That’s the whole story, really. Except it isn’t.
He left when I was six weeks old. Chased a party girl with a red car right out of our lives and into someone else’s, because that’s the kind of man he was — the kind who leaves, and keeps leaving, a trail of children he didn’t stay for. Next was a mall clerk. Then the circus girl. And a trail of children. Momma never said so. Not once. Never said his name in anger, never planted the seed of abandonment in me, never let her wound become my wound. I was just smart enough to see through, and loved by her so completely that it didn’t matter anyway.
She was nineteen.
Nineteen years old, six weeks postpartum, and she picked me up and she held on. I have the photographs. I hold the story of Momma’s younger sister’s boyfriend saying “give me that baby’s bassinet”… helping her transition back home to her own momma and daddy. She is so young in them it breaks something open in my chest now to look. Dark blonde curls, soft glossed lips, smiling like she meant it. Holding me like I was the whole world. Because I was. Because she decided I would be.
I don’t know when I understood that I was taking care of her too. It was before I had words for it. I remember her crying, uncontrollably, and me — not yet two years old — pulling at my own diaper tabs because I had to do something. I had to fix it. I didn’t know how. I just knew I couldn’t bear her tears.
I remember lying across her lap on a Monte Carlo bench seat while Journey played on the radio and she shakily lit a cigarette. Her hand trembled. I was small enough to fit across her lap and I was already reading her. Already tracking her steadiness.
She worried about me, always. Worried I’d be taken. She never once made me sleep alone when I was scared, even when I was sixteen. Some people might call that too much. I call it a woman who understood loss at the cellular level and refused to let her child feel it. She knew how fast someone could be gone. She was not going to let that happen twice.
She never knew how much I worried - still worry- about her.
The song is called “Send Her My Love.” The narrator is the one who left. Writing back. Asking someone else to carry what he couldn’t — the tenderness, the apology, the acknowledgment that something real was broken. He sends his love from a safe distance because he cannot bear to deliver it himself.
But it was me. I was the one who could not bear her tears. I was the one who stayed. I was the one bearing those lyrics “send her, send her my love”.
A baby cannot leave. But I grew up and I still didn’t leave. I learned.
Momma is a bit worn down now by a whole lot of life. Life took more from her than one man leaving — the first stepfather broke her and me in ways that went deeper, lasted longer. Then the third stepfather, names we don’t speak. They don’t deserve it. But Momma still sees beauty. She’s not as cynical as me. I love her childlike view of goodness. Case in point… in my twenties, I was driving, Momma was the passenger. The guy in the car next to us was paying special attention..Momma giggled… I held up two middle fingers and honked the horn with my knee.
She has deep faith, the kind that doesn’t come from an easy life. The kind that’s been tested down to the wire and came back, scarred, still standing.
And she still hopes for love.
After everything. She still hopes for love.
That is the most defiant thing I have ever witnessed. Not the nineteen-year-old smiling in those photographs with her whole heart blown open and her arms full of me. Not the woman who protected me so well from bitterness that I had to figure out the truth on my own. Not even the mother who showed up in the dark every time I was scared.
This. This is the bravest thing.
That after all of it, she still believes love is real and coming and worth waiting for.
She taught me that. She taught me by doing it in front of me for forty three years while I watched.
Momma and me, holding it together since 1983.
I would not have it any other way.
