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| Bye bye Andy. |
She's Leaving Home
(Lennon/McCartney) Performed by The Beatles
Wednesday morning at five o'clock
As the day begins
Silently closing her bedroom door
Leaving the note that she hoped would say more
She goes downstairs to the kitchen
Clutching her handkerchief
Quietly turning the backdoor key
Stepping outside, she is free
She (we gave her most of our lives)
Is leaving (sacrificed most of our lives)
Home (we gave her everything money could buy)
She's leaving home, after living alone, for so many years (bye bye)
Father snores as his wife gets into her dressing gown
Picks up the letter that's lying there
Standing alone at the top of the stairs
She breaks down and cries to her husband
"Daddy, our baby's gone.
"Why would she treat us so thoughtlessly?
How could she do this to me?"
She (we never thought of ourselves)
Is leaving (never a thought for ourselves)
Home (we struggled hard all our lives to get by)
She's leaving home, after living alone, for so many years
Friday morning, at nine o'clock
She is far away
Waiting to keep the appointment she made
Meeting a man from the Motortrade
She (what did we do that was wrong)
Is having (we didn't know it was wrong)
Fun (fun is the one thing that money can't buy)
Something inside, that was always denied, for so many years
She's leaving home, bye, bye.
Looking back just now, I can't believe it's been four months since I deviated from the timeline of my life's story; a plan that I thought would only take me through the summer, but here we are past the middle of October and I haven't revisited the timeline since June. Last I wrote about was me and Rob moving up to Edmonton, but since that was in a post about Rob, I figure I may as well recap by writing about this move from my and only my perspective. As for this song choice, I know it's very literal, but as I was a teenaged Beatlemaniac, I cried over the sentiments in this song for years before I had the courage to break away from my unhappy home life.
To reiterate: In the spring of 1988, my parents announced that they were being transferred back to Ontario, into an insane housing market that saw families being evicted from their apartments and students renting closets and balconies. I knew that if I moved with them, whether I remained a university student or dropped out, I would have no hope of moving out on my own any time soon. And as I had been spending that semester exploring ways of moving out -- I called the student loan people and made up a story about my parents pressuring me to drop out, but since my father made too much money for me to qualify for a student loan, no matter what sorry story I had, I was informed that the only way I could qualify for assistance was to drop out, move out, and work for at least six months before reapplying; as if I'd need their help anymore at that point! -- I just couldn't imagine my life if I moved with my parents; torn away from my friends yet again; starting over in a place where I had no support and no knowledge of how things worked; this had happened to me too many times growing up, and even as a nominal adult now, I just wasn't up to experiencing it again. On the other hand, as I obliquely referred to here, I didn't really want to stay in Lethbridge, friendships were fizzling out and there was at least one boyfriend I didn't want to run across ever again. Moving to Edmonton -- where my friend Curtis was now living and where my friends and I had had some good times over the years -- seemed like the natural solution. I just didn't know how to tell my parents.
Mum and Dad went to Burlington to buy a house, and when they came back with the blueprints to show me how lovely it would all be, I didn't tell them that I wasn't planning to move with them; that I didn't intend to occupy the bedroom they pointed to as "mine". That summer, my mother took her parents to Ireland and was gone for weeks. In all that time, as Dad "hired me" to paint the fence around the house to get it ready for sale, I never said one word about the move or my plans not to join them. Eventually September rolled around, I was neither working or enrolled in school -- which made sense only if I intended to leave with them at the end of the month -- and at some point after Dad had already left for his new job and Mum was packing up the house, I took a deep breath and told Mum about my plan to move to Edmonton instead. And she pretty much freaked out. I hadn't said a proper goodbye to my father before he left. They wouldn't have bought such a big house if they had known my plans (yes they would have; their houses got bigger and bigger after this). I must have been secretly planning this for months since Rob and I had gone up to Edmonton for a few days the month before (well, duh). I was nearly twenty-one, and even though my parents were married with a few kids by that age (not that that's any kind of template for a happy or successful life), I was being treated like an impulsive teenaged runaway, just as I had expected.
Eventually Mum became more concerned with practical matters: what was she supposed to do with all of my stuff if I only intended to bring as much with me as I could fit into my Honda Civic? If she had had more warning, she could have brought up my furniture for me (but as all I really "owned" was what she had bought for my bedroom over the years, I didn't care about any of that; I told her to throw out anything I couldn't bring, but she kept it all for years). She worried about where I'd be living and how I would support myself: I told her the truth when I said that Curtis had offered me a place to sleep (on his floor) but I lied when I said he had arranged a job for me at the video store where he worked (I somehow figured that I'd just get a job eventually and supporting myself would work itself out; this took longer than I expected, and mostly because Curtis took a long time to lose his patience and stop supporting us). She suddenly worried that I intended to take the dog with me when I moved; but although Andy had indeed been bought as "my dog", he was now ten and definitely bonded to Mum; I did not think of him as "mine". In the end, Mum cleaned out her secret bank account (her own running away money, I suspect) and gave me a thousand dollars to get myself started. The night before we left Lethbridge, Rob and I went to a bar with our friends to say goodbye and I forgot my purse -- with a thousand dollars in cash in it -- at our table. Naturally, when I called the bar later to frantically ask if anyone had turned in a sparkly silver purse, no one had. Karma or dramatic irony, I'm not sure, but me losing all of Mum's secret money before I made the escape she probably envied was one of those five or six moments in a life that feels freighted with meaning even as it's happening: I left Lethbridge with a clean slate, eager to make my mark and determine who I was without the weight of family or history hanging over me.
I didn't see my Dad or Kyler the day I moved to Edmonton: Kye had had to move out to Ontario before the beginning of September in order to start grade thirteen (which was bizarre to me as he already had a lacklustre year at the U of L under his belt, but this year did allow him to pull up his grades and attend a prestigious university programme the following fall) and Dad was already at his new job. Ken had worked late the night before at the bar, but he rousted himself out of bed to give me a hug. Mum took a dozen pictures of me walking from the house to the car, saying goodbye to the dog and waving farewell to the two of them, my mother and big brother, as they smiled from the curb and I pulled out onto the street; feeling weightless and excited and free.
She (we never thought of ourselves)
Is leaving (never a thought for ourselves)
Home (we struggled hard all our lives to get by)
She's leaving home, after living alone, for so many years
I can't overstate how much I identified with this song over the years -- the essentially oblivious selfishness of the parents who thought that providing shelter was the same thing as providing a loving home -- and I can't overstate how miserable it was to live in a house without joy or laughter or togetherness. What was a menacing atmosphere when we lived in Stouffville -- when Ken was a juvenile delinquent and Dad reacted with violence -- became something different but equally disturbing when we lived in Lethbridge -- when Ken eventually removed himself and my parents' anger became more focussed on each other -- and while our shaming poverty evolved into a better situation (our Lethbridge home was much nicer and we were all bought cars and there was a veneer of prosperity, even if much of what I had I had bought for myself), we still never had family time; no vacations or many dinners out; no family game or movie nights; zero excuses to spend time together. When I left home, it wasn't so much a natural progression as an escape, and it was recognised as such: my mother treated it as a betrayal and my shocked little brother still refers to it as me running away (and if I had any regrets it was leaving him on his own in the loony bin). But this moment is where all the craziness ends: I moved on, I escaped, I ran away, how ever it should properly be put, and although (like everyone else on Earth) my childhood was stuck to me with tentacles and claws, the moment I drove away, my family no longer had the power to hurt me. I became me.
She (what did we do that was wrong)
Is having (we didn't know it was wrong)
Fun (fun is the one thing that money can't buy)
Something inside, that was always denied, for so many years
She's leaving home, bye, bye.
