My mother was seventeen when I was born and
twenty-one when my parents divorced four years later. By sixteen, she was
already working as a bookkeeper and office worker for a local cotton gin/fertilizer
plant. I was not planed, was an only child and everything I have learned or experienced
since leads me to believe that when my mother looked forward to her future at
sixteen she was looking forward to a career rather than to having children and
making a home. My strong impression is that if my mother had “decided” when to
have children rather than having a child inconveniently thrust upon when she
was busy making other plans, she would never have decided the time was right to
do so and, eventually, biology would have made the decision for her to remain
childless.
My mother
returned to work full-time at the cotton gin shortly after my birth. My father
was a farmer and this was all happening in Alabama in the nineteen-fifties. It
was extremely rare for a farm wife to return to work before her children were
old enough to attend school. My mother’s determination to do so was the main
factor in my parents’ divorce. This decision was not driven by economic necessity.
Both of my grandfathers were relatively affluent by the standards of this
community and my mother’s decision to work full time with a baby at home was
atypical to say the least. My father’s perception that she had little interest
in being a wife or a mother was much more grounded in the common assumptions of
that community. In my first years, my father dropped me off at my maternal
grand-parents’ home in the morning and either he or my mother picked me up at
night except for the occasional nights when I sleep over.
After the
divorce, my mother and I moved in with her parents and, later, moved to a house
in Ashford, Alabama across the street from the cotton gin. Various black women
were hired over the years to keep house and watch after me. Oddly enough, this
continued until I was in my early teens. These caretakers were hired to cook,
clean and keep me out of trouble. They had no special training and were never
lead to believe that part of their job was teaching me skills either academic
or social. They were kindly women who were poorly paid, barely educated and
surprisingly good for me and to me all things considered.
The most
striking thing about the child care I received is how little interaction I had
with my mother that was more than superficial. I spent a lot of time in my room
at night and my mom often came home late or left again shortly after coming
home. I became an avid reader early on. I can never remember seeing my mother
read a book. I can never remember her taking much of an interest in anything beyond
local gossip, her work or what was for supper.
I’ve always
suffered from a loneliness that I would describe as constitutional rather than
situational, as not being a matter of not having enough people around or even
having the right people around. The right people to have around and to grow close
with me have always been those who could understand and accept privacy and a
distance in me that is there even with the people I love best and trust must. I’ve
come to believe that this constitutional loneliness is the structuring into my
personality of a lesson I learned all the way down in my first relationship,
the relationship that was the prototype and model for all the relationships
that will ever come after.
I’m one of a
small group of people who learned very early on not to expect to be loved
unconditionally or even understood completely by even the people we love as
deeply as we can love. For me, love is two solitudes that grieve together for
the distance between them that will, finally, always make them two and not one,
each unique and precious but also both separate and not the same. In love, this
distance between two closes to only the distance that makes two and not one and
leaves both standing alone staring across infinite night at one shining and
unreachable star, feeling an emptiness that this one shining and unreachable
star and only this one shining and unreachable star could ever fill.
