Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids
Elton John, Rocket Man. Song Four, Side One, Honky Château
In fact, it’s cold as hell
It was one of those May afternoons in California’s Bay Area that feel like what you would dream up for a perfect summer day.
A new multi-unit building had just come up in the listings and my sister and I went over before we could even get a call back from our realtor. The Spanish style building was lit up by sunlight. We peeked in all of the windows we could get to and we could see original wood built-ins and vintage touches. We fell a little in love right there and then.
I’d been looking for a permanent place to live for the three months I had been back in California and I had begun to feel like one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters, ready to chop off part of my foot if it meant I could find the slipper that fit.
This one. This is the one.
I called our realtor from the driveway. I was sun drunk and so hopeful.
By the time I got the keys, my belongings had been in a storage pod for over five months. I felt like I had finally landed after a long, long time circling in the air.
Home. Home.
I declared to everyone that I would never move and I meant it. I set about making the space my own and the cool summer evenings here in the Bay lulled me into such a sweet kind of comfort.
This is the place where I first picked paint colors all on my own with no negotiating. Where I laid my mattress on the dining room floor and slept there the first week while I painted my bedroom a dark, dark gray that was called pencil point before I ripped up some of my favorite books to cover the unattractive wall of closet doors.
I had a housewarming party where a friend dragged in strangers from a bar across the street and a neighbor called the police on us because our singing was not the most melodic.
Where I pieced together a quiet, safe haven for myself, all alone, for really the first time ever. Where I nursed the wounds of the years of chaos that led to me moving back to California.
This building that feels almost like an extension of myself is where I stood in front of the red front door when x hugged me goodbye after our first date, where I told him one-armed hugs don’t count and so he swung his other arm around me before kissing me on the cheek and saying good night.
This is the house where I stopped taking birth control and told the universe to decide for me. Where I miscarried alone on the couch as x snored in the bedroom because I didn’t want to disturb his sleep.
(and so this is the place where I first learned to survive with him while still not allowing myself to see the truth – where I removed my pain from his space so peace could be maintained.)
Here is the bathroom where I took the pregnancy test telling me I was pregnant with V. The bathroom where I would sit on the floor, back up against the door, and sob into bath towels during that last trimester and then for several years to come.
So he wouldn’t become even angrier at my tears. So he wouldn’t mock my sobbing.
So I could hold onto the illusion that we could ever be a happy family.
This is the house where, less than two years after V’s birth, x picked up one of my lightweight dining chairs and raised it up and slammed it to the ground so hard that a broken-off leg flew up to the ceiling and chipped the paint, leaving a nickel-sized dark spot that remains, to this day, unpainted.
The spot I stared at as he said you’re not the only one who can get mad with just a hint of the black eyes I would see a few years later when I finally said no more.
Here is the nook where x’s older son lived for a year before I found a way to make him his own room. The nook where my daughter spent the first five years of her life before moving down into that room that had held nothing but the ghost of her older brother for nearly a year.
The nook where I nursed her to sleep and then, when she was done nursing, rubbed her back until she fell asleep. Where I sang her lullabies as x scrolled away on his phone in our bedroom.
Where I taught her the song my grandma used to sing to us kids. I love you a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.
Where I first truly loved her a heap.
The small almost-room with the curtains I hand sewed, while hugely pregnant, from fabric I found in a small shop in Oakland – that had a blue background and small red birds perched on branches. Curtains I still can’t bear to toss even though all but the bottom six inches are sun bleached to near oblivion.
The same nook and curtains that x took a photo of and sent to the main other woman to show her how the nursery was coming along after he’d fully assembled the crib.
This is the nook where I laid on the wood floor next to her toddler bed, more nights than I can count, to count off her snoring breaths in the wee hours of the morning to fight off a panic attack, or what I thought might be a panic attack.
It was my body railing against my willfully oblivious mind, making me feel like I might actually spin right off of the earth, become so thin and gauzy that gravity would no longer hold me.
I felt like an apparition in danger of evaporating.
I was the opposite of solid.
I counted one raspy snore, two raspy snores, three raspy snores. Until my heart slowed enough for me to try to sleep.
I did what I now know is co-regulation. Something parents are supposed to help children do.
But I needed her calm. So badly.
The first thing that made me truly know that my world had tipped over on its side.
To be a good parent is not to steal your child’s calm in order to survive.
***
This is the house where I first told x I loved him. Where he shed a few tears and told me that he had never been loved like this before.
This is the house where I believed him. Over and over and over.
Here is the bed where x pinned me down and smirked as panic went across my face when I realized this wasn’t funny.
This is the house where V and I sat for hours on the couch together in those exhausted first few months of motherhood, her body small and warm in my lap, my need for anything else satiated for as long as we both stayed still and quiet.
This is the house where V would pretend to read me books and my heart would ache with the lilt of her toddler jibberish words.
Here is the street where business owners remember V before she was even V. Who recount to her the joy of seeing her crawl up our front steps for the first time. Who say things to her like my gosh you are so tall now and also ask to see pictures of her Halloween costumes each year.
Here is the front door that x pounded on for twenty solid minutes, knocking a hallway painting askew, before his face switched from black eyes to calm dad in order to walk to the sidewalk and call the police on me, for not answering my phone, less than a year after moving out.
Where he stood on the sidewalk and screamed for my daughter to have me get her a coat. Where he refused to pick up her dropped homework so I would have to come within reach of him to help her myself.
Where he let our five year old daughter run into the street because she didn’t want to go with him and he told me it’s your responsibility to get her over to me or I’ll take you back to court.
Where he leaned against his bumper eating out of a bag of chips and said you have to get her to me as she stood at the back end of the driveway yelling NO NO NO at him over and over.
Here is where I woke up and thought I felt his hand over my mouth even though he no longer had a key and the security alarm was set.
Here is the dark hallway where I dreamed I woke up to see him running toward the bedroom to hurt me well after I had secretly taken the house key from his ring.
***
I have stayed in this place for almost five years after he moved out because, initially, I was not going to let him take this, too, from me. And that stance became reflex.
I decided almost a year ago, after months and months of agony over the decision, that I would finally make the leap and move out of this building. This week, I carried the last two delicate houseplants out to my car, the last must-haves to come with us to the new place.
Forces that have nothing to do with x pushed me to finally let go of the stronghold of you can’t take this from me, too.
Even though moving has nothing to do with x, once I decided to leave, it felt as though my body was levitating ever so slightly – a few millimeters of air between my feet and the ground.
When folks tell you to just move on already, they aren’t even trying to see all the slivers of life that are affected by what has happened.
He is not here anymore. But.
His ghost is everywhere here.
There is not a room in this building I did not, at some point, avoid so that I could feel safe.
His ghost is in the dishwasher that always makes a weird clunking sound because he installed it.
He is in the closet where I found the hidden ipad that gave away all the secrets I didn’t even know to try to find.
He is on the porch, a whisper of a whisper of his voice telling our daughter maybe mommy can take better care of you and not slam the door on you so much after I shut the front door to avoid him taunting me.
He is at the dining table where my daughter sat, after coming home from a visit with him, and told me daddy says you are a big fat liar and a b-word.
He is in the hallway, where I once stood nose to nose with him and, after telling him it was clear he hated me, I told him to hit me. Go ahead. I can tell you want to.
Here is the doorway I sometimes still see a whisper of his ghost blocking me from going through.
Here is where his ghost makes me hesitant, for just a second, to slide someone a coaster for the wood table.
Here is where he lunged at me, with our baby in his arms, as he yelled that I was an awful mother.
***
The never-raising rent of this place is why I could choose my daughter. Why I could feel safe letting the forces of nature maybe bring me a child.
This never-raising rent is why I felt more stable and safe when x left even though he would no longer be helping with expenses.
(I knew already, even if it took time to show it to be true, that he was costing me more money than he was bringing in.)
He was always costing more than he was bringing. Always.
I have this lovely human in my life, who I get to watch grow and change and become more and more herself all the time, because this building was my home.
I have grown roots in this little island town because this building kept me safe from upheaval.
I’ve been saying goodbye to this place in slow motion – in fits and bursts – for so long now that for months and months it has felt like I’m already gone and also like I will never, ever be actually gone.
It’s as though the saying all the feels was written for this exact moment in my life.
I moved in as a tail-end-of -the-30somethings woman who was childless by choice and starting over, having moved back to my home state after a decade away.
I am moving out as a 50something mother of a nine year old whose father is not allowed to see her unsupervised.
To say the woman I was when I moved in here and the woman who is saying goodbye to this place are so different that it blows my mind is not hyperbole.
I moved in trusting the goodness of people. Trusting someone unless they proved otherwise. I am leaving as a woman who draws a safe line around herself and who doesn’t necessarily not trust people, but I also don’t actually trust someone until they prove worthy of that.
I moved in here ready to make new friends and widen my net. I am leaving with an ever-tightening circle of friends and family and a series of redrawn lines that have made that circle smaller and safer over the last few years.
***
I have purged so much that was ours.
First the bed and the mattress we shared and the nightstand he used. Then the couch and the dining table and then the coffee table he bought second hand. So many small things over the years until almost every piece of furniture is now either from before him or after him.
I have washed him from this place as much as possible.
I don’t want to be running from him forever.
I’m not running.
But.
Leaving this place begins the fresh start I didn’t want to admit I needed five years ago.
His ghost will always be here, there and everywhere. My daughter loves her father and he is not a father to her. Her DNA and her smile and her hilariously menacing cackle are all echoes of him.
Her ability to hear a song and know the notes. Her ability to write songs. Her sweet tooth. Her beautiful eyes.
I don’t, though, need to stay within walls that surround me with the echoes of that chair cracking and the leg sailing into the ceiling. Of my sobs in the bathroom or my screams in the car in the driveway in the middle of the night so I could walk back in and quietly lay down beside him.
The echoes of his deep loud sigh as he rolled over in bed and told me I was fucking impossible.
***
When I moved in, I nicknamed this place the Honky Château as a funny homage to the Elton John album with the same name. I stopped calling it that when x and his son moved in nearly two years later, but in the last year I have often thought of that album cover propped up near the stairs, at the entry of my apartment.
The lightness I felt in that first year in this space that was all mine. The relief I felt to be able to, once again, put down roots.
Since deciding to move, I have listened to those songs, some for the first time, and remembered how light and hopeful (& naive, despite my age) I was when I first made this place my home, the memory ringing in my body with all the joy this place brought me for so many years.
I think of the life this place has made possible.
I have never in my whole life lived in one place as long as I have lived here.
I am so ready to be gone and, also, I love this place like no other.
It will always be the place I imagined this little girl into existence.
It will always be the place where I cried that deliriously exhausted cry of a new mother and begged her to sleep through the night. The place where, then, one day, she did.
It will always be the place that I recorded her letting go of the couch to take her first steps in order to hug the dogs on the living room chair.
It will always be where I learned to tell the difference between the people who love you and the people who hurt you, even if they seem to be both at once.
It will always be the place where I, finally, better late than never, decided I deserved better.
Château, do you know the me that’s leaving? She’s so wildly different than the one who moved in thirteen years ago.
You housed families before me and you will house some after me. You will not remember me because, well, you are wood and stucco and paint. No matter how sentimental I am, I am not confused about that. Still, there’s a life you have given me that I will always be glad happened. Despite knowing that it should have never had to happen.
Farewell and good riddance and all of the in between stuff.
On to somewhere with someone else’s ghosts, but not mine.
On to a place where I make new ghosts that don’t chip paint or break walls.
Home. Fresh. Ours.
Life After Emotional Abuse 