Member-only story
Personal Essay
What Parental Abandonment Does to Your Brain
Everyone Wants to be Wanted…
“What happened when your parents separated?” I asked the man I was dating, in 1984. “I mean, what happened to you?” Maybe, intuitively, I was already searching for the reason he was so guarded.
“My mother said she was done being a mother, and that she just wanted to live her own life.”
“How old were you?” I asked, in shock, wondering how a mother could do that. Especially since, to all appearances, up to that point, she’d been a pretty good mother.
“Thirteen.”
“But where did you live? Who took care of you? Did you still see her after that?” I asked — maybe not then, but in the months that followed, still trying to understand. And to be honest, his answers were all a bit murky, except for his shockingly casual announcement: When his father remarried and moved away, and his mother still wanted to keep her distance, they rented him his own apartment so he could finish his senior year of high school and graduate with his friends.
While this might seem like a dream to some kids, coming after his mother’s abrupt decision to walk away from motherhood, followed by four years of “murkiness” when it came to parental support, it wasn’t ideal. But my…
