Windswept.

Running was the only way she ever left her lovers. My mother was a fan of swift departures; clean breaks. She always timed her escapes during the day, when they were at work. They came with no warning. I wonder what that’s like: to come home expecting dinner but finding instead an empty house. Did she leave “Dear John” letters? Or were they given no explanation, left to find meaning on their own as they sifted through the carnage she had left behind?

The most likely scenario is that they were as clueless as her own children were about what prompted these abrupt departures. She’s not the type to offer explanations. Perhaps the escapes followed fights, or maybe it’s just in her nature to flee. Could she lack some necessary gene that enables mothers to form bonds? (The inability to produce oxytocin would explain a lot, actually.) Whatever the motivation, they always seemed spontaneous.

It usually went a little like this: Late morning. A voice on the intercom instructing my teacher to send me to the office draws a chorus of “Ooh-ooh-oohs” from the other kids, because of course delighting in other’s troubles is a universally favorite past time of children. Eventually, after a pattern of running had developed, a summons to the office specifying that I bring my coat and bag immediately clued me in that it was happening again. I’d take a long last look at the teacher, classroom, and friends I knew I’d never see again.

But not the first time. The first time I was as blind sighted as my stepfather must have been later that night. My cheeks burned with embarrassment as the others teased me, but I was also very curious. Aaron and Tonya, my biological siblings, were already waiting at the office. My mother had been drumming her fingers on the sign out sheet, and offered only a brief wave to Mrs. Dinkly, the chubby red haired secretary whose large bosom, the subject of much playground discussion, always strained the buttons of her blouses. I had never been able to look her in the eyes after hearing what the boys said, and even then I blushed and walked faster to catch up to my mom.

“Where’s Bub and Susan?” I asked, noting the absence of my stepsiblings. But she ignored me, herding us toward the tiny tan Volkswagen Rabbit that wasn’t capable of hauling all the children at once anyway. She offered no explanation until the car had left the parking lot. Finally, our answer came: she was unapologetic as she told us that Nelson couldn’t be our dad anymore, nor his children our siblings. They had married when I was two, a year after my birth father died. Nelson was the only father I knew.

I cried nearly the whole way from Randle to Montesano, but not because I’d never see my daddy again. I cried because it was library day, and my book, still zipped up tight in my backpack, wouldn’t be returned. I begged and pleaded when I found it, tried unsuccessfully to convince my mother to turn the car around and drive the twenty miles back to the school. But there was no convincing her. She had no regrets it seemed, since making the decision to leave, and was annoyed that we weren’t as eager as she was for the “fresh start”. There was no room in our new life to fret over trivial nonsense like unreturned library books.

But I was only six. I felt much guilt contemplating how, because of me, other children would never again get to check it out the book, never get to admire the beautiful watercolor illustrations. It broke my heart.

We stopped for gas at the junction with I-5. My tears had subsided, though the dried trails on my cheek testified to their presence, and my breathing was still interrupted every thirty seconds or go with a gasping hiccup.

“I’m hungry” my older brother complained.

Mother’s hands disappeared into the depths of her bulky black hand bag, and emerged with three chocolate bars. “Here” she said, tossing them in the general direction of the back seat. “Special treat today: chocolate for lunch.”

“Rad!” my sister exclaimed. “I call the caramel one!” My sister had been crying, too, because my mom didn’t pack her favorite purple dress, but the novelty of getting candy as a meal smoothed over her bruised feelings.

“We can’t eat those! Those are from the fundraiser!” That morning, I had carefully set out the large manila envelope full of cash to turn into the school. I had sold every candy bar. My siblings had complained that I was only outselling them because I was so small and cute: none of them had even went through half their stockpile. Mom was supposed to turn in the cash money and leftover chocolate bars that day, but instead the school’s money filled our gas tank. The class that sold the most candy bars was going to win a pizza party. But now my class would OWE money because my mom was a thief.

Like most children that age, I was obsessed with justice. I broke rules, of course, but when others did so I was the first to point it out. At first I refused to eat the candy bars on principle, but I had given in before we got to Montesano. I was only six, after all.

It was my youth, I suppose, that insulated me from the reality of the situation. I had woke up to what I thought was an ordinary day, but before lunch, everything I’d ever known had been erased, like an Etch-O-Sketch drawing carefully crafted for hours then gone forever with a few vigorous shakes. It should have been a very surreal experience to lose half my family on a single car ride, but the strangeness faded quickly for me. The memory of the daddy and siblings I used to have steadily faded a little more every time a new situation unfolded, until all that remained were phantom memories, as slippery as remnants of a dream one could never quite recall. Within a few years I would give up on trying to remember, realizing that I no longer missed them; because by then it had become hard to feel anything much for anyone at all.

For such a monumental day, there should have been some grand display of ominous clouds and rolling thunder, but there was no foreshadowing and my mother didn’t stray from routine. Nothing that morning set off warning bells. I got dressed, ate my cereal, brushed my teeth…. Mom kissed all of us, even my stepbrother and stepsister, and waved goodbye from the porch as my five siblings and I boarded the bus. What an actress she was, reminding them to grab their homework like everything was normal. She must have started packing as soon as the bus pulled away, just minutes after telling two children she never intended to see again that she loved them.

Can you imagine how that feels? I don’t mean the loss of stepsiblings and stepfathers. Broken families are pretty much the norm these days. I mean losing one’s home. If you stop right now, and close your eyes, can you create an image in your mind of exactly what your home looked like when you left it this morning? Did you make your bed? Were there unwashed dishes in the sink? What do you love most about it? The way the sunlight angles in through a certain window? How your books fit perfectly into the built in bookshelf? If you were never going to see your home again, and told you had five minutes to pack a single bag of belongings, what would you put inside?

On a few lucky occasions, there was time to stop at home before we left town. But usually we weren’t afforded the luxury of choosing what went in the one bag we were each told to pack. Usually we had to make do with whatever mother had hastily stuffed inside. My sister’s purple dress was only the first in a long line of cherished things left behind: Over the years there were many forgotten toys and abandoned items of clothing. But inanimate objects weren’t the only things we sacrificed to mother’s whims. Not being privy to her plans meant we had to leave friends or first loves without saying goodbye. We abandoned cherished pets.

As much as losing friends and animals hurt, though, the hardest departures were the ones when we couldn’t pack our own bags. How powerless we felt, subject to her whims. Nothing was safe. Nothing was consistent. Sometimes even her personality changed. She collected unicorns when she was married to Nelson. In later years she was fond of Native American décor or angels. Were our interests supposed to be fleeting as well? If we had imitated her mercurial ways would the losses have come more easily?

I think only refugees or victims of natural disasters could relate to my experience, for theirs is the closest to mine. Someone who fled a home engulfed in flames, who only had time to save a single armful of possessions, they probably know the helplessness one feels after being abruptly severed from their belongings. If that fire survivor had to go through it repeatedly, without warning, then they might have ended up as lonely and unsure of reality as I was. Mine was a Groundhog Day experience: I went through the experience of uprooting more times than I can count: five states, twenty schools. She picked us at school with pre-packed bags maybe half a dozen of those moves. Over and over, the pattern persisted: losing the homes, friends, and material objects I was attached to. But it wasn’t due to flames or political strife. The natural disaster was my mother.

My mother was a tornado. Her impulsive decisions to end relationships and pattern of hasty departures robbed me of the security and trust a child needs to develop. I learned that the world was a terrifying and unpredictable place; nearly as unpredictable as she was. In my world, love was conditional, family was temporary, and children were a nuisance.

If only she had loved us, it might have been bearable. She didn’t abuse us. She was just indifferent: I don’t remember her ever reading me a story. Parenting was my big sister’s realm. Affection was Tonya’s responsibility too, apparently. Our bond probably saved us during the years mom dated her most abusive boyfriend. We weren’t close to our brother, who resented us. Aaron ran away at sixteen b but I don’t blame him. At six, he would have been the only one old enough to remember my father’s death. And our mom’s boyfriends were always hardest on him; he was the oldest, the one who challenged their authority merely by possessing a y chromosome. So Tonya and I clung to each other, comforted each other, each providing the only stable relationship in our violently chaotic world. And then she left me, too.

Her departure fell the same year as Aaron’s did, the summer after fifth grade. Fourteen and pregnant, she moved in with her boyfriend’s family. I didn’t get angry. I was too numb to feel, and all of the exits- the addition and subtraction and rearrangement of our family unit- were just too familiar to elicit a reaction anymore. Besides, hunger preoccupied me. The occupation of my mother’s new boyfriend required frequent weekend trips to Las Vegas: he was a cocaine dealer. And she was a user. Which meant there usually wasn’t anything to eat. So I started to randomly show up at various friends’ houses at lunch time, making sure not to hit the same house too often. And sometimes, when I had the nerve, I stole plastic wrapped sandwiches from the Circle K on the corner.

But this arrangement didn’t last long. Satisfying both her boyfriend and her habit proved too big an obligation. I was a buzzkill and they fought. I anticipated a move soon, and I was right. But I was the only one who left. Two weeks before the start of my sixth grade year, I waved goodbye to my mom through the glass of a Greyhound bus. With a suitcase of clothes and two egg salad sandwiches that would spoil in the desert heat before we hit L.A. I was embarking alone on a three day bus trip to Washington state, to live with an aunt I hadn’t seen in more than two years.

As I huddled in the hot, sticky seats of the crowded bus, I recalled the last time I had seen my mom’s younger sister. It was two years before that day on the Greyhound. My mom, brother, and I were visiting her over Spring Break while my sister spent the week with my grandma. The last time I had seen her, the Morton police were folding her into the backsat of a cop car. Thirty minutes earlier, pistol cocked and aimed at my uncle, my mom had intervened in a frightening domestic violence confrontation my brother and I had front row seats to. “Get your God-damn hands off my sister right now or I’ll blow you away!” she had demanded.

After my uncle had backed away and cowered in a corner, the police were alerted. I doubt my mom realized her phone call would end that way: even though Aunt Chris’s face was bleeding and swollen, and my uncle’s unscathed, they arrested them both, because she had indicated in her statement that she fought back.

My aunt’s arrest wasn’t the most memorable part of that trip, though. Nor was it the way my mom had intervened. Mom’s shocking brave threat to my uncle as he held Aunt Chris by the scalp with one hand and pummeled her with the other certainly had made an impression, but what stands out the most is the way my brother held me in his arms. As I sobbed “Make it stop!” repeatedly, he kissed my forehead and rocked me like a baby, whispering a promise that it would be okay; We’d all be safe. That’s the only memory I have of my big brother being protective.

Pushing the images from my mind, I found myself wishing he was there.. .Even though he had been a pretty lousy big brother, I missed Aaron that morning, and Tonya, too, as I watched the broken, bleached blond figure of our mother-distorted from the greasy trails of the last passengers fingers on the window, grow smaller and smaller until she was swallowed up by the shimmering waves of heat on the horizon. I knew I’d probably miss her as well, even though she had been largely absent from my life; drugs , men or night shifts as a bartender had conststantly taken her from me, stealing her away as suddenly and completely as the asphalt mirage had just appeared to.

I had never felt as alone or scared as I did that day. I didn’t know what to expect in Washington, but that had pretty much always been the case. Whether I found myself in the back of a crowded Greyhound on my way to live with strangers or sitting in the backseat of a Volkswagen Rabbit, gorging on stolen chocolate, leaving home meant headed toward an unknown future I didn’t choose and had no control over.

It’s a terrifying thing to go through life like a tattered, sea tossed ship, trying in vain to react to changes shaped by forces beyond one’s control. For years, my mother had been the force, but now even the source of my chaos would be unknown to me. She had tied me to the pillar and sacrificed me to the sea. I had lost everyone I ever loved. Every time the world started to make sense, my life was rearranged in a manner that contradicted my theories. That three-day road trip marked the end of my childhood. I was finally, utterly, alone. Untethered. Windswept.