The events centering on Pandora came to their harrowing conclusion towards the end of my junior year of high school. I was turning seventeen that summer, and excited to graduate high school during the ensuing school year. I was still pretty torn up over how it ended with Pandora, and I made several attempts to re-establish contact with her to apologize. Even then, I knew what I had done was reprehensible, and I was obsessed with finding a way to apologize, to convey even a fraction of the remorse and guilt I felt for how I had treated her that fateful night, but every attempt came up empty. It would take another three years or so before I gave up completely, but always to no avail. It was then that Pandora transcended, becoming more than just a memory, more than just a girl I used to know, and evolved into a mantra, a force, an influence so pervasive that I can hardly recall a time without it.
Despite all that, however, you may recall that, at the end of “The Time I Learned Regret, Part Three,” I mentioned that the regret (and, by extension, Pandora herself) was a catalyst for an even greater change. You may be wondering, then, that if that regret was just the prelude, what is the main event? If Pandora was just the spark, what could be the flame? Extending the flammable metaphor even further, in addition to the spark, you also need something combustible in order to truly create a fire, so before we can go into detail about the fire, I must first set the stage with the combustible element used to feed it. Bear with me, dear reader, as we go back in time to when my mother was just a teenager, age seventeen.
Dramatis Personae
Alex (me) – the protagonist, referred to hereafter in the first person
Mom – my mother
Dad – my dad
Gina – One of mom’s older sisters
Nolan – Gina’s firstborn son
Becca – my sister
My mother is the second youngest of nine siblings. The important thing to take away from her family is that her mother was abusive, her father was an alcoholic, and one of her older sisters, Gina, was a teenage mom. To hear my mom tell it, Gina was quite the party girl when she was younger, and had Nolan when she was very young. Nolan was eight when my mom was seventeen, and she pretty much raised the kid for most of his life, as Gina was, well, quite the party girl. Due to the amount of time mom and Nolan spent together, and how much bonding was established during such crucial times throughout Nolan’s development, it is not surprising to discover that mom looked at Nolan as her very own son. I have seen a few pictures of Nolan from when he was that age, and if you had not told me otherwise, I would have believed I was not my mother’s firstborn child; that is how obvious it was to any observer that mom raised Nolan. For all intents and purposes, he was her son.
My mom was seventeen when Nolan died. They lived in a really small town with a population of under six hundred people, so it was pretty common for kids Nolan’s age to bike to the playground unsupervised. On the very edge of the park, there is about a three food wide sidewalk that gives a pretty good buffer from the curb, and then the main street through town. You know the kind of park you see in some of those old photographs from the 50’s and 60’s in rural towns? With the tangled web of steel as the jungle gym, the towering slide with so many dents that it is nearly impossible to slide all the way down on? The kind of park with a rusted but still mostly working merry-go-round? That is the kind of park this was: picturesque. It belonged in a faded memory of simpler times, of long summer nights thick with the humid air of a coming storm, pierced ever so wonderfully by “The Entertainer” tumbling enchantingly, announcing the arrival of the neighborhood ice cream truck. You get the idea.
Nolan was riding his bike on the sidewalk just after noon on a Saturday when a drunk driver, going well over the speed limit, mounted the curb, and proceeded to run Nolan over, dragging him the remaining forty feet or so where the sidewalk ended. The driver then crashed into a light pole, knocking him unconscious.
It is a small town, so it did not take the sheriff long to respond to the scene. The ambulance was not as swift, but I am told it would not have mattered; Nolan likely died on impact, they said. I am no medical examiner, so I am hardly an authority on the subject, but I would think that a car would have to be going pretty darn fast to kill someone on impact. I think the sheriff told that lie as a piece of mercy, because any lie was better than the likely truth that Nolan died when his broken body was dragged beneath the truck. So much pain, so much fear…
…and then nothing.
Gina was heartbroken. Mom was devastated. To hear my dad tell it, mom struggles with Nolan’s death even today, and I cannot begin to imagine what that would feel like. I have the deepest sympathy for any of you who have experienced any such tragedy in your life. I cannot think of any fate worse than burying a child.
I tell you this because it relates to the story. It is important to know part of the motivations behind my mother, and what drove her to be the type of parent she became when she had two children of her own, because it is my relationship with my mother that would become the combustible element that would become sparked by Pandora, and grow into the fire I mentioned, earlier.
Three years pass, and my mother meets my father, they marry, and three years later I come into existence. Three years after that, Becca joins the fold. Mom has her own family now. She moves out of the town she grew up in, away from the haunting memories of the life she loved that was taken from her far too soon.
Unfortunately, leaving does not help her nearly enough. I never met Nolan; he died several years before I was even born, but from the day I entered this world, I have existed in his shadow. I never really understood what was going on until many years later, when my dad explained it all to me, but for the bulk of my early childhood, I was measured against Nolan in my mother’s eyes. I even remember her calling me Nolan a handful of times by mistake. Or at least I tell myself it was a mistake. I tell myself that mom suffered a great tragedy, and when memories of Nolan were close to the surface, she’d just fall back on old habits and accidentally call me by his name. I tell myself that because it beats the alternative; that my mother sees me as a twisted revenant of a veritable son she lost so long ago.
That I was weighed against a young boy I could never measure up to created some friction throughout my youth and into my early teenage years, but the true lasting effect Nolan’s death had on my mother was in how protective she was of me. Under no circumstances was I allowed out of her sight until I was five years old. Needless to say, I didn’t go on many play-dates as a young kid. As time went on, she evened out a little bit, but she was always incredibly paranoid about my safety, and often went to severe lengths to punish me when I jeopardized such safety.
Grounding a child is pretty common punishment when they make notable mistakes or do particularly naughty things. I was not a child prone to misbehaving. My mother drilled into me that the world is a terrible, frightening place, and that the only one who can protect me from it was her. I became the poster child for the term “Mama’s boy.” Anything she asked, I did, and anything she wanted, I gave. Anything she said, I believed. She had me wrapped around her finger, and I had no idea. Looking back, it is easy to point out the instances where her manipulations were used to keep me dependent on her, to keep me “needing” her and her “protection.” If I ever did anything to compromise her grip on me, I would be grounded in monthly increments, which always seemed harsh to me, considering how little trouble I got in under a conventional sense. I would get grounded for being told I could go outside and play, but then played with another kid on the playground, because I only had permission to play outside, not play with another kid. I would get grounded for being told I had to be home by 7:00, then arriving home at 6:57, because I “should know better than to be less than five minutes early.” If I were to total it all up, I would guess I spent about a year of my life, from age seven to sixteen, grounded.
The moral of the story is that she was incredibly protective, and incredibly strict, but interestingly, only with me. Becca, my younger sister, was given incredible slack compared to me. I would get grounded for a month for getting one “C” on a report card, whereas she would just get a mild lecture when she came home with all “D’s” or worse. I was not allowed to stay the night at a friend’s house if mom had not met their parents, but my sister was not subject to the same limitation. At times, I wondered if that was not a form of neglect on mom’s part, but I would later come to realize that, once again, it pointed back to Nolan. Mom had developed a twisted perspective of how the world worked based off how Nolan died, and her own perceived strength in raising him all those years ago. She viewed boys as weak and incapable of surviving without their mother, and girls as independent and strong enough of spirit to look after themselves, even at a young age. I am not here to refute nor defend her logic, but simply stating what her mindset was in order to properly indicate just how strongly losing Nolan continued to grip her.
From the start, it would seem my proverbial wings were clipped. How, then, did I ever learn to fly?
In a sense, I owe some semblance of thanks to Arnold. He convinced me that, while I might not always know what is best, I do have an opinion that is at least worth listening to, and that simple realization struck a crack in the dam that mom had erected around my sense of self-worth. Like a crack in a dam, it grew as its own integrity was no longer strong enough to contain the pulsing torrent contained within it. I started to view a great many aspects of life with my own eyes, rather than through the lens mom had tried her best to color my perceptions with. It may sound needlessly poetic, or perhaps even overly dramatic, but it truly felt like I was seeing the world for the first time. I started seeing things, not just looking at them. My previously telescopic vision had been replaced with a kaleidoscope of wonder and possibilities, and I spent many late nights with just about any friend who would humor me conversing about philosophy, religion, politics, and all the other topics that teenagers introduce themselves to, and subsequently believe themselves experts therein. The world mom had “prepared” me for was a fading illusion, and with eyes no longer clouded by her influence, my heart began to beat with a new vigor. It was about this time that I developed an interest in writing and finding ways to articulate the human experience, and I took my newfound passion for the English language online. I am dating myself a little bit, here, but chat rooms were all the rage once upon a time, and I spent many a sleepless night conversing with the multitude of digital personas inhabiting cyberspace.
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