Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.

Loving people.

With love, I will get hurt. I don’t believe that love is inherently hurtful. I’m sensitive to average relational experiences.

Abandonment Roots

This sensitivity is due to my deep-rooted sense of abandonment.

When I was in the early throes of my cancer diagnosis, my father had a middle-of-the-week wedding while I, not invited, sat in a kindergarten classroom. He then moved a thousand miles away. I’ve seen him several times in the last thirty years, most of which were happenstance. My mother kept the rent and bills paid in our apartment. My sister and I had clothes that fit, and more times than not, we had something edible we could cook up ourselves: a can of corn, tortillas, a ziploc bag with an opened package of hot dog wieners, with or without a thin, milky film coating. Still, we were emotionally starved, nearly never interacted with, treated as roommates and near-strangers for the majority of our childhood.

It didn’t start with me: my father was orphaned as an infant. My mother was the second child to a teen mom whose birth prompted her mother to work outside of the home. Too poor to afford formula, my mother spent her infancy suckling canned evaporated milk.

It didn’t start with me. It ran in my family until it ran into me.

Orphaned

“Orphan” isn’t something I related to my family of origin. It’s all in how the story is told: my grandparents wanted kids and a woman at an agency was more than ready to call them up when a baby was born, and they said yes four times in quick succession. It wasn’t some sad, Russian orphanage with a choir of infant wailing situation or anything.

I began to relate to the word “orphan” as an adult, after I had my second child. With my first, I was so frantic, so in the thick of more trauma, more anxiety, more survival mode as a teen parent that I couldn’t take a step back and see the big picture. Older, wiser, and surrounded by adults with children of their own who can depend on their own parents, shined light on the lack I continue to experience.

I feel a deep lacking coupled with yearning to have parents to relate to with wisdom to guide me and a knowing that they always have my back, though I’ve managed to build a great life in their absence and inaction.

Old Wounds Flare Up

I’ve built my own family. I build community, I practice ubuntu, I connect with others quickly and frequently. I make friends that mean the world to me. I think of them like family.

But then they leave and I feel abandoned again. They move for college. I move. They cancel plans so frequently that they’re little micro-abandonment-aggressions that are unbearable. They get too busy with a new love interest. They prefer a different friend. There was an unspoken riff.

It’s right back to that not-worthy feeling. Still left behind.

Yet, these are the ebbs and flows of a life! Of friendships! This is their nature!

Grappling

My dearest local friend is house shopping and I can’t help but feel like this is the beginning of the end. I know it’s childish, I know it’s not personal. When I have a close friendship, I see them like family.

But they’re not family. They already have a family. When their going gets tough, they lean on their sisters to vent, their mom to stay with the kids while they go to a doctor’s appointment, their dad to fix the leaky faucet. They have their in-law’s house to go to for Easter, where everyone gathers around to watch grandma and grandpa break out in dance.

The rational side of me knows that it has nothing at all to do with me. But I still hear the echos of my hurt inner child screaming, “What about me?”

The perceived abandonment—it’s not an actual abandonment, though it may ignite those feelings within me—reunites me with previous losses. I re-mourn the people I’ve lost along the way.

Yet, these are the ebbs and flows of a life! Of friendships! This is their nature!

I Have a Family Now.

And they are enough. I don’t want any of them to grapple with feeling like their parent is always searching for something better. I know it’s not out there.

When I was 19, I laid my newborn baby in his crib. The night was dark. No one else was home. I wanted to do what I always had done in the dark, alone: run and jump onto my bed, fearful of what could lie beneath the box spring. But I paused and thought: “I’m the parent now. I can’t be afraid of the dark.” Then I stretched one leg out and made an exaggerated, elongated walk to my bed. One foot at a time, I got in my bed and under the covers.

Abandonment is the under-the-mattress boogeyman I have to decide not to fear anymore.

Risky Business

I don’t regret loving anyone, no matter how long ago I lost continued contact with them. The memories are gifts I can choose to reopen at my will.