While we waited for the police, my sister Holly searched our mother’s office. She was looking for clues as to why she hadn’t come home the night before. Exhausted, I leaned back in the chair my mother had bought when she left my father’s house almost a year ago.
Holly was almost 30 and had her own family. She had left her children with her mother-in-law before coming. I was 17 and shared this apartment with my mother every other week, according to the custody agreement with my father.
It was the first time that my mother did not come home.
A woman who wanted to build her own life
She was many things, including a librarian who loved Mozart and a mother who made her child eat her broccoli. She was an adulteress who had left my father for a man who didn’t want to commit. He had hurt her and left her ashamed. She was also stuck in a depression she couldn’t seem to get out of, and consumed by ever-worsening anxiety. My father insisted that she seek treatment, but she refused.
My mother was above all a woman who wanted to build her own life and couldn’t. The summer before he disappeared, I had aborted a suicide attempt. That’s why, that day when I leaned on her chair, I thought she was probably dead.
I had waited for her all evening, dancing in the living room and leafing through the books in her library. But the hours had passed. Suddenly I remembered how she said goodbye to me in the morning and my heart started beating faster. She had slipped into my bed and held my teenage body like when I was a child. “It’s nice !” I thought, half asleep. Before leaving the apartment to go to work, she had placed a 20 dollar bill on her desk next to a note that read: “I love you, Mary.”
A farewell, not a new beginning
It was a radical change from the arguments that had become our common lot during our journey through my teenage years and his divorce, and I had thought that things were finally going to be better. But when night fell without any news from him, I understood everything: his gestures were a farewell, not a new beginning.
“I believe that my life will change”, I said to a friend on the phone. I drove 100 km/h to my father’s house, lay down on the sofa and left increasingly desperate messages on my mother’s answering machine. In the last ones, I no longer said that “Mummy mummy” amid sobs.
I loved my mother more than anything. But when I entered high school, her presence became unbearable and I began to see her as all teenage girls see their mother when they are looking for their place. Absolutely everything she did, whether it was chewing her