“Sarah. Wake up. Come upstairs.”

It is hours past my bedtime when my mother shakes me out of a deep sleep. I might be as young as eight or as old as ten, but in my memory, I am nine: the exact age when Mom is the center of my tiny universe. I don’t ask questions; I simply crawl out from underneath my Little Mermaid comforter and follow her up the stairs.

“Look,” she whispers, pointing toward the picture window. My eyes travel the distance of her outstretched arm and grow wide. There, painted across the moonless sky, are enormous, sweeping brushstrokes of iridescent green and smaller, spectacular flashes of fiery red. I’ve seen photographs of the Northern Lights – framed and on display in gift shops, hotel lobbies, and art galleries – all over downtown Anchorage, but I’ve never seen them in real life. Their colors are so electrifying they appear to dance, sending echoes of light out across the heavens.

More than thirty years later, that midnight viewing of the Aurora Borealis is still the only time I’ve ever seen them. As a child, I had no idea the magnitude of what I was witnessing; that such richly-drawn color, blazing against the backdrop of city lights, was the kind of rare phenomenon that happens maybe once per lifetime.

But at nine years old, I simply look to my mother, expecting her expression of awe to match my own. Instead, I find a vacant stare. The lights retain their magic, but the spell is broken.

“Mom?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”

She moves to the window bench and sits next to me. Her eyes are shiny wet topazes, the same color as my December birthstone. I don’t want to see her cry, so I burrow into her side, hiding my face in the fabric of her nightgown. Mom wraps long, slender arms around me and rests her chin on the top of my head.

“Oh Sar,” she murmurs. “Sometimes I think you’re too smart for your own good.”

If by “smart,” she means attuned to her moods and the terrifying speed with which they change, then I suppose she’s right. I’m even smarter now that it’s winter: my mother’s most dangerous time of year.

“How would you feel about leaving?” she asks.

“Leaving?”

“Mmhmm. What if we went away, just you and me?”

It’s not the first time she’s brought up the idea of escape, of the two of us running away. But this is different than our usual game. There’s an urgency in her voice that makes me lift my head to look at her.

“Where would we go?”

“I was thinking about Idaho. I have some friends we could stay with.”

“Idaho?”

“I think you’d like it there. It’s awfully pretty.”

“But I like it here, in Alaska.”

“I know you do, Sar. But the winters are so long. And your father. . .”

She doesn’t need to finish. Every night it’s the same routine: Mom trying to end the long, lingering cocktail hour by announcing it’s time to start dinner, Dad insisting on “one more drink.” Alcohol is a constant in our house, but the fact that it so often leads to raised voices and slammed doors is a problem I attribute solely to my father. His booming baritone is the sound I hear echoing through our hallways, his sharp words the trigger for my mother’s tears. I’m too young to understand that it’s more complicated than that, that my mother drinks just as much as
he does but largely in secret, that she blames him for things that aren’t necessarily his fault. At nine years old, my mother is everything I want to be. She is beautiful, kind, affectionate. And glamorous. My mother is the most glamorous person I know. Her walk-in closet is a world onto itself, with its perfumed silk scarves and satin dresses, its high-heeled leather boots and – because this is Alaska – floor-length fur coats.

I don’t feel the same connection to my father, don’t watch him with the same worshipful eyes that my older half-siblings do. Dad is fifty when I’m born, and our age difference is a chasm I can’t (or won’t) cross. Just five years after that midnight viewing of the Northern Lights, a disability will force my father to stop doing the thing he loves the most – practicing law – and he will never be the same. But when I’m nine, my dad is still a successful, career-obsessed, larger-than-life figure that I am equal parts afraid of and distant from. If I have to choose between my parents, it’s no choice at all.

“I’ll go with you,” I tell my mother.

“Good,” she whispers, squeezing me. “Because I’m not going anywhere without you.”

We sit together in silence, watching the Aurora. Fleeting though they may be, the shimmering streaks of incandescent green and red offer hope, a promise of better days ahead. And for the moment, that is enough.

My mother and I never made it to Idaho. In truth, I don’t think she really wanted to go. I don’t think she wanted to leave my father; I think she just liked knowing that she could. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized how much my mom depended on him, how she saw him as someone who had saved her. My mother’s early life was marked by disappointment and longing, and a desperate need for approval that went largely unfulfilled. Born to a cold, verbally abusive mother (someone who, if she’d been born at a time when women had more of choice, probably never would have had children), my mom’s primary source of care and affection was her grandmother Sarah, who died when she was just thirteen.

After four years together, Mom’s college boyfriend (the man she often described as the “love of her life”) came out as gay in a letter, telling her simply: “I’m letting you go.” Around the same time, her dream of becoming a professional tennis player was squashed when her parents forbade her from pursuing it, even though by all accounts she was a gifted athlete who was good enough to try. After a brief stint at Gonzaga Law School – where she either dropped or failed out – she grudgingly followed in her parents’ footsteps and became a court reporter, but the work caused her so much anxiety she vomited before every job.

My mom often told me that when she met my father, he swept her off her feet. He was charismatic, handsome, accomplished. And most importantly, he was a refuge, offering a steady hand and an escape route away from her domineering mother. When she met him, moving to Alaska must have seemed exotic. My parents had a whirlwind courtship, got married, and a year later I was born. I imagine she told herself she would figure out the rest later. But later never came, and the plans she made for her life – taking culinary classes, going back to school for a master’s degree in psychology, volunteering for a nonprofit – never materialized, either because she lacked the confidence to pursue them, or because somewhere along the way, she lost the will to try.

I grew up knowing that my mother was unhappy, and that her unhappiness was dangerous. Since she often told me that the day I was born was the happiest day of her life, I reasoned that if I could continue to keep her happy, then I could keep the danger at bay. It was a job I willingly took on, mostly by trying to undo the damage done by my grandmother’s cruelty.

Sometimes I was my mother’s therapist, sometimes I was her cheerleader, but always I told her that she was good enough, that she could do anything she wanted. In return, my mother’s devotion to me was constant and unwavering, as was her desire to give me all the things she never had.

Which is why, even though it pained her that I moved to Los Angeles at eighteen to pursue a career as an actress, she never made me feel guilty about leaving, never insisted I come back home. It was also why, when I called to tell her that my longtime boyfriend had proposed to me on a New Year’s Eve trip, she was silent for a long time and then finally said, “I’m so glad you’re going to have a normal life.” Looking back, I wish that instead of “normal,” she had said “different,” because what had been normal during my childhood – the alcohol-fueled fights, the tears, the shouting and slammed doors – was surely not a relationship pattern any mother would want her daughter to repeat. And yet to my great shame, that was exactly what I had done. How could I tell my mother about the countless nights that dissolved into a haze of wine and hurled insults, the countless mornings I woke up consumed with regret and self-loathing? How could I tell her that, on the night I stood in an ocean front hotel room and watched my boyfriend get down on one knee, a cold panic seized my insides? That I saw my life flash before my eyes in the same way people talk about when they think they’re going to die?

I couldn’t tell her. Or at least, I didn’t. My mother and I simply didn’t have the kind of relationship where we told each other the truth, not when that truth was painful. How else could she have celebrated my marriage to a man who wasn’t right for me? How else could she have been drinking herself to death in plain sight and I couldn’t see it?

I’ve often wondered what type of relationship my mother and I might have had on the other side of unvarnished honesty. Were all those unsayable things really that unsayable? I’ll never know. I only know that it was easier to continue to do the thing I had spent my whole life doing – making everything OK – than it was to confront the truth. But when the easy thing is also the wrong thing, eventually, the center will no longer hold. Which is exactly what happened on a Sunday morning in September when I was awakened by a ringing phone, and a tearful voice
message from Sandy, the woman married to my mother’s brother. “Call your dad,” she said, with an urgency that, to this day, makes my stomach drop. As I dialed the number and listened to my parents’ landline ring, I realized too late that she hadn’t said, “Call your mom.” There was a click as someone lifted the receiver from its cradle, and the sound of muffled voices in the background. Strangers in my parents’ house. Finally, my father – elderly, hard of hearing, his body ravaged by pancreatic cancer – answered. He didn’t say hello. “Sarah,” he choked out. His
voice was too loud, his words shot through with shock. “Mom’s dead.”

I don’t know when the danger that had been encircling my mother for most of her lifefinally took hold of her. I only know that from the moment I got engaged, I could feel her slipping away. It was almost as though getting married meant that I had checked some important box, that the life she had imagined for me was on track. That now that there was someone else to take care of me, she could finally let go.

For a long time, I told myself that my mother’s death gave me the permission slip I needed to leave an unhappy marriage. But that was a lie, not unlike all the lies Mom and I told each other to make life more bearable. With my mother gone, I could no longer use her as an excuse for not living the life I wanted. I no longer had to protect her, or shield her from worry, or offer up my perfect life as evidence that she had done something, this one thing, right. I was free to blow up my life in spectacular fashion because the consequences of those actions were mine and mine alone. It was both exhilarating and terrifying. “You take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.” Erica Jong didn’t know the half of it.

And it was terrible. It was the most terrible, excruciatingly painful thing I have ever experienced. For the first time, I was forced to face all the uncomfortable truths my mother and I had spent our lives protecting each other from. Including the cruelest truth of all: that her death, while it nearly destroyed me, probably saved my life. Because it showed me in no uncertain terms the horrors that would befall me if I didn’t change.

And so, I did. I have changed my life many times in the eleven years since my mother died. Those changes weren’t always pretty, and they didn’t always make sense to other people, but they were mine. They were made in service of my most important goal: to do all the things my mother never could, so that I wouldn’t end up sharing her fate.

All these years later, I’ve still never been to Idaho. I don’t think I’ll ever go. To most people, it’s just one of the fifty United States, famous for potatoes and some fancy ski resorts. But to me, Idaho retains a sort of mythic quality. It’s the place my mother and I shared like a secret; a place where life was a beautiful, unimpeachable dream. I think that we need places like that. Places that exist solely in our imagination. Places that keep us moving ever forward toward an unknown future, remaining always just a little bit outside of our reach.

-Sarah Kelly

Sarah Kelly spent more than a decade as an actor, writer, and producer in Los Angeles. As a playwright, she has received staged readings in both L.A. and New York, with her play War Stories debuting to rave reviews at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. She is the author of the popular blog Extra Dry Martini (featured more than a dozen times as a Wordpress.com Editor’s Pick), and an alumna of the University of Southern California (B.A., Communication) and the Savannah College of Art and Design (M.F.A., Writing). She lives in Savannah, Georgia.