Safety in Mothers

The longest distance I ever traveled alone at the age of five was twenty-one feet. I'm fairly certain of this because each step I took was about a foot wide and I counted all my steps from park bench (where I sat with your mom) and the water fountain (which on certain afternoons felt as if it were overseas.)
How funny my mother must have found me to be, so scared to travel 7 yards to the water fountain. How disappointed my father must have found himself at raising little more than is own little Pinocchio; a marionette with strings attached to both himself and his wife.

That was pretty much the type of child I was. I'd want to be let go, put down, unembraced, left alone and whenever it was that my parents would eventually relent and let me roar off into the sunset, I would get about five feet away and turn back like a dog encaged by an electric fence.
I can't recall exactly what my mentaility was in all this. I'd help my mom do the weekly grocery shopping* and when I couldn't immediately find her in the frozen foods or produce section, I'd tailspin into a panic. I'd look around at all the strangers and imagine what kind of foster parents they'd be. I'd use my really bewildered looks for the kind-hearted looking strangers, the loving ones, the ones with a lot of Cookie Crisp in their shopping carts, because I assumed that my mother had enough of me and decided to whittle the family down a bit. Furthermore, whomever I chose to tell my tales of woe to would have to serve as my new foster parent.
Yep. I was a spaz.
Speaking in the past tense is mostly wishful thinking. I suppose I still am a spaz. But I am a bit more adult now; I no longer care if my foster parents have Cookie Crisp in their shopping cart.

Then there were airports.
I want to clarify that I have never been afraid to fly. Not that I can remember. From take-off to touch-down I'm as calm as a hollow reed in an Iowa breeze.
But those damn airports, man. To an eight-year-old me, airports were like hanging out in Pleasure Island with Lampwick and the rest of the bad children awaiting their mutation into donkies.
It was like Hell.
Once a year, we'd fly to Nevada to visit my grandma, and the only thing that ever got me through that nonsense was a mother who would never hear the end of it from my grandma if I was left somewhere between the Honey Dew kiosk and the duty-free shop.
I distinctly recall telling my best friend in fourth grade that 1988 had been a bad year for me and mom. I don't recall any of the events that lead up to any of this, but it's quite reasonable to believe that I was officially moving into my pre-teen phase of thinking that I was basically an adult while still eating vanilla Dunkaroos and Lunchables.
I have no doubt that the bulk of what was seperating mom and me, causing us to bicker all the time, had more to do with my own stupidity and less to do with my belief that she kept trying to release me to foster parents.
And see, even that... I say I was seperating from my mom at that point, but she and I (and soon after, my sister) would fly to visit my grandmother almost every year until I was in college and not until I moved to Baltimore in the autumn of 2003, had I ever been on an airplane alone.
Clearly if anyone was seperating, I was not one of the involved participants. I was always too scared to seperate... from anything.
I don't do well with change. I am currently wearing a t-shirt that can be seen in pictures of me from 1997.

Moving is pretty bad too. When our family left Chicago city-proper for the Chicago suburbs, I was crushed. I was eleven and I was crushed.
I wasn't entirely selfish... I was mostly selfish certainly, but not entirely selfish. I worried about other people being left behind too. Heck, I worried about other things being left behind. I'd rather carry the weight of the world on my back than say goodbye to any of it. We moved and during the final five minutes in our (now empty) Chicago apartment, my dad asked that I take a look around one last time to insure we not forget anything.
It took me twenty minutes of apologizing to inanimate rooms and saying goodbye to favorite floorboards and wall outlets, stuff like that, before my dad decided to force me out...
...for good.
I still remember the rooms I didn't visit one last time. I remember wondering if there was anything left in those rooms.
I can't imagine anything worse than being left behind, all alone.

I've got 23 more days to say goodbye to every room I've ever been in here in Massachusetts and I don't know how I'm gonna do it.

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* By help, I mean that I ditched her and went to look at magazines and toys until I was pretty sure she was almost done. A bad day at the grocery store, for me back in those days, usually meant two things 1) they had stocked no new toys and very few magazines since the previous week and 2) I rejoined my mom in the freezer section. The freezer section meant she was running slow. It also meant that she hadn't even started her produce shopping yet and that was the most boring of all grocery shopping.