My Mother Left Me to Enter Witness Protection
A part of me was relieved.
My mother entered the Federal Witness Protection Program the summer I turned 15. The incidents that led up to this Lifetime movie moment weren’t my mother’s first battles with the law or even the first time she went away for a while. Rather, it was the first time she ever admitted the truth: she wouldn’t be coming back, and I couldn’t go with her.
I think some tiny part of me was relieved to hear these words. It had been roughly 11 years of broken promises such as:
I’m going to get better.
Soon, I will get a house.
It was time to give up the ghost.
I couldn’t admit it then, but I was tired of the false hope. Pretending that someday I would be normal was exhausting.
The moment she said, “Witness protection,” I knew I would never be normal. The hand had already been dealt, and it was a losing one at that. It hadn’t been normal for a child of 8 years old to learn to play pool in a biker hall from a man named Dog and his friends. It wasn’t standard custodial practice for a grandparent to file a kidnapping claim and have the FBI investigate.
It was reasonably abnormal for people to get divorced in the late 80’s. Nevermind the fact that neither parent…
