Don't Look Back

On Fog, Escape, and Relief

A few weeks ago, I considered moving back to the East Coast from California. At the time, I really wasn’t sure why the thought was so compelling. The pandemic had been hard, most of my family is on the other coast, and there was something about the idea of “help” that felt too attractive to ignore.

I began hunting for living options. I checked out local schools. I went so far as to scope out a really cool house, next door to where my sister is currently living, that might have been a good fit for me and the kids, just a mile from my parents’ place and across the river from my home town. I asked her partner to try to negotiate with the landlord to see if I could get a good lease.

It was an interesting few days of fantasy, rife with all sorts of idealistic thoughts about what it would mean to have help as a single mom.

And then it imploded, thank the gods.

Allow me to explain.

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Almost three years ago now, we arrived in California. I came first, to wait for furniture and my car, which my rad dogsitter had driven across the country with our French bulldog and his girlfriend for an epic roadtrip.

My kids arrived a few days later, flown down from Seattle by their grandparents, into the sunshine.

That night, at dusk, my kids sped back and forth on our new rear patio on their scooters, laughing. They were, at the time, four and six. I stood there, watching them, joyful and happy in the California sunset, and suddenly burst into gut-wrenching sobs. My ex-mother-in-law, now affectionately referred to as my outlaw, put her arms around me, and said “What? What is it?”

I choked this out through tears: “I did it. I got out.”

The saga of what it took to leave my marriage and, then, two years later, to leave New York with full custody, took every ounce of my energy, my will and my money (and then some).

Why then, two and half years later, was I considering a return?

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I made a prescient error while I was considering moving back: I announced to my family, including my ex, that I was doing it.

Without going into details, that provoked a response, to both me and my kids, that spun me out for an entire weekend. It was emotionally manipulative, cruel and unnecessary—and exactly the sort of thing that had sent me running to the opposite coast.

It roiled me. I felt the panic and fear that I thought I’d left behind in that marriage, the instant post-traumatic response of adrenaline rush, and the rage at being insulted in front of my kids, to the face of one of my kids, over my decision making.

And it stopped me cold, in my tracks.

I’m lucky enough now to be surrounded by some stellar friends, including some really intuitive women in the mental health professions. I hopped on a Signal chat with two of them and said, “Wait a minute, what am I doing here? I have a great life here, my book is about to come out, the kids are happy, WHY would I consider this?”

One of them, my friend A., replied with this:

So, one simple, life-changing thing I read years ago was about emotional blackmail. The author used the acronym “F.O.G.” to define it. Fear. Obligation. Guilt. The funny thing about emotional blackmail is that people use it on us—but sometimes we use it on ourselves. So sometimes, if I feel like I “have” to do something, I question whether fear, obligation or guilt are the primary influences. If yes, I back away from the decision until I feel really grounded.

Fear. Obligation. Guilt.

Here’s one thing about single motherhood: you’re constantly being subjected to cultural messaging that you’re not enough. That your kids need another parent. That your son needs a father figure. That your daughter needs a masculine role model. That you, as a mother, can’t meet all their needs without a man with a penis in the picture.

It arrives in various ways—in the form of subtle pressure from family, insidious internalized messaging about what you are and aren’t capable of providing, and external pressure in the ways in which we limit the success of single mothers financially, emotionally, socially.

It is a constant drum of inadequacy that is hard to rebut without constant, conscious effort.

So there we have guilt.

Add to that aging parents on another coast who you love dearly. The sense that your children are being denied a childhood with their cousins, a few of whom are just a couple of years away from leaving the nest, and one set of grandparents who they nonetheless speak to every day, one of whom is nearing 80.

And there we have obligation.

And what of fear?

Well, looking at it honorably, I can’t say that fear was driving my thinking, save in one arena: the fear of not being able to handle it all, for good.

But here’s the thing: after more than a year inside, I’m still standing as the sole provider and sole caregiver, and if I can handle that, I can handle pretty much everything.

So there I stood, looking back, with my obligation and my guilt driving my consideration.

Rather than looking forward toward the future, where we were already on the path, already healing, already moving in the direction of the west, propelled toward safety and an ongoing, blossoming better life.

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The day I left New York City for good, the last moment when I lived there as I headed into a car to go to the airport with my kids, I put my hand on the front door of the apartment that had taken us in when I left my marriage.

I thanked her, that building, that address, that space, for all that she had given us. Respite, shelter, space to breathe, room to pause before moving forward.

It hadn’t been enough.

There was a mark on the front door of that apartment where he’d thrown something at it one night after dropping off the kids, when he’d become preternaturally enraged in a moment, a few months prior.

I’d sat in the living room with my arms around them that night as I heard it hit the door, hard enough to sound like a fist.

I pretended I hadn’t heard it. I stayed focused on them.

It wasn’t the first time, nor the worst, by a longshot. It had been his fist before, on other doors, in other places.

We weren’t safe there.

Somehow, I had forgotten that.

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I got out of the query on the house in Pennsylvania. I rescinded the note to my family. I had a phone call with my father where he told me I had done the right thing, that now was not the time to come home, that all he wanted was for me and the kids to be happy, and maybe, someday, if it was truly right, to live closer.

I vowed to call more often, and I have.

And then I looked around at my life here—at a city that has welcomed us, mostly, in all its glorious multi-cultural ways; at a home that has given us true safety in a pandemic; at sunshine and fresh air that let my kids ride bikes with masks through an entire year of lockdown; at friends who believe, as we do, in collaborative community and found family.

All this has been a stark reminder of why time propels us forward, not back, and why we can’t return to where we once were in an attempt to meet our fear, our perceived obligations, our societally-imposed guilt, or delete original harms by pretending they didn’t happen or aren’t there waiting to dole out more.

Instead, we must bloom where we are planted, seek to heal our wounds and our traumas, and reconcile with the past from where we find ourselves now, in the present and also with an eye to the future.

This is particularly true if we have escaped something awful, unspeakable, destructive, violent.

I am not who I was three years ago, or the last century.

Neither, by the way, is this nation.

We can’t go back and make it better, we can’t live in the fantasy that somehow it was something that it wasn’t, we can’t ignore that we have barely escaped, by the skin of our teeth, something horrifying and violent and wrong, the effects of which continue to this day. We must seek to redress harm and do justice from the present, while continuing to move forward toward something better.

We have to take from our past what we can as lessons, seek to heal what is unhealed within us that led us there in the first place, and also, let us not forget, do our best, if we have been victimized, to thrive in spite of it.

We who have lived through horrible things often fail to note our own bravery. We fail to take real observation of what it took to escape, to get out, to survive.

Now would be a good moment to do that, while also continuing to fight for a better future.

Now would be a good moment to note that when you are walking away from trauma and toward the sunshine, you are under no human obligation to look back and wonder, what if I tried that again?

You get to face forward and keep walking. You get to own what it took to start walking in the first place.

Because everything you need, and everything that matters, will be walking right alongside you toward that future.

Let’s keep going.