of Mariah Carey or Julia Roberts. But now that I have the maturity to recognize it, those same traits I was embarrassed by growing up have helped shape me into the young woman I am becoming.

My mother is many things—a writer, a wife, a warrior. But, she was always, first and foremost, a mother. My mother, mine. I didn’t find true peace or happiness until I returned to the love that I came from. It gave me life and, ultimately, saved it.

Jan was right, this journey has been a blessing in disguise, and our lives did change in ways we couldn’t possibly have imagined then. How could we know, when this journey began, that the path would lead us not to somewhere new, but back to the beginning? To who we have always been, two little girls who galloped out of the woods together and flew.