eleanor parks / five. fin

The first time I met my mother I was four years old, but my memory of the time she first came back into my life is hazy, fragmented. I don’t think I really remember it so much as I remember every little detail that my father has told me about that day, like it’s not really my memory, but rather his, and I am just a voyeur into this moment that I was hardly even a part of.

From what I know, she was only ever around when it pleased her, came dancing into our life for flashes of time when she was bored, when she wanted to be loved, when she needed something to fill a void that she never seemed to find the bottom of.
I think that’s the main problem.

Pa always let her back in, indulged himself in how much he loves her each and every time, and let himself be broken every time that she left.

That’s why I hate her.

That’s why I hate that I’m just like her.


The second time my mother came to visit, it was three years later and I was seven, someone turning into a person, someone who had thoughts and opinions and what I thought was an entire world.

I know now that I had a lot more growing to do, but at the time I’d felt like a whole person. 

Pa grew up on a farm, and even as the district has shifted further and further towards oil and further and further away from caring for animals, that was never the path that Pa was willing to walk down.

Looking back, I don’t think I gave him enough credit for that at the time. I took it for granted, the fact that I grew up alongside every animal I could imagine, that I got to go out into the big wide world and turn it into something magical, something all my own. I used to run out past the fields, trek through the wooded areas beyond them, talk to myself and my imaginary friends as I built story after story. I was a knight, traveling through the underbrush to get to the princess I needed to save. I would scale trees until I was in the tallest one and I could peer out over the tops of all the others, call out to the birds flying above that I had come to save them from the tyranny of a wicked king in the treetops. Sometime, probably a long time ago, a tree fell in the forest clean across a little river that cuts through the earth, and I used to love climbing across it, acting like it was my little bridge into another world where anything could happen.

When I was seven, I showed my mother this little world of mine, and I can still remember her tinkling laughter when I pulled her across it, like the sound of bells chiming.

I think that was the day my father first realized how alike we are.

Or maybe it wasn’t, maybe that was just the first time that I realized we were alike, so all this time I’ve just assumed he had the same epiphany on the same day, but I suppose he could have seen it long before I ever did. After all, he loved her more I think than he would ever be able to love anyone else—everyone except for me, and that would have been his first clue. His darling little girl, adventurous in every sense of the word, a little replica of the woman who loved him and left him over and over again. It didn’t matter that she hardly ever came around; I didn’t need to know her to be like her.

She’s in my DNA. 

I’ll never escape that.


The third time my mother came to visit I was thirteen, and I’d spent every year since the last visit watching my family curl further and further into himself. Once, he used to go out with friends from his adolescence every other week or so, leave me in the care of the kind old woman who lived about a mile down the road. I’d stay over, and he would go out and be a human, be a man, live the life that he deserved. But I don’t know what it was about the second time she came to visit, but year after year passed and the outings went from every other week to once a month to every few months and then, before anyone even realized, it had been a year since he let himself be anything other than a father and a caretaker to the animals we were raising. He threw himself into raising the mutts that the Capitol asked him to, became more and more animal than man. He loved me, cared for me, made sure that I was always sure he never hated me but—I was just like her.

And I think that ruined us.

When she came to visit the third time, I was thirteen, and she didn’t stay more than five minutes.

She showed up on our doorstep, knocked on the front door one of the rare moments that someone was in the house. Usually I’d have been somewhere in the woods, and Pa was always out in the pastures, watching, learning, reporting back.

But it was early afternoon, and I’d come home to get a glass of lemonade.

“Hi baby,” she said, smile in her eyes.

“You should go,” I’d replied back, not bothering with a hello. I could feel my stomach rolling as I said it, my want to have a mother battling with my want to have anyone but her. “And you shouldn’t come back.”

I closed the door, and she left, and if you don’t count every time I look in a mirror, I haven’t seen her since.

It’s better that way.