When I left home in the 1960's, I only left one small hamper behind. It took up very little space. So many years later now and I cannot remember everything that was in it, but I know it wasn't heavy. There was Maggie the auburn haired doll and the beautiful clothes my aunt made for her one Christmas. There was a faux leather zippered notebook that probably contained some of my writing. I think there may have been a stuffed animal or two, but I can't remember. Maybe one of the diaries I was always starting and then aburptly forgetting about?
Leaving home was not without its trauma. My younger brothers were in my care when they were not in school, and when I wasn't working or going to junior college, I helped out with the housekeeping. My mother was away. Some would say 'away with the fairies', but it certainly wasn't a pleasant experience for her or any of us. She was in a state mental institution with what was then diagnosed as manic depression. Hard times for all of us. We had just moved to a new house in northern California, and trying to make it feel like home without her in it was a challenge. Dad picked her up from a private institution in Los Angeles after the moving van packed up all our stuff and headed north. I was in charge of dropping off the family cat at the pound, and then we caravaned to our new house.
We all hoped she would make the transition, of course, and somehow pick up the threads of herself and her life in new surroundings. It didn't last. How could it? She was taken out of one hospital against medical advice, and dropped into new surroundings in a place where she had not even chosen her new home. My dad and I did that. She lasted a month or so, but then was shipped off, this time to a state instituiton, leaving us to sort out our own new surroundings, schools, jobs, and all the things that come with a big move. I was nineteen, my brothers ten and five. My dad was only forty three, my mother forty one. So young, all of us.
I keep telling this story. Many of you have heard it a thousand times. But the matter of the little white hamper I left there haunts me. I want to see those things I treasured from my childhood. I didn't want them to be given away, or trashed. But once my mother returned home it was clear we couldn't live together. She was angry at me all the time, and I at her. I didn't ask to fill her shoes while she was gone, but I had to. She felt guilty about that, but it wasn't her fault either, she was ill. And somebody had to pick up the pieces for my brothers, my dad. The conflict was too great for all of us. I had to leave. My dad agreed. Somehow I had expected him to say he wanted me to stay, he'd somehow intervene in the conflict. But he didn't. He said it was time for me to go. So I went. I left my childhood behind, I suppose, both figuratively and literally. I never saw those childhood treasures again.
And sometimes I am sad about that and all they represented. Which from this point in my life seems perfectly fine. There were so many happier times ahead, but those years need to be labeled correctly, in the album of past memories, as sad.
If you find an auburn haired doll in a blue dotted swiss dress, let me know. Her name is Maggie. And I still love her.
