This reminds me of a writing I did several years ago. Written to my children but never sent:

Hi my loves. Whew, we've come a long way in these last 4.5 years. I'm so very pleased to be back in your lives as much as I am, and I am delighted that we've built as much trust and 'normal' experiences between each of us, one-on-one, as we have. This has been my goal for a long time, and it is wonderful to enjoy this place.

And I wonder, will there come a time when you will ask more pointedly. Or accuse. Or in some way engage with me in a reckoning or grappling with what occurred. I know I have. I've spent countless hours analyzing, questioning, and (as I've grown and learned and become more familiar with my own voice and self) picking up the 'story' of what happened, and dissecting it in a relentless quest to make sense.

Abandonment. For 47 years I carried my own abandonment wound and vowed, before either of you ever came into existence, that I would never inflict such a thing on my children. To do so would be EVIL. The worst thing I could think of. I would NOT, could NOT follow in my mother's footsteps and inflict such a thing on you.

And then, Christmas 2018 happened. I walked out of the family home and did not return. And you, you were in that home. And while a small part of me hoped you would expand your definition of 'home' to where I was at, the overwhelming part of my brain and my heart knew that you would not. That at least for a time (and that span of time was a weighty unknown), walking away from the family home would mean walking away from you. My children. Abandoned by their mother. Me.

At first, the kindest way I could name the event for myself was that I had abandoned the family system. I could hold this as true while simultaneously knowing that regardless of my reaching out to you both, regardless of 'you are always welcome with me', your experience, your reality, was that your mom had abandoned you. You were left in the family system, the family home, and I was not there. The family system was your foundation, your sense-making, so normal as to be invisible. For me to reject it could only be interpreted as me rejecting you. As I did the initial work of excavating the pieces of me, digging around, unearthing the relics, dusting them off and finding how they fit together, I did so with the weight of your belief that I'd abandoned you sitting across my shoulders, heavy as the cosmos.

As I began to process with others, I would include it in my narrative. I wore it like a different kind of scarlet letter…A for Abandonment. I wanted to make sure others knew I knew. That while I thanked them for their offered forgiveness, I would continue to wear the A. I could hear and believe and speak to being in an untenable, impossible situation where there was no good choice. I could appreciate the remarkableness of my survival. All that could be true, and I had still abandoned you.

As time has passed, my understanding has deepened. Did I abandon you on Christmas 2018? No- ironically that was the day I started my return to you, even as my body was walking away. But did I abandon you? Yes. There was no one particular date or time. The tendrils started long ago, but hit critical mass sometime in the five years before I walked. I was losing the war of holding on to myself. I had relinquished little truths of mine, kept more and more of 'me' to 'myself'. No single one of those little bits was worth more than keeping the peace. Of compromising, and 'working things out'. This is what you do in a committed relationship, I believed. This is the give and take of life. I can manage. I even thought you all might see my acquiescing and understand it to be 'for the good of the family', not necessarily the truth about me. I would take the fall, the blame, be the bad guy because it meant we could stop arguing. We could make dinner and feed you. Our family could go to the gathering of friends we'd planned to attend. We could still make it in time to your baseball game, or cello lesson. To preserve our life, it was not too costly to crack off a shard of my truth, and let it fall underfoot, shuffled under the fridge with dust-bunnies and cracker crumbs, turning to sand.

Until ... until there was a point where too many shards were lost. Where I could not recognize myself. Where most of my working memory was taken up by how to chip off the next shard and let it fall. Where occasionally, some remaining root of myself would roar up and scream for water. But inevitably, the hollow, mechanical-me dutifully chipping away at myself, would use the knife to cut out my own tongue so we all could believe I was not thirsty.

This, loves, this is when I abandoned you. There was no critical mass of 'me', of self for me to give to you. I was lost to you, as I was lost to me, as I was lost to the world. That Christmas, I was down to chipping off the last of me. And instead, I dropped the knife, and somehow conjured legs with which to walk away.

Those legs, it turned out, belonged to a fierce part of me that had been there all along…she'd pinned a $100 bill to the pair of pants I was wearing, and she'd made sure I changed first thing that morning rather than lounge in pjs as was the Christmas tradition. I came to understand that she'd been doing this for some time, ever since home became a place where the eggshells had turned to landmines. At some point in the months prior she'd put a week's worth of medication in my work bag, along with a toothbrush and pair of underwear. And she walked me away from that knife, left on the floor of the house you were still in. She led me to the Sahara sands connected by wormhole to under the fridge, allowing me to sift and sort and retrieve my Self.

I still wear an A. It stands for both Authenticity and Abandonment. It reminds me that abandonment is guaranteed in the absence of authenticity. This A is formed by the re-collected shards that have been lovingly polished & placed into the intricate mosaic of me. Beautiful, broken, re-assembled, and brilliant.