When I was nine, my oldest brother left one day in the fall, at dawn. His traveling companion, also our relative, left with him, kissing me lightly on my cheek. I was awake. I could have opened my eyes, but I had said my goodbyes the night before. I wasn’t going to do it again. I heard them whisper. I heard them close the door. I heard their footsteps. I heard my mother’s muffled voice. I didn’t fall back asleep. I lied there, not knowing how to close my eyes.
When I was nine, Daddy was also not home. He had left the year before. I cried often. I hadn’t exactly learned to be tough and hold my tears like my mother. So I cried every chance I got. There was this one day, among many others, when my other brother came home from work and saw me running with tears to my mother’s bedroom. And I heard my mother say to him, “she misses her father.” I liked to think I was the most fragile because I was the baby of the family. I didn’t know that my sister and brothers had been through worst.
When I was nine, I hated school. I cried every morning. I prayed for it to end, for my pain to go away. I don’t know if I knew what that pain was. My father wasn’t there. But I wasn’t mad at him. I guess I just wanted to cry, and their absence was the perfect excuse. So I spent that year hating school. It was also the year I decided I loved my father more because he wasn’t there.
Those years ended somehow. I reunited with my father, not with my older brother. I also left my younger brother, so did my mother, later my sister did too. Today, my siblings are in serious relationships, married, and engaged, soon-to-be-married. They’ve all experienced leaving. They’ve all been left. Some, more than others. I didn’t exactly grow up with them. I sort of became my own version, more American and more confused. I experienced leaving them. I experienced living with them, at different times, in different places, temporarily. I learned to enjoy moments with them because I knew one of us would leave again. None of us likes to stay put. We are, after all, our mother’s children. We outgrow our normal states of being. We outgrown ourselves. We like to break free, maybe because we feel our mother never did. So we do what we think she would have done. Higher education, traveling constantly, learning to adapt and transform and recreate. We like to do it all. We like to make her happy, and somehow, somewhere, find our own happiness. We are not prisoners, so we take every opportunity to move, forward, always running away from something within ourselves.
Since we’ve all moved on to different homes, we try, every now and then to reconnect and reunite. We had a family reunion one summer. Temporary, but a reunion nevertheless. We learned that we like to drink, that we still laugh, that we have funny little habits. We also learned that we all have significant others and that we put them on pedestals.
I am not sure I will ever have that childhood idea of all of us. I used to want that from God, pretending there was one, all the time. I really prayed hard. I am not even sure I want that anymore, because it would be temporary. We would get bored. We would move again.
Maybe this is our destiny. The travelers, the immigrants, partly due to our mother’s past, partly because of our own desires. But no matter where we end up, we always remember how they left us, the way they parted, and the way we left them, the way we parted from them. Always.