I divorced my mother twice. The first one happened in my head when I was thirteen. It was the only one that mattered. The courtroom dog-and-pony show came later, a sad formality for the lawyers to get paid. I’d already served her the papers in my mind, on some quiet Tuesday night when the truth finally hit me like a kick in the teeth: she wasn’t coming back. Not as a mother. Not as anything.
My mother wasn’t a mother. She was a halfway house for broken men, a revolving door of bad decisions and cheap perfume. She collected guys the way a dirty street collects rainwater—carelessly, and with no real purpose. Every new one came with a new set of promises and a new way of pretending things were normal for a week or two. None of them stayed. They’d sober up, or wise up, and when they left, the only thing they took with them was another little piece of her soul, not that there was much left to take.
The last one with any real grit walked out when I was nine. No big farewell, just the sound of boots on the pavement and a screen door slamming shut on the whole sorry affair. She screamed about abandonment. I knew, even then, he was just escaping the fire. He saw the ship was going down and was smart enough to find a goddamn lifeboat. She never forgave him for getting out alive, just like she never forgave me for staying to watch it sink.
She didn’t raise me. The streets did that. The silence did that.
I was a latchkey kid, a ghost in my own house. Learned early that no one was coming home, that a lock is just a minor inconvenience, that the most valuable skill a boy can have is to become invisible. Dinners were canned soup and pure, uncut stubbornness. The hum of an empty refrigerator was the only lullaby I ever knew.
She spiraled. The men came and went faster, like cheap wine. The drinking became a career. And the excuses… my God, the excuses. Everything was someone else’s fault. The world owed her. Life was unfair. She deserved better.
I watched. I listened. And I made a simple pact with myself, the only religion I’ve ever had: whatever she is, be the opposite.
If she ran, I would stand my ground. If she lied, I would choke on the hard truth. If she shattered into a million pieces of self-pity, I would learn how to build.
And it worked. Christ, did it work.
So I walked away. No big scene, no final, teary speech. I just stopped looking back.
Now, on the wrong side of fifty, I don’t think of her much. Why would I? She wasn’t there for the grime, the sweat, the long, bloody years of turning nothing into something. She has no claim on the man I clawed my way into becoming.
But sometimes, when the whiskey is low and the house is dead quiet, the ghost of her floats through. And the feeling I have for her, it’s not love. It’s not even hate. Hate takes too much goddamn energy. It’s just… a strange kind of nothing. A quiet, empty space. Like remembering an old, lumpy chair you were forced to sit in as a kid. You don’t miss it. You don’t despise it. You’re just glad as hell you finally got something better.
And that’s the thing about freedom they don’t tell you. It’s not some piece of paper from a judge. It’s not being legally untangled. It’s this:
Waking up in a life so solid, so clean, so completely your own, that if she walked into it, she wouldn’t even recognize the goddamn place.
That’s the only victory that matters.
