The Door Girl, Part 32

I am roughly 10. I am sound asleep in my room. All of a sudden she comes tearing in and flips the lights on.

“I lost my fucking drugs,” she screams. Before I know it, the opening part of the headboard is sliding across my forehead like a sailboat over placid water.

She doesn’t find her drugs. I am bleeding. She leaves the room.

        The next morning, she wakes me for school and seeing the gash gasps, “Shit. You’re not going to school looking like that today.” And so I stay home until my head heals and we can go back to playing pretend like we always do without ruining our good family name.

My grandma was my refuge during those years before foster care. Gigi, we called her. Her last name was Graham, so it only made sense. She did not, however, find the humor in it when we started calling her “Grandma G-String,” because she was too high-class for bullshit like that.

Gigi was diagnosed with Parkinson’s shortly after she retired for her job at the county clerk’s office. Everything shook, including her lips. We put food on a spoon and scraped it below her top teeth to just get something in her mouth to eat.

One day we were sitting there and I sneezed.

“Excuse me!” I laughed.

“I’ll never understand why people try to hold their sneezes in. It’s one of the greatest joys in life,” she quipped.

The Door Girl, Part 31

There were two doors. One was narrow and jagged. The other was round and open. My mother chose to go through the open door. It hurt her like hell, it ripped her wide open, but she knew it was the only way to survive. Do I approve of it? Do I think she did the right thing? I’ll never know, because the life I had and didn’t have with her are all I knew. It’s impossible to imagine what my life would have been like with her presence.

        I know I’m strong, however. I have been to hell and back again a thousand times. Day upon day. And I continue to rise from the ashes. Clumsily, yes. I am constantly losing my way and finding it back once again. But I walk through the round, open door as well. I am exactly like my mother and not a thing like her at all. I like to believe the thing on the other side of my windowsill looks different than hers did. I know it’s different in fact. Her door took her to men, drugs, alcohol and the point of madness. I discovered these truths in her journals--what she had been doing all this time she had disappeared.

        My door must be different. And I’ll tell you a secret. I’m deathly afraid that it’s not. And yet, I walk through the door, shaking and scared. I listen to the universe and follow it. I allow it to gently guide me by my jittering hands. I follow it in the dark like a lantern and see nothing around me but stark branches. But I follow.

         

The Door Girl, Part 30

She mailed me her journal after my stay at the psych ward. Maybe it was to help me understand. Maybe it was to remind me that she was still alive despite the absence of me. Maybe it was to hurt me. I don’t know why she sent it, but as I read the entries, my heart ached for her. My mother was not a monster, but she was mentally ill. My mother did the best she could and the best she could was all she had to give.

July 2, 1974

The thing is, I’m happiest when I’m not me. When I escape and hide behind whatever I can. I guess I never learned that lesson—to be a big girl and face my problems. I think what gets people is the monotony of the everyday. I wake up, make coffee, take care of my child, set my timer for fifteen minute increments just to make it through to bedtime. And during those fifteen minute increments, I feel lost. I don’t know what to do with myself that has any value. And so I sleep. I get high. I drink. I break things. And after, I feel so bad that Junie has witnessed yet another breakdown, but I can’t help the madness. It’s clawing at me to get out and all I know to do is shatter glass.