Sometimes I Walk Away

In which parenting breaks my heart.

Sometimes I walk away
When all I really wanna do
Is love and hold you right
There is just one thing I can say
Nobody loves you this way
It's alright
Can't you see?
The downtown lights…

— Paul Gerard Buchanan

Note: I wrote this back in the spring when it was incredibly raw for everyone involved. Now that we are through the worst of the disaster, I am sharing it. Annie, who goes by Ash now but was Annie at the time, has read it and wants me to share it, using her name as it was last March.

The song came on in the car as I pulled away from the hospital. Annie Lennox, her voice a prayer against the heavy drumbeat, her name an echo of the name drumming in my mind: “Sometimes I walk away…” 

It hadn’t hit me really, until the nurse had asked for Annie’s sneakers. No laces on the unit. No sharps. No belts. No drawstring pants. Nothing that a child desperate enough could use to kill herself. 

And so Annie stood there in her socks, weeping and wavering wildly between “I hate you” and “I love you,” as I walked away. 

Sometimes we betray the one we love, the one who loves us and leans on us, in order to save her life. To maybe save her life. Because nothing is certain here, is it? Except that a child who cannot bear to be anywhere but by my side for more than a moment, a child who seeks and finds all the scissors in the house in order to cut herself, who writes an elaborate suicide plan in her heartbreakingly childish hand, is no longer safe at home. 

And so I pray to the inadequate god of what-we-know-about-the-human-brain (which isn’t nearly enough), and the god of hopelessness-is-not-an-option, and I deliver my child into a hospital where the nurses round every fifteen minutes and the “quiet” rooms look like prison cells and a nurse dispenses medicine through a window while another nurse observes closely to make sure the pills go down and where I can only call during the prescribed hours and only one parent (me) can visit every other day and only for ninety minutes and where the container of slime Annie has brought in her little purse is forbidden because the cap has a jutting piece of plastic just sharp enough to slit a wrist. 

Finally, after a week measured in lonely minutes and the scraping of the spirit raw, Annie comes home, shell-shocked and heartbroken, and we sit together in the long hours and fit the pieces of our hearts back together until we are jigsawed into an interwoven and fragile peace just strong enough to let us both sleep through the night. The daylight hours are marked by fear, fear, and more fear, but the demons seem diurnal at least for now, and I am grateful.

Of course this all plays out against the global backdrop of life as usual, or terror as usual, and springtime is coming even if winter persists in these children, in my child, and I cannot get Auden out of my head:

Musée de Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

So it is that the human position of my daughter’s suffering takes place alongside the blooming of the ethereal cherry trees and the hated Callery pears, and the grinding, gutting war, and the slugs of Congress oozing slime at Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the windows opening and closing in the houses of the world, and on, on, on…

So it is that even some who witness our disaster turn from it, although it also is that some kind and beautiful souls turn towards it without hesitation, for which I will always be grateful. 

And so it is that I have become Dedalus now, and Annie’s brave and hurting sisters too, all anxiously waiting to see whether our Icarus will keep narrowly avoiding the ultimate disaster, all flying through the echoing, darkening sky towards an uncertain horizon. I believe that Annie will resist the voices and visions that lead her away from us. I believe that our wings, made as they are from delicate feathers and fallible wax and hope, will hold us. I believe there is a soft landing somewhere up ahead. I reach for Annie’s hand, and fly on.

P.S. This heartbreaking, must-read article contained some eerie parallels to Annie’s story. Not for the faint of heart, but I encourage everyone to read it. And the New York Times has been doing an equally heartbreaking series on the current adolescent mental health crisis.