I ran away from home over a dress.
On a cold day in February my mother and I sat in the parking lot of my high school.
“It’s just a dress!” I screamed at her.
She didn’t think it was appropriate for my boyfriend, who she hated, to buy it for me. Too intimate a purchase for a man for a man who wasn’t my husband. To me, this was the final act in a lifetime of heavy, suffocating rules.
Not being allowed to date until 9th grade. Not being allowed to dance the way I wanted. The dresses I had to wear, despite my protests, that my friends laughed at. Parts of the floors, walls, and yard that we couldn’t walk on or touch.
An underlying expectation of perfection coupled with religious teachings that my very essence was sinful.
They were controls my mother suffered under as well, in her own hidden way.
And for both of us, always the internal backdrop of shame.
I got out of the car and slammed the door. I called my boyfriend to pick me up and drop me at a family friend’s house, where I stayed for two days.
All I wanted was space. Space to breath. Space to feel acceptable. Space to calm down. The only way she could have brought me closer, was to let me walk away.
It was the one freedom I decided I needed.
It was the last freedom she was prepared to give.
She clawed at me through the phone, desperately pleading for me to come home.
—
It’s the hardest thing to mock our pride and admit that the throbbing open sore our child is showing us, matches the shape and depth and inner feel of our own wound utterly.
A mother’s wound isn’t so open and gaping. It’s a dark brownish purple, crusted over with excuses and guilt. It’s buried in clutter so deep it’s easier to ignore.
But the matching wound shapes are a key. And the daughter knows innately that her keenest, most consummate healing lies first with her mother.
When the child shows her wound, the mother has a choice. It’s the first of many, but each costing her irretrievable time.
She can retreat, overwhelmed, into the clutter.
Or she can uncover and feel.
If she chooses the latter, she will find the path to healing in the pain. Not just for herself, but magically, mystically, powerfully.
For them both.
