Though it fits, I don’t really like the term “abandoned.” I’m not a puppy left on the side of the road, or an infant dropped at someone’s doorstep. I haven’t been left to completely fend for myself. I haven’t been homeless, or hungry, or alone. So I prefer to say left behind. I am those items you always kept, out of sentimentality or laziness, but have no space for in your new apartment. I am that which was packed into a box and left behind.
        

It all came together as I finished seventh grade, as spring came to a close and the air turned humid, the sun hanging in the sky for those few extra hours. My mother sat my brother and me down on the faded leather couch in our tired-looking living room, her eyes sad, her mouth an expressionless line. With an unnervingly calm voice, she told us that she was moving to California. With those words, my stomach dropped through the floor, my throat closed, my eyes became faucets. “There are more opportunities for me there,” she said. “I need a fresh start.”

So, our faces became fuzzy images of children she faintly knew, our pain was whited out and covered up.

I felt helpless, for days, for weeks. I couldn’t see a way to live without my mom; the person whose warm breath brushed my face when she whispered stories to me as I fell asleep, who squeezed my hand before every shot, who told me I was endlessly beautiful,

I felt alone and unwanted, a leper, condemned to be that girl without a mother. I hadn’t had my first kiss, I still had endless questions about life and womanhood and boys. But my questions went unanswered, swept aside while I learned to breathe again.

But with the passing of days, months, and years, came a change. I found that I could make it on my own. I learned to do things and solve problems for myself, problems that my friends didn’t think about because their mothers took care of them. I learned to schedule my own camps and pack my lunch and always remember my keys. When a girl asked me backstage at our eighth grade musical, “How do you buy bras without a mom?” I coolly answered that I bought them online, "It’s easier anyways". I became good at answering those questions, and appeasing the curious minds that couldn’t comprehend a life without a nagging mother. I discovered that independence is a beautiful thing.

I’ve learned to embrace that I haven’t had a Family-Christmas-Card, Leave-It-To-Beaver sort of family. I've known pain, familial complications, mental illness, utter heartbreak. It has helped me understand that people are always more complex than we think, relationships even more so.

Part of growing is building memories, joyful and painful alike. The hole in my gut when friends talk about how annoying their mothers are is as integral to me as my skeleton. The hesitation every time I complain about my “parents,” because it’s really just a “parent," is a feature of my vocal chords.

Every one of us has lost pieces of our hearts; has been left feeling empty and alone. We’ve all been knocked down, our lives narrated by battle wounds and ugly scars and fractures that have been knit back together. We experience our hardships, and they become us, they make us.

So I stand on my wobbly two feet on a floor I built for myself. I have been made stronger where I was broken. I have survived, and I have, dare I say it, thrived.