The Long Way Home

So let me tell you about the family God placed me in.

First, Neil Diamond isn't really my father.

No kidding, right? But knowing that Neil Diamond isn't my father also meant knowing that my mother lived with a significant mental illness. How are you supposed to go back to the beginning and find your way once you’ve realized the map you've been following is not only illusory, it isn't even your own illusion?

And how do you cleanse that illusion from your burned and shell-shocked life without dishonoring the person who gave you such a beautiful and terrible gift? If she could read these words, would her dear heart break? Now that she’s gone, how can I show her how tenderly I loved her, yet place her craziness far away from me, away from my damaged brother and sisters?

Because it was a beautiful gift: beautiful and poison, like Snow White's apple or Rip Van Winkle's mountain wine. It was a thing that seduced with its lush, sparkling beauty and heady promise, yet it blighted every blessing of the present.

What a time it was: The dawning of the New Age—and for her, freedom from the debauchery and claustrophobia of her old life. A moment of breathless anticipation as she realized she could have her own ideas and thoughts—that she could wander fearlessly for the first time. But she dreamed so deeply into the spirit woods that she could not find her way back. Certainly the beast she met there looked more like a savior than a psychosis. Why wouldn't she follow him? He seemed to know the way.

Sometimes I wonder at my complicity. Yes, I was just a kid—and not a very worldly one at that, a bit fey myself. But I have kids, and I don't believe they’d let me get away with living the kind of dream that I allowed my mother to live. Only once, timidly, did I try to nudge Mom back to hard-headed reality. It was springtime 1973, when the spell was just beginning to set, that I made some small remark to show I knew she was only kidding about Neil Diamond’s presence in our lives—and the look she gave me was as piercing and direct as her words: “I’ve never been more serious.” She didn't acknowledge the joke because it wasn’t a joke—it was her reality. So I had to choose between following a lost soul, and not following anybody. I wasn't aware of another option. Not following anybody was what I was used to, and probably what I should have stuck with—but I was fourteen and it was a time of new beginnings. So I chose to follow.

After all I was finally wandering fearlessly, too. For the first time since age six I was at a school where nobody knew my name was Bucky Beaver, or worse, Fleabag. And my mom was turning out to be such a smiling, curious companion—an interesting somebody who was looking for her own stuff along the way. How could I help but get caught up in her odyssey? She was the mom; she was supposed to be leading us. When she got lost we coped by believing—or pretending to believe—that we weren't lost at all; we believed that we were blessedly on the less-travelled path, headed for the best of all possible homes.

We'd come from perhaps not the worst of all possible homes, but it was certainly not a place of comfort and refuge. We learned, in our home, that our security was shaky—our roof and sustenance were never to be taken for granted, because they might disappear any minute.

By age nine or ten, I lied for my father regularly, telling creditors on the telephone that he wasn't home. One year, our new living room furniture was not to be mentioned to our kindly old landlady, because the rent was in arrears.

Home was where we learned to fear our unpredictable father, who could turn into a monster for no apparent reason. He was the man who called his child daughters filthy names in a way that, though we didn't understand the words, we knew they meant we disgusted him. He was the man who built a bonfire in our back yard and burned all of our toys, the dear stuffed creatures we'd loved since babyhood, Dakoo and Scottie and Yellow Kitty. I was maybe eight years old; Lou would have been six and George and Joanie only toddlers. It’s a hazy memory, or maybe a smoky one: Lou and I, our own hearts mauled, trying to comfort the twins. Or maybe it was George and Joanie trying to comfort Lou and me as we got off the afternoon school bus. Did Dad burn their animals too, or just mine and Lou’s, because we were older, old enough to be finally keeping our room tidy? There we were, the four of us: partners in grief. Hearts not yet old or hard enough to let those imaginary lives end in the great whoosh of sudden gasoline fire and black smoke in a rusty steel drum where our yard met the woods; we kept them alive for each other in heaven. One of the twins’ animals, a small woolly lamb who escaped the inferno, hung on the clothesline camouflaged amid socks and towels, witness to that grubby little crime. (Do you remember?)