Hostage Mama

Saturday night was one of the longest of my life. A., my teenage son, did not come home. He swears that he left a message for me, letting me know he was spending the night at a friend’s, but of course, I did not get this message, and the existence, or non-existence of this message, did not help me Saturday night, when the hours stretched on and on, and I did not know where my child was, or who he was with, or what he was doing, or, as any parent who has been in this situation knows, most importantly, if he was alive, unhurt, helpless, afraid, dead.

Some might think, oh this is typical teenage bullshit, and scoff the night away. True.,.. this might be typical, and it is definitely teenage, most assuredly bullshit….but none of that changes the fact that the night was long, it was horrible, it was something I desperately do not ever want to experience again, although I am afraid it won’t be the last time I do.

First of all, A is not a typical teenage. Those who read my old blog know that he is extremely honest with me, to the point of painfulness, and is also kind and caring, solicitous of my paranoid freakiness in a maybe-not-healthy way. In short, he knows his mother is a total wack job when it comes to vivid hallucinations about what could be happening to my children when they are not under my protecting gaze, and he has always been so careful not to upset the delicate balance I have managed to create, keeping me sane and allowing them to occasionally leave my sight.

He always calls, he always lets me know where he is. If he is going to be one minute late, he will call, let me know, assure me that he is alive and well and even in a good mood, so no freaking out Mom, don’t worry Mom, I am ok Mom, be cool Mom, everything is fine Mom.

When midnight came and went without one if these phone calls, the first waves of fear began crashing over me. I noticed that his cell phone was sitting on the end table, being charged. Ok, so he forgot his phone, and he can’t get to one. He will be home shortly, apologizing for his lateness, with some kind of explanation. As the seconds ticked by and one a.m. approached, I mentally calculated the distances in walking time of our small town…how long it would take for him to walk home from any point on the city map. By the time his imaginary time was up, when I knew that there was no place within the city limits that he could have been and not yet reached home, even on foot, even dodging cops (it was after curfew and of course like any rebel without a car he takes great delight in breaking this seemingly asinine rule and hiding in bushes when a patrol car goes by) my first panic attack was well under way.

Any parent, even ones not as freaky-deaky about their children as I am, who have had this happen to them, knows the kind of thoughts that roll through the mind in the wee hours of the morning. There is no stopping them- you can’t hide from these thoughts, or bury them under other, more important thoughts of work, what to buy at the grocery store, what bills are overdue. There is no ducking from these vivid, horrifying, blood-curdling scenarios, built one right on top of the other, so you can’t even get over the horror of the first before the next hits. Your mind seems to become an enemy, as if it has held these private plots in a secret place, just waiting for the right opportunity to come along to lay them out before you.

Look at this, this car crash. Isn’t that awful? See how many pieces a person can be sliced into during an accident like that? Oh, not something you want to see, your baby’s body in pieces, no sirree. Maybe , here’s a scary thought, maybe he’s not dead, but alive and suffering many painful injuries… he isn’t dead yet, oh no, but he is going to die, and he is doing so now; painfully, horribly alone, and thinking of you, wishing for you, calling for you, like he did when he was a baby and hurt himself.

And how about the possibility of a drug overdose? Wouldn’t that be terrible? If he was jerking and seizing in the throes of some drug-induced fit, and the only people around to help him are a bunch of other drugged-out teenagers? Oh yeah, picture that! They are all too scared to call for help, but they don’t know what to do, so they just stand there, watching him flop on the floor, eyes rolled back, maybe foam or something at the corners of the mouth, oh they don’t know what to do…it isn’t their problem, maybe they are saying "whoa dude" and he is dying right now, right at this second….

Hey who just grabbed him and pulled him into a van?

Hey was he crossing the street in the dark and thump thump- couldn’t be seen in those black clothes- just a speed bump for a drunk coming home from the bar?

What is alcohol poisoning, anyway? How many teenagers die from it?

…cheerful little stuffs like that. I didn’t want to wake up my husband, who would undoubtedly be useless at comforting me and simply suggest that he was fine, and if I was really worried, just call the police. I didn’t want to call the police, especially not on A., who has had numerous run-ins with them, mostly about his girlfriend, who is a habitual runaway. I could imagine their skeptical gazes as they realized whose boyfriend he was, and decided that he was just “running away” as she did so often. I didn’t want to call his friends' houses at three in the morning, for obvious reasons. I wanted to believe he was fine, there was a simple explanation because he wouldn’t do something like this, he was conscientious. At the same time, thinking that he wouldn’t do something like this, because of his conscientiousness, increased my panic. I called myself ever despicable thing I could think of (and I could think of a lot) as I drove around and around the town, up and down every street, looking for him. Bad mother, simple and eloquent, was the favorite by a mile. If I did not allow him to be out at night, by himself, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen. Never mind that he is six feet tall, strong as a young bull and actually pretty damn fierce, probably better equipped to defend himself than most men twice his age. All of that was a jumble of pathetic excuses, trying to make myself feel better for being such a horrible, awful, doom-inviting mother.

I was aware of this handicap placed on me at the moment of his birth. I don't know if it is the same for all mothers, but I felt it immediately. First, that sensation of absolute love... the realization that I had never actually understood what "love" was before. The simple knowledge that I would die, easily, no questions asked, to protect this little creature. And third, that my life was never going to be the same. I was made a kind of hostage in that moment of his birth, or maybe it was when they placed him on my stomach and he began to roar like a little lion, or when his unfocused eyes first fluttered across my face, or when I first nursed him. Never the same, were the words that went through my mind, I remember it quite clearly. From that point, to today, 'til, according to my mother, I die or happily lose my mind, I will remain paralyzed with fear whenever my child is in a place where I cannot touch him, fix him, take care of him, watch over him.

As he grows older, it is worse, not better, though for my husband the opposite seems to be true. There are more and more situations like this one on Saturday, when he is out there, in the world, and god, I know what the damn world is like, and there is nothing I can do to guide him. Just sit back and hope/pray/will that the things I have told him stick in his head, that I have given him enough ammunition to fight things he needs to battle, and enough wisdom to make choices that won't lead him into bad places. I worry that I haven't done a good enough job, that there were, are, a billion things I should have said, done, shown him, to prepare him. Bad mother... the whisper is always there.

But I love him so much, is my inevitable answer, as if I live in a fairytale world where love in enough, where love conquers all, where love is all you need. Nope, that's not this world.

Hostage to fear. Watching my younger son sleep, and he is all innocence and long lashes and sprawled limbs, beautiful and ten, and a couple of years from the days when he will rather spend time with his peers than his family, when he stops listening to me, when he starts rolling his eyes at my warnings on his way out the door. I am cherishing this time, drinking it up like a cool, sweet drink through an intricate, rainbow-colored straw, in a gorgeous, precious, thin glass of an impossible shape. Knowing that when it's gone, it's gone. It will be empty and I will be left cradling the glass, remembering how it tasted, tracing my fingertips over the rim, trying to capture the last drops.