What Gets Left Behind-The Bricks and Mortar of a Loner Personality

I am five years old.  I feel my mother's hand on my forearm and I hear her speak the words: "No, you stay here, I will be back in a little while."  But I want to go with her.  I do not know this place and I do not know these people.  I smell smoke from cigarettes and it is dark.  I hear the man we are with, the man who delivers milk to our house each week from a white truck that has "Christiansen's" on its side, tell the guy behind the bar that it will only be about an hour.  I assess from their interactions that they might be brothers, as I continue to plead with my mother to go with her.  She insists.  She pushes me toward the stool and I feel the loosening of her grasp, then the distance, then the absence.

I expect her to come back inside.

I wait for it.

I feel tears on my cheeks.

I am afraid.

The first sting of being abandoned, even for a short while by my mother, rises in me.

I run from the stool to the door and am stopped by the man who has been behind the bar.  He tells me it will be okay, and I find myself looking eye to eye with a stranger.  And there, in that bar on North Main Street in Providence, now known as "The Parlour", began a series of being left behind and the foundation for severe separation anxiety was poured.

I would find myself at the bar once a week for what seemed like years.  Often, I would wake in the car in a parking lot after falling asleep, while my mother shopped, not knowing where to find her. Other times I would await my mother in the school yard at length until she arrived, numerous calls to the house made by the principal to retrieve her, reaping no reply.

Desertion is insidious.  You anticipate being cast off at every turn.  A child, unlike an adult, is trapped where you leave them.  They cannot leave the space for fear you will return, while they simultaneously desire to leave and search for you.

I wondered for years why no one intervened, why my mother got away with leaving me.  I have come to determine, from talking to my father, who I never told because I thought he knew, that she was "responsible enough" to not cause alarm.  She left me at the bar with the brother of the man she left with, she left me in the car at a time when there were less fears about your kids being harmed or taken, she left me standing in the school yard from time to time, with an irregular pattern.

Ironically, this woman, who has an extreme fear of abandonment, had seen it fit to leave me, whenever she felt the need.  So instilled in me was the fear of her leaving me behind that I could not be left anywhere, even with relatives, without crying and vomiting. I was inconvenient, a burden to her plans and her desire to do what she wanted. Yet I forgave her each time and although I ran to her when she returned to me, filled with relief and love, she did not comfort me, she did not apologize, she did not seem happy to see me.  And in such, the realization that I deserved to abandoned grew.  I struggled with separation from her for years, causing issues at school, with family, and with the formation of friendships.

But the thing my mother did not know is that with every abandonment, with every hour that I waited for her to come back, with every moment that passed, I was changing slowly.  The thoughts of deserving desertion were being hard wired in my mind and sadness and mourning were being replaced by bricks that I was adding to the wall I was building around me, and my mother was the mortar that would make the wall impervious to most.

Neglect seeps in with a slow bleed.  When you are young, you feel the hurt, the damage pervades the psyche until you cannot be damaged any more.  What was sensitive becomes calloused like palms forced through hard labor.  Your mind will do anything to protect itself.  It learns to adapt to the environment which aims to destroy it.  Every ounce of me, which once sought the comfort and the companionship of my mother, began to encase me with an improved design:  a design that did not need the things that were not provided to me.

To this day I have the wall.  I let very few people in to get to know me.  I am not sure if it's because I want to "leave" you before you leave me, or whether I don't want to commit for fear of making another person feel abandoned.  I will only get close to some, and those who I do feel a connection have to understand that I spend a lot of time alone.  I cannot need them.  I cannot feel the pull of a necessary relationship.  I will never again be that little girl who waited in the backseat of the car, bound to the space I occupied because I did not know whether I should search or stay.

I realize that this is not a great quality.  I work on this everyday.  I am trying.  I know that people who try to befriend me become frustrated with this aspect of my personality.  I want to tell people who attempt friendships with me that it is not them, that my elusive ways are my survival mode.

The wall is thick and high, but not impossible to transcend.  It takes time, sometimes very little, other times endless hours.  I cannot predict how someone with affect me or how I will be moved to make a relationship work.  There are some people I respond to immediately, something in them stirring an element of safety in me that negates my fears.  If I feel safe, the bricks come down, one by one. I will let know me, you will see what lies behind the wall, and you will know me as a friend.

I am now a parent myself and I simply cannot imagine doing this to my child.  In fact, the experience has left me somewhat paranoid and overprotective.  I make my son, who is seven years old, hyper aware of my whereabouts when we are out and about.  I have never and will NEVER say, "I'm leaving without you" to him.  Because I know what it feels like.  He will not know the pain of intentionally being left behind.  He will know that he is valued and loved and that I will always embrace the opportunity to reunite with him after being apart.