She's Leaving Home

"She (We gave her most of our lives)
is leaving (Sacrificed most of our lives)
home (We gave her everything money could buy)
She's leaving home after living alone
For so many years."
~ She's Leaving Home ~ Lennon/McCartney

I moved out of my mother's house when I was seventeen years old, which is not to say I left. I found this out twenty years later when she put the house up for sale.

Life began, for me, on 52nd street between 7th and 8th avenues in Brooklyn. I have memories of our apartment there in spite of the fact that we left when I was barely five years old. It was a six-ish unit apartment building and we lived on, probably, the second or third floor. My friend Bobby lived on the first floor in the back and I loved going to play at his place because he had one of those big plastic horses propped up on springs that you could bounce up and down on and pretend to be the Lone Ranger, or Tonto, or just some girl riding a horse which, in Brooklyn, is equivalent to being an astronaut or a surfer. I was afraid of Bobby's father so I rarely played there anytime near 5pm when he and most of the other dads, would be coming home from work. I'm not sure why he scared me but I vaguely remember him being big, and dark and quiet. Too quiet.

My best friend at the time, John Ratazzi, lived in the building next door. His mother would take us on excursions to the bakery across the street for sugar cookies every now and again. John and I walked to our first day of school together, holding hands, and he cried hysterically when they separated us from our mothers and had us line up in the auditorium. I was on the girls line holding back tears and John was on the boys line sobbing and heaving as if our boat had just pulled away from the dock to go on a "three-hour tour" with the Skipper and Gilligan. I wanted to hug him, give him a sugar cookie and comfort him with the lie being told to all of us frightened children that our mothers were waiting for us right outside the doors of the school - even though I knew it was the first of many big, fat lies.

Another vivid memory I have from the apartment on 52nd street is the time I flushed my goldfish down the toilet in a moment's panic when my father came banging on the bathroom door because it was locked. I was forbidden to lock myself in there. I thought I'd surprise everyone and clean the goldfish bowl. So, I put the fish in the toilet to swim while I scrubbed away at the filthy scum hugging the walls of the small glass bowl using my parent's toothbrushes. For months afterwards I couldn't sit on the toilet because I was sure the fish would come back and take revenge on my tiny behind. I used a wooden potty chair for weeks because I knew there'd be no unpleasant surprises swimming up from the scary, unseen depths in the recesses of the bathroom toilet. I'd probably still be using it today if my father hadn't forced the issue and thrown the potty chair out one late night while I slept.

My parents divorced when I was 12 and at this point we had moved, the year before, to a big house on 68th street. This house was next door to my father's sister Anna and her husband Albert and, in the same house but on the top floor, my mother's sister Dorothy and her husband Mike. When my Dad left, that house became even bigger. My brother and sister and I would huddle, at the end of the day, in the living room together watching TV - something we weren't allowed to do when my Dad lived home. It was never spoken but I know that we just wanted, and needed, to be close to each other. So, there we were, sprawled out on the sofa, the floor - wherever. In those days, TV used to go off the air at a certain hour. The national anthem would play to an image of the flag waving in the American breeze and then the station would sign off for the night. Even if all three of us were sound asleep, the minute the anthem started playing, someone would wake up and walk over to the TV and change the channel. To anything. What was on didn't matter - having our electronic fireplace did.

Fast forward twenty years and my mother had over a hundred thousand dollars worth of remodeling done on the house and then decided that she needed to sell. It was, according to her, an "albatross" around her neck. She was in debt and stressed and ready to move on, finally. When she told me she had a buyer I had the first twinge of - well, for lack of a better word, fear. I was the one who'd left home at 17. How could I be having these feelings over a home I couldn't wait to leave?

Once I acknowledged the fact that this was, in fact, strangely difficult for me, I began to see even more clearly and realized that I had never really left. As independent as I'd been my whole life, somewhere in the back of my head, and heart, I always knew that if anything went wrong, I could always come "home".
I felt the need to ritualize my emotional exit from this time and place in my life, once and for all. I had planted the garden in front of the house the year before my Dad took off and I tended it and replanted it every year so it seemed the most logical place to "pull up roots", so to speak.

I went early one morning and chose a plant to dig up. My plan was to go to the ocean and toss the plant, roots and all, in to that vast expanse of water that would nourish it and possibly give it a chance to re-root itself elsewhere. I took the bus to Brighton Beach. When I got there, I sat for awhile in the sand and held on to the memories, both good and terrible, and I knew that they were inside me and safe and so was I. When I felt like the time was right, I walked in to the waves a bit and then hurled the plant over the crest of, what seemed like the wave I was "meant" to throw it in to. I stood there for a moment, filling up with emotion -

And just then I felt something at my feet that made me jump up out of the water and head for shore, positive that it was the tail of a great white or a slimy jellyfish that had brushed up against me. I looked down to see...the plant. The plant that I had unleashed in to the great and almighty Atlantic Ocean had found it's way back to me. Really??? I took a deep breath - renewed my heartfelt vow to honor the memories, blah blah blah, and threw the thing as far and as hard as I could. Less than a minute later, it came back again. I'm not kidding.

I was stunned. So, is this what my mother meant about the albatross?? Would I never, ever be able to leave this house, after all?

I decided to give it one last effort. I walked a bit further in to the water and said, out loud, right before I unleashed it again, "if you need to come back, come back, but I'm going to stay here until I'm sure you're gone." And then I realized that in order to truly leave, I needed to say goodbye. Goodbye to the fight my parents had right before my dad left for good - goodbye to Babe and Dog, the two beautiful animals that loved us in spite of ourselves; goodbye to the nights without heat and the days without my mom who was lost to her own sadness.

I threw it and this time I really, truly let go. I stood there for close to an hour - waiting for it to come back, and it never did. Even if it had washed up on shore right next to me, I don't think I would have seen it. I was changed. Things were beginning to look different.