I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (38 page)

Ride in peace. Be.

I get it. Sam’s not really
thinking
anything, in the sense that I, as a woman, am thinking: i.e., constantly trawling for information on the physical, mental, and/or emotional state of everyone around me. The mind of a man resembles less a ticker tape than it does an EKG. There’s activity going on there, but wild swings high and low are an indication that something’s wrong. They like to be right in the middle. Sam doesn’t really communicate verbally. He communicates through his presence. Through being.

I decide to take this time together, on the way home, in the car, driving down the 134 freeway, as a mother-son meditation. Sure enough, a few minutes later, Sam has something to say.

“Mom…”

“Yeah?”

“Can I watch
Naruto
when we get home?” That’s the Japanese animation show that he loves. “When my homework is done?”

“Sure, honey.”

Hearing his voice again reminds me that we’ve been together this whole time. We just haven’t been talking. It feels kind of good. Like,
We know we’re here. We don’t have to hear ourselves to know we’re here
.

My kid is a lot deeper than I am. And then:

“Mom?”

“Yeah, pumpkin?” I say expectantly. I think maybe now that I’ve succeeded so well in being quiet, as a reward Sam’s going to tell me something up close and personal about what happened today at school.

“Can we have macaroni and cheese for dinner?” he asks.

I inwardly laugh at myself for being so relentlessly the way I am. “Yeah, honey. We can have macaroni and cheese.”

It’s so much less complicated than I make it.

NEITHER OF US CAN SLEEP.
It’s dark, and very late, and though there is another bed, Sam is lying in mine, because this is Paris, and we are jet-lagging. At age eleven and a half, it’s still okay to
sleep next to your mom, a last gasp of pure childhood.

Tomorrow we are going to Versailles, which has brought up a discussion about Marie Antoinette and her public execution, which has led to a discussion of Henry VIII and his six wives, which has led to a discussion of divorce.

“You leave everyone,” Sam says quietly. His tone of voice isn’t superangry, but he’s definitely accusing me. Over the past couple of years he has figured out that I left his dad, I left my other boyfriends, and especially, I left Paul, whom he loved. “Why do you leave, Mom?”

When I was growing up, parents never had to answer to their children. Not until Family Day at rehab, anyway. As much as it’s no fun to think about where I have failed as a wife and mother, I’m glad that my kid feels comfortable asking me this. It is that much less stuff he’ll have to carry around in his family-dysfunction backpack.

“Things are complicated, honey. You’ll understand more when you’re older.” I go into a brief explanation about people with crazy childhoods, and how they have a harder time than others forming relationships, and how I’m learning a lot and working hard to heal the things in me that have made it difficult for me to stay with someone.

“Sometimes I have picked right but couldn’t stay. And sometimes I have picked wrong and couldn’t stay. It’s complicated.”

“Why did you leave Paul, Mom?” Sam has asked me this question before, but never point-blank.

I take a deep breath. It breaks my heart that my actions, my choices, have affected my child in such a profound way. I know that Paul has been recorded on his heart as the first person to disappoint him, to abandon him, to fall horribly, painfully short. To be glaringly human.

Besides me, of course.

“I had to, honey.”

I’ve never told Sam exactly why I left. I think he knows Paul cheated, but I’ve never said it, because when it happened, Sam was only eight, too young for that level of disclosure. Still, I think he
knows (in the way I remember “knowing” things when I was a kid), because one time, in the grocery store, near the tabloids in the magazine rack, he asked me what cheating was. But this is a whole new ball game. He’s holding me accountable for the outcome of the relationship.

“I just couldn’t stay,” I say. “Like I said, sometimes people can, but sometimes they can’t. This was one of those situations where…it wouldn’t have been good. For any of us.”

“But why, Mom?” He wants to know why. Exactly and precisely
why
I had to—and thus he had to—leave.

There’s something in his voice, a quality that tells me that he is asking so pointedly because he is ready to hear the truth. Not a blaming, ugly, gory truth. But the truth that will dispel the confusion, that will allow him, going forward, to make sense of a very painful situation in a new way, that matches his going-on-twelve understanding of the world. “What happened?”

I’m facing away from him, and he is facing away from me, and there’s almost no light in the room. We are almost four years and 5,600 miles away from what happened, and it seems like now is the time. I say a prayer:
God, give me the words
.

“Paul started to date a girl, honey. And when…when I found out, he didn’t stop.” That was as plain as I could say it. No judgment. No vitriol. Just the facts. None of Mommy’s unfinished business, hurt, and pain spilling all over on it. Because, thank god, Mommy’s dealt with it.

“Why did he do that?”

Such a simple question. So hard to answer.

“I don’t know, muffin. Sometimes it’s hard to know why people do things. People don’t always make sense. But I couldn’t keep us in that situation. It was just too destructive. Believe me, my heart was broken. I loved Paul.” I pause for a minute. “I know you did, too.”

There’s a long silence. Which I’m careful not to just…fill.

“Is he married to her now?”

The question takes me by surprise, though it shouldn’t. One of his friends’ fathers left his wife and is still with the woman he left her for. They’re married now, with kids, living happily ever after. (Or not.) This is Sam’s frame of reference for people who leave people for other people.

“No. They never even had a relationship. The girl was, like, twenty-one. They were never really going to be together.”

There’s a silence while Sam tries to figure it out, tries again to answer his question—
Why
? And I get to ask myself, too, from where I stand today. Back then I cried. Now, I accept. Because now I get it.

Paul was me.

I’m
the one who leaves. I left Dan. I left Kenny. I left Michael and Brandon. I chose Paul out of myself. Out of who I was. And when he was no longer me, when we were no longer a match, we left. Like one planetary body that falls out of the orbit of another. There’s really no one to blame.

“Sometimes people have a hard time accepting real love, muffin. It doesn’t match the way they feel about themselves inside. So they move away from the people who love them and move toward people who don’t.”

Sam’s not saying a word. But I can feel him listening. I keep talking.

“And I understand that, because I’ve been like that in the past, too. Forgiving Paul is like forgiving myself.” I pause. Is this too much information? I let another few seconds pass. “I know my choices have affected you, honey. I’m so, so sorry. I can’t change the past. No one can. But we can make it…” I struggle to find the word. What can we make of the past? “We can make it count for something.”

That’s it. We can make the past sacred—though “sacred” is probably a little too high-concept for an eleven-year-old boy.

“No
one
person is ever to blame,” I continue. “I had a part in what happened with Paul. Your dad had a part in what happened with me. That’s how life is. Making mistakes—even huge ones—is what
it means to be human. Otherwise we’d be, like, daisies. Or house cats.” House cats don’t fuck shit up. Or get married and divorced three times.

I wait for Sam to say something or to ask another question, but he doesn’t. He’s fallen asleep. Finally.

I lie there, staring out the window at the rooftops, thinking I might cry because even the rooftops in Paris are so damn beautiful. I feel like something good has happened. Something that never would have happened at home.

Because we don’t lie awake, in the dark, jet-lagging, at home.

As I float off to sleep, Sam’s foot touching mine, a sense of peace washes over me. It’s the peace I’ve been looking for all these years. And I know it’s mine to keep.

Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral

Jacket photograph courtesy of the author