Ambiguous, Nine, Slept

I got a letter from her today, from my long-lost daughter. I never thought I would be that woman, the woman with the long-lost daughter. I worked hard to raise good kids, but I obviously failed. I tried to be a good mother, to be a friend to my kids, to teach them right from wrong and respect for others and the importance of regular flossing and personal hygiene and mental health. I thought I demonstrated charity, and love for others, and a healthy approach to relationships between men and women.

I mean, I never made my kids call any of the men in my life "Uncle" anything, they were just Dan or Johnny or Vito or Cliff or whoever. I never let the kids meet anyone I wasn't serious about. I guess the problem was that it was easy for me to get serious about someone. I fall in love so easily. The men I was attracted to, however, seemed to be a little ambiguous about being seriously involved with a widow saddled with three little kids.

Nine times I fell in love. Nine times I got my heart broken. It was number eight, I think, that almost sent me over the edge. Number nine, though, oh number nine. He led me all the way down the primrose path, right to the edge, and pushed me over into the abyss.

My daughter never forgave me for not being strong enough to come back. She was 17 when it happened, 17 and figuring out life for herself, and she thought surely she would have been strong enough. But nine men in a row, nine men who said they loved me and left me, discarded me without a thought as to what would happen to us next...it was too much. After number nine left me at the altar I was broken. That night I went home, I drank the champagne that was chilling expectantly in the refrigerator and I slept in my wedding dress. I spent the next 6 months in my room. It took a week before I could take off my wedding dress. I abdicated my home to my children, and one by one they left me. I was sad, I was unimaginably horrified and embarassed, and I couldn't function. I drank, I wept, I ate nothing. I lost weight, my skin looked terrible and my hair grew in straggly lengths. I was a shell of the woman I had been. And my daughter, my long lost daughter, could never understand and never forgive.

When I saw her letter in the mail today, I almost didn't open it. I was healing, finally, after years of therapy and medications and a couple of stints in the "hospital" and, well, rehab. I wasn't sure I was strong enough, even now, to read what she had to say, Her recriminations and accusations and complete lack of empathy for me would surely set me back. Did I need another setback? Did I need this daughter who needed a mother I could never be?

I don't know what made me open it. But I did. And a picture fell out, a picture of a bride, my radiant daughter as a bride, obviously taken before the wedding that didn't happen, and a note that said, "A man has done it to me, and I finally understand. I finally forgive you. Come help me, mommy."

So I packed up my car, and I closed up my house, and I found my daughter. And I let her find me, too.