The Interruption

The birth of my three children changed me completely. I embraced motherhood with a kind of force I didn’t know I had. There was a time when I fought the system that tried to shape me, but it had won. Now something of that strength returned. What I couldn’t find for myself, I found for them. It’s one thing to try to save yourself and something else entirely when you believe you’re responsible for three innocent lives.

I rejected most parenting advice immediately. There would be no cribs. I wouldn’t leave them alone to cry in another room. I was up constantly, rocking, feeding, comforting. They were so close in age that sleep barely existed. I wanted to spare them the kind of inner abandonment that had shaped me. In my mind, they would know that no matter what, they came first. At least with me.

We were living with my parents because I had nowhere else to go. I don’t think I would have worked even if I had childcare, which I didn’t, because I didn’t trust anyone to watch them, especially my own parents. I caught my stepfather trying to slap my son for touching food on a plate. Fury doesn’t quite describe what happened. I went after him. My stance was simple: no hitting, no scolding, nothing unkind. If you crossed that line, there would be consequences. Being a guest in their house didn’t make that position easier. It was tense all the time.

Something in that tension gave way.

I had been reading spiritual books and found a meditation meeting. I decided to go. It had been years since I had gone anywhere on my own. My life revolved entirely around my children. My parents encouraged me to take the night off.

The meditation began with tensing and relaxing different muscle groups. Afterward, we were told to sit in silence for as long as we wanted. No talking, no relating, no trying to change anything. Just leave yourself alone completely. I stayed for nearly two hours. No one seemed to move, so I didn’t either. When people began to leave, I got up and left quietly as instructed.

I drove home. The air was warm, the window down. I flipped through the radio, found songs, sang along. I noticed I was in a good mood. The drive was short. Nothing seemed unusual.

Everything changed when I walked through the door.

My body entered the house, but I did not.

It’s not that I didn’t know who I was. It’s that the one who knew was gone.

I remember everything. My parents were fighting. My mother was drunk, yelling. My children were playing. I noticed all of it, but none of it registered as a problem. I said hello, took the kids upstairs, and got them ready for bed. There was no thought of correcting anything, no reaction, no tension. If I had been there, I would have been furious. I had always told my parents not to fight around my children. But that night there was nothing to defend. I put on a Winnie the Pooh movie, settled them in, and stayed with them until they fell asleep.

Later my mother came upstairs, heavily drunk, wanting to talk. Normally I would have refused, but I didn’t. We sat on a small couch in the landing. She spoke for forty-five minutes about everything that was wrong with my father, repeating herself, circling the same complaints. I listened. I didn’t agree or disagree. I didn’t try to fix it or stop it. I just sat there. Eventually she wore herself out and went to bed. So did I.

For two weeks I lived like that.

I functioned normally, but there was no sense of a personal self behind anything. I don’t think I remembered that there had been one. Nothing felt wrong. In fact, it felt better than anything I had ever known. There wasn’t a single worry. Not one. It didn’t seem like there was a past or a future to think about. I remember standing outside by the pool, smoking a cigarette, looking up at the sky as if I had never seen one before.

I don’t know what would have happened if it had continued.

It didn’t.

After two weeks, everything came back. The sense of self returned, and with it, everything that came with it.

You might expect something to have eased after that, but it didn’t. It got worse. Much worse. The pain intensified beyond anything I had known before. Whatever had been driving it hadn’t been removed. It had only been absent.

Now it was back.

And I wasn’t just in it.

I was it.