Did they think teens could just take care of themselves?
In 1994, when I was on the precipice of turning 16, my mother left me behind.
She moved interstate from Dubbo, New South Wales, to the impossibly sunny city of Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. She’d had enough of rural living and had just split up with her then-boyfriend, so she hightailed it to the perennially tanned, neon-lit, bikini-clad sunshine state.
My mother expected me to follow suit, but I was about to begin my final two years of high school and I dug my heels firmly into the ground. She had promised we wouldn’t move again until I graduated, and I simply refused to go.
I didn’t have a plan. All I knew was I had to stand my ground. The cycle of uprooted chaos had to stop. I was 15 and about to be homeless—but this didn’t deter my mother from leaving one iota.
Being abandoned by my mother cracked the foundation of our relationship—something I later realized many other teenagers of Boomer parents, in Australia and beyond, had also experienced.
A recent post on Threads detailed the strangely common experience of ’90s teens living alone from the age of 15 onward—their mothers often leaving to go live with new boyfriends or partners. Another Thread talks about moms who would go on month-long vacations or just completely moved out. Thousands of comments echo similar experiences. Teens left in apartments alone, paying their own way through the world with boulder-heavy responsibilities, while trying to finish their studies. Or teens, living with family friends or even strangers, simply because their parents ditched them for a better offer.
I was one of the latter: My high school drama teacher and his family welcomed me into their home with open arms. But even with a place to live, I was untethered. I was unmoored. Lost. Terrified.
Growing up, I went to 17 different schools. My single mother was always running to stand still. Or, more specifically, she was always running away from another failed relationship. Or a lost job. Or debts she couldn’t pay.
She dragged us all over the East Coast of Australia; from the Glass House Mountains on the Sunshine Coast to Melbourne to an orchard farm-cottage in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in Griffith, New South Wales.
Now, I have a 5-year-old daughter, and she has celebrated every single one of her birthdays in the backyard of the yellow brick, terrazzo-floored, 1950s-home we bought before she was born. This is the longest I’ve ever lived in one house in my life. It’s the most settled and happy I’ve ever been. My husband and I have been together for 17 years. Married for nine. I teach at the school on top of the hill minutes from our home, where my daughter is in her second year of kindergarten.
I love my job. My daughter is flourishing. Yet, at times, a deep restlessness overtakes me.
Patterns of childhood instability are difficult to shake. When things are going well, I’m inevitably bracing for the crash. The fall. The total destruction of it all.
Like at my 17th school, in our 10th new town, in my second year of high school. When my mother promised this would be my final stop; that I would graduate from this high school in Dubbo.
How did we find ourselves in Dubbo? Brilliant question. I wish I could answer that succinctly. Myriad reasons, but sitting at the top of that list: yet another spectacularly broken relationship between my mother and good old what’s-his-face. I truly can’t remember his name. But what I can remember is that at the end we lost everything in what the police deemed a “suspicious” house fire.
Every.
Single.
Thing.
It’s a discombobulating experience being dragged here, there, and everywhere, on the whim of your impossibly beautiful mother being love bombed by another mediocre man. But it’s a whole other level of harrowing to lose everything we had because she decided to hitch her wagon to yet another deadbeat dickhead she barely knew.
My sister and I began to know when our lives were about to be upended. The dates. The charming manipulation. Cheap cologne would suddenly appear in the bathroom like a stale magic trick. Months, weeks, or even days later, these mysterious, mostly moustachioed men would move in.
Misogynistic, often abusive men.
One occasion we’d returned from our annual three-week visit with our dad in Melbourne, only to be greeted by our brand new housemate who suddenly shared our mother’s bed. It was an absurd, utterly destabilizing pattern of behavior—and we were completely powerless.
Did I get to finish high school in Dubbo? I did.
But not with my mother.
I refused to leave with her because she broke her promise. I was sick of the chaos and instability of her undiagnosed mental illness. I was sick of being at her beck and call as she forged yet another path of complete and total destruction.
She didn’t fight for me. She didn’t beg me to come with her. She barely glanced back when she left me behind.
My dad and stepmom asked me to live with them, but that would mean uprooting my life again, and I just wanted to finish high school in the same place. They did support me financially in those last two years of high school, and I also took on a part-time job at a local department store. My mother didn’t offer me a cent.
My stepmom called me every week to check in. My mother did not.
As time went on, she resented me for having the audacity to not only survive, but thrive, without her. I had friends and was succeeding academically. I found my creative passion and purpose in theater and writing.
I missed my mom terribly. I grieved our fractured relationship.
I don’t know if she shed a single tear.
But our separation gave me the distance to realize that she was no longer my safe space. Perhaps she never was.
And as it turns out, I’m not alone. Boomer moms all across the world were leaving their daughters behind. And no one thought it was weird? When I reflect back on it, it’s weird beyond all measure. Weird to the fucking max.
Seriously, Gen X, are our boomer parents OK? All signs point to a resounding no.
When I think about abandoning my own daughter, I cannot comprehend the circumstances required for this to even be a consideration—it would have to be some serious Sophie’s Choice-level catastrophe. A situation my imagination can’t even conjure.
In my last year of high school, my older sister came to watch my solo drama performance exam, which I wrote and performed myself. My sister. Not my mother.
The adult character I played worked in a fairy shop and believed she was a real fairy. It was the only way she could survive the abuse she had experienced and the profound loss of her stolen innocence. Through fantasy, a dogged optimism, a deep belief in magic, along with a healthy dose of disassociation thrown in for good measure, this character was a version of me I both loved and desperately longed to escape.
I came first in the state of Victoria for this performance; my name was in the newspaper.
The splintering of my relationship with my mother, all those years ago, put me on the trajectory to become who I am today.
A writer. A drama teacher. A mother seeking to provide stability and safety for my daughter. A mother who has made it her life’s work to break the dysfunctional intergenerational patterns of her own mother.
And yet, still today, my restless heart stirs with a longing I can’t always fulfill.
I think it always will.
Two weeks ago, my daughter celebrated her fifth birthday in our backyard. It was a fairy party.
When I looked at her—in her beautiful fairy dress, with wings in glittering hues of soft pink, purple, and leafy green, laughing with joyful abandon—I saw 5-year-old me, honoring the lost child in me and the mother I’ve fought so hard to be.
On the night of the fairy party, as I tucked my daughter into bed, after reading our nightly bedtime story, I whispered to her, “Do you believe in fairies? Say quickly that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands!”
And my daughter clapped wholeheartedly.
I do believe in fairies.
I do.
I do.
And when I look at my daughter, I know it to be true.
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by Michelle Fitzgerald
Michelle Fitzgerald is an Australian mother, writer and Drama teacher, rebelliously raising her young daughter Thelma, on Wadawurrung Country. Michelle was recently Longlisted for the 2025 Richell Prize For Emerging Writers and Shortlisted for the Finest 500 Writing Prize. Her writing is featured in Ramona, Solstice Literary, Mutha, Motherlore and Howl magazines. Her formative childhood feminist icons were She-ra Princess of Power and Miss Piggy. You can follow her journey on Instagram.
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