My parents never left me anywhere. Once upon the late seventies, a two-car, two-family caravan mixup resulted in leaving my cousin Rebecca (not to be confused with my sister Becky or, you know, me) at Peking on Fresh Pond (a restaurant where they left the head on the fish, ack) in the environs of Boston, but I’ve never been left behind. Not that I’ve never been forgotten. But that’s a blog post/therapy session for another day.
Nevertheless, having never actually been left behind didn’t prevent me from fearing abandonment.
Constantly.
When I was in middle school, our family went to Florida for spring break. It rained every day. We spent some bonding hours in front of MTV, my brothers and I. (That was this TV station that played music videos, kids, and our parents didn’t approve, so we didn’t have access to it at home, but it wasn’t specifically forbidden during the wet week in Florida, so… guilty joy.) One day, my mom took the rental car and hit the grocery store – most probably to avoid ONE MORE PLAYING of the ridiculously chipper jingle, “Please stop calling MTV, cause the phones are closed, da-da!” Certainly she was off to breathe quietly in the car and avoid any more togetherness for a few minutes, but I was positive that she’d never come back. With only angsty middle grade novels to blame for this thought pattern, I was certain she got behind the wheel and headed out on the freeway to never, ever return.
(Spoiler: she came back. With groceries. From the grocery store.)
I’m not sure why that thought has been in my head today (except that I kind of want to go to the grocery store ALL BY MYSELF and not tell anyone; but fear not: I have no intention of never returning home), but I want to put it out there that my parents never tried to run away from me. You know, in case something like the desire to sit alone in a car and just breathe ever appears in a book and someone tries to tie it to a childhood trauma. There are no childhood traumas here, okay? Just early teen drama and imagination, and the occasional grown-up sympathetic understanding of what a temptation that escape might have been for the mother of thirteen-year-old me.