Chapter 1: Transition
After my divorce at age thirty-one, I broke camp and moved with my two-year-old daughter from Palo Alto, California to my parents’ house in St. Louis. Mother and Father waited hand-in-hand for us at the designated Lambert Field Airport arrival gate—access all greeters had in those pre-9-11 days–wearing a look of fortitude, which slowly melted into joy as they folded their granddaughter into their arms, yielding to her irresistible toddler cuteness and planting kisses on her snub nose and big Dumbo ears made for listening.
Our arrival melded for my parents the windfall of a grandparental love fest with their doubtful attitude towards my move back into dependence. In addition to the practical inconveniences, my homecoming may have painfully reminded them of my adolescent delinquency that had for a time severed our family ties. Not to mention their more recent disappointment concerning my failed marriage, shattering the fragile image they had been busy constructing of their Johnny-come-lately promising daughter.
Even by my own account, my life was a mess. Money issues, divorce, the abrupt boot-kick into single parenting, the limbo I occupied between my past graduate studies in literature and my as yet unassured future career, and now finding myself creeping on all fours back home where I hadn’t properly lived since I was fourteen. The only thing that saved me, really, was my utter cluelessness about most of life, obscured by my single-minded ambition to become a doctor.
I moved back into my childhood room—the one with the window that during most of my early adolescence cranked open just wide enough for me to wiggle through and jump out into the yard and then into the car full of joy-riding boys while my parents slept. It was in this room with its spartan teak pallet where I would now be sleeping alone for the foreseeable future. I sank back into my girlhood pillow, the bedside bookshelves still carrying their freight of Andrew Lang’s fairy tales and ancient schoolbooks with failing spines.
My daughter Vanessa I plunked in the room next door. She of course was free of adverse teen memories, innocent of all the adult drama around her. She’d had no voice, no say in the divorce: or for that matter any choice in her parents, or their conflicts, or the two thousand miles that now separated her from her father.
Months earlier, at an airport, I found myself pushing Vanessa in her stroller as the crowds rushed by. What if I just left her there? So went my thought experiment. Not that I would actually do such a thing. I was overwhelmed by her trust in me, sitting in that sunken, denim collapsible stroller seat, her faith incontestable, involuntary, complete. It filled me with a sense of terror and tenderness, this utter dependence that seemed simultaneously a miracle, as astounding as her conception and birth: an overwhelming gift. And here she was now, torn from her small life as she had known it, always without choice or agency, because of what the grownups had said and decided and done.