There’s been lots of talk recently at Chez Naked about abandonment issues. Both DearSweetDave and I have them. Because this is my blog and not his blog, I’m only going to talk about my own abandonment issues, but I will tell you that the recognition from each of us that we both have them has been rather illuminating.
The summer I was 15, I learned that my father, who up until that time had really been my hero in very many ways, was having an affair. Was it his first affair? Who the hell knows? It was the first affair that we, the children, were told about. I remember the night we were told so vividly.
Albert (I have always called my father Albert, since I was a very small child, because that is his name. It is very rarely that I ever call him Dad) was supposed to be home for dinner with the rest of the family, but he never showed up. Instead, our Aunt Debbie and Uncle Harry showed up and NakedMom spent the entire evening out on the back porch with them smoking and drinking (as they often did). I kept wondering where the hell Albert was, but also kept myself out of sight in the basement watching inane television. The joys of summer vacation.
Eventually, my mother asked all three of us to come upstairs. We went out onto the back porch and she said, very calmly which is rather UNLIKE NakedMom if you know NakedMom at all, that the reason Albert was not at home for dinner was because he was out with his girlfriend.
Now, people, my parent’s marriage was certainly not going to win any awards from June and Ward Cleaver or Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. Good Lord, no. Not even Fred and Wilma Flintstone. But as kids, one thing we felt fairly certain about was that even though Albert and NakedMom fought like cats and dogs, that they really did love one another. Really and truly. Forever.
Albert was out with his girlfriend?
I burst into tears and then I threw up. I throw up when things are too much for me to handle. Exorcist style. It’s really quite dramatic. If I receive news I don’t want, BLECH. All over everywhere. That’s exactly what happened that night.
My sisters, HalfNakedRobin, NeverNakedBeth and I waited up for Albert to return home. We figured he had to come home at some point, right? He wasn’t going to stay out with his girlfriend ALL NIGHT, right? Wrong.
At 3:30 in the morning, or thereabouts, I was standing half naked in my pajamas in the hallway of a fancy condominium across from the National Zoo pounding on some stranger’s door and demanding that she let me speak to my father. How we got from the back porch to that hallway is still a bit fuzzy, but I believe it was NakedMom who said she knew where this girlfriend lived and offered to drive us there to “go get him.”
Of course the girlfriend denied that he was there. Or that she even knew who he was. We finally left, totally defeated and feeling even more uncertain about NakedMom’s revelation and about Albert’s love for us.
That summer I was working with my father. My mother’s family owned a small lumber company. I was employed there mostly to keep me out of trouble. My father worked there, as well. So the next morning, I went to work. Of course, I hadn’t slept all night, I was still vomiting and I had the puffy eyes of a raccoon.
Folks in the office kept asking me all morning if I knew where my father was? Had I seen him? Did I know when he might be in? And I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know what to even say. I wanted to blurt out that he had a girlfriend. That he was abandoning our family. That he was leaving us all high and dry! But I had been raised as a very vigilant daughter of alcoholics and I knew that there was certain information you never shared. There were certain family secrets that NEVER WERE TOLD. That you smiled, ignored it and told everyone that life was PERFECT. Absofuckinglutely perfect.
Albert called the office at noon that day. I was working the switchboard because it was one of my jobs to relieve the receptionist for lunch. I asked him where the hell he was. He was so nonchalant. But I could tell by the tone of his voice, just from his hello, that he was drunk. So that meant he was most likely at a bar. He tried to convince me he was at one our customer’s offices. Right. The lies just kept coming.
Wanting desperately to believe him, I told him he had missed dinner with Aunt Debbie and Uncle Harry and that we were all terribly worried about him and why didn’t he call.
“I don’t know why anyone would be worried about me. No one ever cares about me!”
If I had a dollar for every time I have heard those words uttered by Albert, I’d be a millionaire. No joke. The man had boulders on his shoulders. Forget the chip, he has spent my entire lifetime telling me what a worthless human being he is, but has blown up at me if I decide to agree with him. Fucker.
He said he would come home for dinner that night. That he’d see me later. I didn’t believe him, but I wanted to believe him.
Albert did come home. Very late that night. He walked into three very angry daughters. Ready to read him the riot act. We all sat in the living room trying to wrap our minds around his infidelity. It was one thing to deal with his alcoholism, a factor of our entire childhoods. This was quite another thing. Was he going to abandon us? Was he going to just leave? Who the fuck was this woman and what did she give him that his own family didn’t?
That was the beginning. Albert abandoned me that summer. He wouldn’t actually truly abandon our family for many more years, but the spiral of deceit and hurt and deep-rooted pain began with that summer.
So here I am. Twenty-eight years later. I still have abandonment issues. I don’t want to be the one who is left. I also don’t want to be the one who leaves because I understand all too well the pain that it causes. I want to heal that part of me. I want to trust that the people I love are not going to just leave. I want to choose a partner who wants to stay.
I want to not fear abandonment.
