The Shadow in Me

How my life changed forever when my mother left our family

Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash

First: There was sunlight, orange Formica counters, oranges ripening on our trees. Toys heaped in corners, friends in all directions, and sweet milky tea. Slow afternoons on a Middle East hillside, boundless blue above, breezes breaking over our resting bodies, adults draped in soft cotton. Couscous and chicken and carrots in scuffed plastic bowls, shimmering water in a just-right swimming pool, my father’s arms to jump into, laughter. I had everything I needed. This is where my family began.

Then: Gray-lit Pacific Northwest rooms 3,600 miles away. Dripping and chilly most fall days and even in spring. Quiet adults and bare walls, worn wood floors under my feet, the hollow quality of sound. A nearly empty rental house with halls that echoed when my little sister and I shrieked running through them, smudging our small fingerprints on dull white paint, each of us inhabiting space so fully, maybe for the last time. The two of us tiptoeing up a creaking staircase to peer out windows in splintery panes. The sun: gone. My friends: gone.

My father home less and less, my mother resting for hours behind her locked bedroom door. At night I awoke to whispers, a single lamp lighting the living room, my parents, curly haired, in denim and flannel, hunched. Secrets I wouldn’t sift through until I was grown. This is how two people end their life together, become angry enough to forget why they began. Perhaps their love was a misunderstanding. Or wishful thinking. Maybe neither will learn to be more than one, by themselves, alone.

So: It’s 2,800 miles across the country and now we are down to three. An itchy sofa striped in five different shades of brown and hotel towels my father brought home in our suitcases. Raid roach spray, fire escapes, and my sister’s missing Naked Baby doll I thought was so ugly in its bald and big-eyed newborn bird way but now wish for her that we had thought to save. Sticky counters, trash room smells, and bringing my father coffee in the mornings: two teaspoons Folgers, two teaspoons sugar, a splash of cream. Cereal and homework after school in front of the TV before shutting my books to make our dinner.

Bigger than the first apartment, dim and dirty compared to the rental house, half a world away from the desert where I was born: the taste of sand in a sandbox and in my mouth, the crunch of minerals and salt a lesson even then that I could digest hard things, take them in until they become a part of me.

My father angrier, closer, his edges growing sharp, the two of us like scratchy throats, coarse wool sweaters on tender skin, too tight shoes that blister your heels. Our air churns with his mood, his injuries, what he gave away. We don’t talk about my mother. She is beyond my reach, outside of my life, across the country swirling in reds, oranges, and burgundies on her own. My shoulders round, I grow quiet, cave inward at the loss. I pore over shelves of photo albums when I want to see her face but stop expecting her to return.

If you’d asked me, I would have said I didn’t like myself, my cheeks, my body, the empty place where comfort used to be. I wanted to feel better, I wanted to get out, I wanted to know what someone loving you gently was like. I wanted to lose my baby fat, the roundness of my middle, the gap between my front teeth, the feeling I was leavable. A dark time, a tired time.

And yet: moments that flickered. My freshman choir teacher Mr. Sorenson who told me my voice was pretty when I sang for him and the flutter I felt inside. The classmate who noticed my lip gloss spilling around the cap, took it from my hands to wipe it clean for me; watching her I understood what it was to be cared for uncomplicatedly. The friend who saw me standing in a snowstorm waiting for the Metro bus that never came and called me in, my toes and fingers numb, no quarters in my pocket for a pay phone. Whose parents fed me hunks of parmesan and crusty bread, plum tomatoes canned from their summer garden until my father could get to me. Red fruit bursting in my mouth, minerals dissolving on my tongue, thawing me, while snow fell in heaps and nothing tasted so good before or since.

First period PE in the ancient basement pool swimming and swimming and swimming, the water lapping at my skin, free from the weight of where I came from. The only time I felt different from myself. I let it hold me.

For decades divorce coiled tight around the branches of my family tree, uncertainty and fear shot through each limb. My people felt unsafe in the world, were steeped in generational and Jewish trauma. Survived and didn’t survive adultery, cancer. They were children who didn’t get to be kids, adults who didn’t know how to hold onto love so dreamt of another time and place, just not this one. I was supposed to be like them.

But a part of me must have known that something that had once belonged to me was missing, could still feel the shape of my lips when I asked for what I needed, the strength of my body when it moved through the world without fear of all that I could lose.

That part of me buried in deep, quiet layers remembered how long ago before I lost my first language, my family, my home, the brightest of sun had bathed me in light. How I could close my eyes and tilt my face up to feel its heat. I knew no darkness.

And though that warmth was only briefly mine, I began to believe I could find it again. So I did.

Now: The shadow is almost gone.

Ronit Plank’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. Her memoir When She Comes Back about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book and her collection Home Is a Made-Up Place won the Page Turner Award for Short Stories and the Eludia Award for Fiction. She’s Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, teaches memoir writing, and hosts the podcast Let’s Talk Memoir. Find her on Substack, on Instagram, and at ronitplank.com.