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I volunteer at the women\u2019s shelter out on Route 4. Tuesday nights. I fold towels and sort the donation bins and I tell myself it makes me a decent person. That\u2019s the part I need you to understand before I tell you the rest. I went there to feel clean. Nine years of folding strangers\u2019 towels so I could stop seeing my own kid\u2019s face when I closed my eyes.<\/p>\n
Because nine years ago I put Megan out of the house. She was seventeen. She stood in my kitchen and told me she was pregnant, and I didn\u2019t ask one single question. I went upstairs, got the blue suitcase out of the hall closet, set it down by her feet, and said,\u00a0\u201cFigure it out.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0That was it. That was the whole conversation.<\/p>\nShe was crying. She kept saying,\u00a0\u201cMom, please, you don\u2019t get it.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0And I said,\u00a0\u201cI get it just fine.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0She tried again.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s not what you think.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0And I told her I didn\u2019t want to hear it. I actually held my hand up like a stop sign. I can still see my own hand doing that.<\/p>\nHere\u2019s the thing I want to say about the years before that. Megan\u00a0used<\/span>\u00a0to be glued to me. She\u2019d climb in my bed on Saturdays and we\u2019d watch those cooking shows and she\u2019d tell me which contestant was gonna get sent home. She was a sweet, funny kid. Loud laugh. Hugged everybody. That\u2019s who she was before she went quiet.<\/p>\n\n
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And she did go quiet. Around fourteen, fifteen, she just folded in on herself. Stopped hugging people. Started keeping her bedroom door shut and asked me, more than once, if she could put a lock on it. I told her no, we don\u2019t do locked doors in this house. I thought she was being a moody teenager. My husband Dale said the same thing.\u00a0\u201cShe\u2019s just looking for attention,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0he\u2019d say.\u00a0\u201cLeave her be.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0So I left her be.<\/p>\nDale. I married him when Megan was eleven. He was good to me. Steady, paid the bills, never raised his voice. When Megan got pregnant and I lost it, he was the one who stayed calm. He sat at the table and said,\u00a0\u201cShe made her bed.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0He said a kid who throws her future away like that needs to feel the weight of it. And God help me, I agreed with him. I leaned on him. I thought I was the one being strong.<\/p>\n\n
\n
After she left, I didn\u2019t chase her. That\u2019s the part that\u2019s hard to type. She texted me twice that first week. The first one said,\u00a0\u201cMom I have nowhere to go.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0I didn\u2019t answer. The second one said,\u00a0\u201cPlease just call me.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0I deleted it.<\/p>\n\n
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I told myself she\u2019d come crawling back and apologize and we\u2019d deal with it then. She never called again. Nine years, not once. I told everyone she was the one who cut me off.<\/p>\n
So Tuesday night, I\u2019m holding her file. My hands are doing this weird shaky thing. Intake date, March 14, 2018. That was three months after I put her out. Three months. I always pictured her landing somewhere soft. A friend\u2019s couch. The baby\u2019s father\u2019s family, whoever he was. I never once pictured her here, in a place exactly like the one I fold towels in to feel good about myself.<\/p>\n
I kept reading. Seventeen weeks pregnant when she walked in. Then there was a note further down, in a different pen. It said she gave birth in the shelter bathroom. In the bathroom. Because she couldn\u2019t cover the ER copay and was scared they\u2019d turn her away. My grandchild was born on a tile floor while I was probably home arguing with Dale about what restaurant to go to.<\/p>\n
Then I got to the form she filled out herself. I knew her handwriting the second I saw it. She always made her R\u2019s funny, with a little loop. Under Emergency Contact she wrote one word. None. Under Family Support, same thing. None. I read those two Nones about ten times. My whole body just kind of stopped working for a second.<\/p>\n
And then there was the last box. Reason for Seeking Shelter. Most people put a few words.<\/p>\n
\n
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Megan wrote out a whole sentence, and that\u2019s when my legs went and I sat down right there on the supply room floor with the towels still in my lap.<\/p>\n
She wrote:\u00a0\u201cMy mother found out I was pregnant and told me to figure it out. I tried to tell her that the father was her husband.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n
\n
I read it. Then I read it again because the words wouldn\u2019t go in. The father was her husband. Her husband. My husband. Dale.<\/p>\n
I sat on that floor and I went back through every quiet year.<\/p>\n
\n
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The locked door she wanted. The way she stopped hugging him first, then everybody. The flinch when he stood behind her chair.\u00a0\u201cShe\u2019s just looking for attention.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0The way she begged me, in my kitchen,\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s not what you think,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0and I put my hand up like a stop sign because I already had the man\u2019s side of it before she ever opened her mouth.<\/p>\nShe didn\u2019t run from me because she was a scared pregnant teenager. She ran because the one person who was supposed to protect her handed her a suitcase and chose the man who did it. She tried to tell me. She got nine words out.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s not what you think, Mom.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0And I shut the door.<\/p>\nI don\u2019t know how long I sat there. The intake coordinator found me and asked if I was okay and I said something about my knees. I couldn\u2019t say the real thing out loud. I still can\u2019t, really. I took a picture of that file with my phone, which I know I shouldn\u2019t have done. Then I drove home.<\/p>\n
That was four nights ago. I have not found Megan yet. The shelter can\u2019t give me anything, and I understand why, I\u2019m the last person on earth she\u2019d want knocking. I\u2019ve been looking. There\u2019s a county over where I think she might be. I don\u2019t know what I\u2019d even say.\u00a0\u201cSorry\u201d<\/span>\u00a0is such a small, stupid word for it. There\u2019s no word the right size.<\/p>\nDale is still in the house. He\u2019s upstairs asleep right now. I\u2019ve been sitting in my car in the driveway since I got home, looking up at our bedroom window, at the light, then no light.<\/p>\n
\n
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I keep my phone in my lap with that photo of her file on the screen. The two Nones. The little loop on her R.<\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t gone inside yet. I keep thinking about her writing that sentence on a clipboard in a place full of strangers, finally telling somebody the whole thing, and the only person who needed to hear it wasn\u2019t even in the room. She got to finish it that time. I just wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n
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The file was just sitting there on the counter, open, like somebody had walked off mid-sentence. I wasn\u2019t snooping. I was folding towels. I read three lines before I even … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9784,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10014"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10015,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10014\/revisions\/10015"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}