I slipped on a pink tube top, a pair of capri pants, strappy sandals, and a silver bracelet. My brother, age 12, and sister, 14, were sleeping in their bedrooms, and I was supposed to be watching them for the evening while my parents were out of town. But an ex-boyfriend was having a party, and I wanted to see him before returning to college for my senior year.
It was 20 minutes from my home in Zionsville to his in Meridian-Kessler. At the party, I drank a few beers, had a few laughs with other friends who were home from school, and was hanging out by the pool when the ex sought me out. He told me that he had made a mistake in letting me go. I should have felt a boost of confidence, but, already a few drinks in, I found myself confused about why he had ended the relationship in the first place.
It was easy enough to prove the point: I simply returned again and again to the keg in the backyard. By about a. I could barely walk, much less see straight. Somehow I drove myself home, and when I tiptoed into the house at 3 a. I asked where Mom was. My dad told me she went home to live with Jesus, and I never asked again. It was almost lunchtime when my dad called me downstairs and confronted me.
My brother and sister had not been asleep after all. That much, at least, was true. My mother had been gone for nearly two decades. My stepmother was the only mother I had ever known, and I called her Mom, as I do today. And I had not thought about it all very much. Growing up, my thoughts never pushed much beyond the vacancy inside me, a kind of constant absence that over the years I found more and more ways to try to fill.
I started with resentment, a free-floating anger toward the woman who had taken her from me. Even in church, where I sometimes sought solace, I felt that God had cheated me. I searched for and eventually rejected fulfillment in nearly every place I could think ofβat concerts and parties, in relationships and bars. Finally, as I approached the age my mother had been when she died, I decided to stop trying to fill the hole and start trying to heal it.
