Abandonment Issues: How My Mother Came Back Into My Life After Leaving When I Was 13

When my mom fell in love with a woman, I was the first person she told; two years later she was gone.

Salty white and a blue as bright as her eyes, she passed me the sweater. I hadn’t expected another one. I hadn’t asked for one. “Thanks, mom,” I smiled. She knits the Icelandic way—essentially backwards—which she learned from her mother, who learned from hers. Knitting is one of the few traces that have trickled down from our Icelandic heritage. 

I can’t knit. My fingers are more fluent in dough and knives than they are with yarn and needles. I lost patience after one scraggly scarf—a reminder that knowing and doing are two different things. Although my mom showed me more than once, I never learned. Years later, I learned to ask her to knit for me. 

When I was in my 20s, I asked for an Icelandic sweater. I had mentioned it before, but this time my request hovered between a question and a demand. It was weighed down by a footnote about something much more serious than a sweater. Our relationship was even more strained than usual. She had nearly missed my wedding, having booked her flight to Munich less than two weeks before. When my father’s family, who she had last seen two decades prior—probably in a courtroom—heard she was coming, they scrambled together tickets for a trip to leave the day after the ceremony: an escape route from being in the same city, maybe even country, as my mother. 

“I know my daughter,” she confessed to the man who was about to become my husband. “She wouldn’t have forgiven me if I missed your wedding.”

The list of absences was already long enough. For years they had outnumbered presences. Every birthday since I turned 13. Every graduation. Every high and low that paved the road from adolescence to adulthood. If she skipped my wedding, what more would there be to miss? 

I wanted the sweater as proof, not that she’s an excellent knitter—that, I already knew—but that she would make something just for me. That she could still find a way to be my mother after so many years apart. That she could take care of me in a way I couldn’t do for myself. 

We no longer knew how to be mother and daughter, and didn’t have the words to talk about whatever relationship we now inhabited instead. The abandoned child is a genre of its own, but what happens when the parent returns? Or attempts to? 

We could, however, talk about sweaters. 

The pattern was gray, white, and black—a palette that borrows from Iceland’s stern landscape. No zippers. No buttons. Just a classic pullover made from lopi yarn. Apparently she had knit me one as a child, which likely got lost between moves. But back then I didn’t need a sweater made by my mother, because I still had her. 

That first sweater was an apology. Now, a decade later, I can see she hesitated not because she wanted to miss witnessing her first child get married, but because she was afraid of not being able to go home. She feared that if she flew to Germany, she would not be allowed to re-enter the U.S.—that a border agent would announce the life she had built as “illegal.” A crime. My wedding was two years before the Marriage Equality Act, which legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states and would have granted her a smoother path to legal status.

When my mom fell in love with a woman, I was the first person she told. She was 43. I was 11. She was nine when she first realized she was a lesbian, an identity she buried only to finally live out in middle age. 

I don’t remember a lot from my childhood. Memory is as much a dead-end, sometimes, as it is a door. But I do remember the mittens, toques, and neck-warmers she knit to keep us warm. Pale purple speckled with orange. Blue highlighted with pink. After my mom told me she was going to leave my stepdad, I remember crying at school, knowing that my second family was about to unravel and feeling too small to hide a secret so big. Feeling a chill that no scarf or sweater could warm. 

My mom and I moved to a new house in a nearby suburb. Soon my siblings would share it with us every second week. Our mother was trying on a new life, largely in AOL lesbian chat rooms. She met an American—a proud Southerner with a red pick-up truck and a drawl as thick as a tornado. Jada came to visit us in Canada, or that’s what our mom said. But when we got home from school we noticed the wooden shelves and boxes in the back of her truck.

Years later, a friend recited a cliché of a joke: “What does a lesbian bring on a second date?” she asked.

“A U-haul… or a truck with a Texas license plate,” I laughed. 

But Ontario’s weather was too cold, the gas too expensive, so our mom followed Jada down south to Texas one month after my 13th birthday. My brother was nine, my sister seven. I, too, was supposed to trail her, after my annual summer visit with my father, she promised. But I stayed with him in Toronto, and my siblings with their father in Ottawa. 

At my dad’s house, I refused to hang up my clothes. T-shirts and shorts snaked around a bedroom I didn’t want to call mine, some making their way back to my suitcase. I wasn’t planning to stay. The courts would reunite my mom and me, I convinced myself. She had a place to live and a job. 

What started out as a game of telephone tag turned into weekly calls, updates about her new life in Texas that I would soon join. “I’m waiting to hear back,” she told me over the phone about her green card application. This sentence repeated. It became a song you hear again and again without ever reaching the album’s next track, like the needle is somehow stuck. 

The green card never came, nor did split custody or even visitation rights. We could only see our mother with our fathers’ permission. 

The day I turned 16, I no longer needed my dad’s clearance. I was finally old enough to see my mom alone. But it wasn’t my first time since she had left. She had passed through Toronto a few months earlier. “Shana invited me over,” I reported to my dad. I took the subway north to my cousin’s condo—my aunt’s daughter—and hugged my mom in the hallway for the first time in years. Not only was our height now the same, our proportions were too. Her shoulders aligned with mine; my hips were parallel to hers. How my body mirrored hers only further amplified the years a national border had kept them apart.

“What’s the purpose of your visit?” the border agent asked the first time I flew to Dallas, that summer I was 16. I repeated my mom’s instructions. “Visiting a family friend,” I replied. He nodded and stamped my passport. 

In Dallas, we bought needles and yarn. I studied her as she knitted strands of wool into a scarf. We cruised bookstores and curled up on the couch to watch movies. It felt easy, normal, as if we hadn’t spent the past three years separated. But Jada grew jealous. “I made a mistake,” my mom cried when she dropped me off at the airport to catch my flight home. 

How can you stretch the word “sorry” so that it feels big enough? How do you say that you should never have left without it breaking you? How do I say it’s OK, that maybe things even worked out better this way? But also that it’s not OK? 

She tried to find these words, but they felt too sharp, too dangerous in her mouth. When she attempted them, tears came out instead. And so, whiplashed, I would search for other words, ones to soothe her crying.

I was born on Mother’s Day. Sometimes this feels like a punchline. “You were the best Mother’s Day gift,” she used to tell me. We still don’t quite know which words to use to fit back together—how to be mother and daughter—but we’ve gotten closer to saying it with sweaters. 

^{The author in Iceland wearing the sweater her mother knit for her.}

Two years after my wedding, I visited Vancouver, where my mother now lives. She had just finished the black, gray, and white sweater. I wore it that winter and again that summer on vacation in Iceland. It was late August, but in Iceland this doesn’t signify peaches or bikinis. Summer that far north speaks weather in a dialect of its own, for which my sweater was engineered.

The wool was waterproof. It kept me dry and warm while my husband and I watched geysers as if they were special effects in a movie and photographed black sand beaches and drifting chunks of ice. I had long appreciated Icelandic sweaters for their good looks, but only learned about their durability on the island. I browsed the tourist shop selections and felt smug that I had one others could not buy: one my mom had made. 

Somewhere between Reykjavik and Vik, we pulled our rental car over at a store stocked with yarn. Light and dark blues, Bordeaux and bright creams, plus demure browns and grays. I mailed some to my mom. “I want a lighter sweater,” I instructed. “Maybe a pattern that is less Icelandic and more Faroe Islands.” Less abstract snowflake and more geometric teardrop. After some online window shopping, I set my eyes on a minimalist pattern of blue, white, and red, or, as I later realized, the American flag, the country that had taken her away. 

One year later, I was the owner of a second hand-knit Icelandic sweater. The first was made from wool she had bought, and the second from wool that I had. My sister was now asking our mom to knit her one, too. 

When I spent a spring at the University of California Berkeley as a visiting scholar, my mom flew down to visit. One morning we were out for breakfast and she passed me the salty white sweater patterned with the blue as bright as her eyes. The material was light, like the second one she had knit, but this one, now my third, was the first I hadn’t asked for. 

“The blue yarns are left over from the ones you bought in Iceland,” she said. This one was more modern. Light enough to tuck into jeans and pack on weekend trips without sacrificing half my luggage space. Still informed by tradition, but not adhering to its every rule.

A few days later I texted her a link to a book of contemporary knitting patterns. Chunky cardigans with tassels. Oversized turtlenecks with tulip sleeves. The type of knitwear that costs as much as a flight. My mom is an excellent knitter, but her comfort zone is Icelandic sweaters. “Do you think you could make a cardigan like this?” I asked. She texted back that she had bought the pattern book. “Which color do you like best?” she replied. 

I still don’t know how to knit. But for now, my mom knits for me. And although sometimes it feels like we are still stuck in the rain, never quite reaching the color and light of its bow, her sweaters keep me warm. And the Icelandic ones even keep me dry. 

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