My mom had a wandering spirit. I sometimes wonder if she got like I often get—frustrated with the same, always on the lookout for new. It runs in the genes. When I was seventeen I became thoroughly depressed. I’d suffered depression before then, I always have, but this depression felt different. It felt restless, bored.
It felt like the town I grew up in was trying to root me, cement me in a place of unhappy.
Cause I’m A Wanderer
So I told my mom I had to go. And her eyes understood, her words said “goodbye,” but I know I tore a little bit of her heart out and took it with me. I know that she understood the pull, knew I would never want to stay, that’s I’d not be content to live in one place. Because she never was. She moved us across the country in a VW bus, where we experienced our country before we even knew what geometry was. That travel-lust fell heavy into my veins.
I moved to Washington, to Boston, to Missouri, my partner (now husband) moving with me, experiencing how to live in what was strange, how to evolve in a new city, on the metro train. And months before we moved I’d feel that same depression sting. It’d tell me that I have to leave, wipe the slate clean, learn how to be a new me.
Depression Hit
After my daughter was born, an even more terrible depression hit—the kind that said I was not fit to be around a helpless being, who needed me but hated me. And I wanted to leave, again. But I didn’t want to take her, take my husband, who was a natural parent and was happy. I wanted to be clean of all responsibility to anyone but me. I was more terrified than I’d ever been because my depression carried with it rage. And bitterness. I may not have left physically, but I floated away on clouds of whiskey. I did all I could to get the man I love to leave, to take the baby who hated me.
I’d imagine starting again, never bringing anyone else into my crazy ever again. But he wouldn’t let me go, he wouldn’t accept my emotional departure.
He told me I was enough and that my daughter loved me, needed her mom to be what he knew I had in me.
And I rose above it, like he said I would. I came back down to earth, held her in my arms and realized her worth. And understood mine, too. And we moved together, back to his home. Where we planted a little red house, a few gardens and sprinkled it with another baby, a boy, and various creatures.
Planting Roots
And each addition to my life—my daughter, my son—my silly animals, is a new adventure. And it feels like traveling while staying in place because each new thing shows me I can be a new person, like I was when I was free to roam. I’m a dog lover. Who knew? I’m a green thumb. I’m a mother of chickens. I can be patient, quiet, silly and forgiving. I learned those things. Those things weren’t me before the journey of my mothering.
My blood craves gone, though. It tells me to find a Vardo, pack my things and leave. I won’t lie and say that my wandering spirit is always a good thing. It sometimes scares me. And it stymies my husband—that urge I have to change everything, to get rid of all my clothes or rearrange the house or get a tattoo sleeve. But these are my ways to have little journeys without leaving. They are the ways I satiate that desire to pack it up. Because that’s not brave.
My mom always wanted to go, always wanted to do, but she never left us behind. She did rearrange the furniture, have so many different trades I’m not sure I could name them all, get a faraway look in her eyes when she sat smoking on our porch. I wonder if she was dreaming of being untethered. But she did nothing without taking us along, teaching and talking and sharing her mini-adventures.
The Need to Be Free
I felt like being free the other day, and so I turned to my husband and said, “Can we get away?”
Because I realize that I don’t actually want to be alone. I love being a wife and mom. I can’t help my depression, the manic stirring in my veins. But I can help what I do with it. So we packed our bags and our kids and we got away together.
We stand, digging clams by the roar of the Pacific Ocean. And I feel as powerful, changeable, fierce, triumphant as those waves that threaten to plow me over when I’m rinsing my son’s bag of clams. The waves would overcome him if he didn’t stand in my shadow. But because I chose to be firm, present, the waves smash into me. And I stay standing because I’m strong, like I’ve always been. He doesn’t look worried when he’s standing next to me, no matter how angry the waves. I realize, then, that I’m like my mom—always with her eye on the horizon but never gone. It’s a complicated beauty because I have never regretted the moves, the VW bus that smelled like fumes, the way she let me go with tears in her eyes.
My mother was always with me, and still is, even when she’s not. She liked to go but she never forgot to take me with her. And my life has been such a strange and stunning journey.
![Wanderer, HM Jones Writes, Rachel Thompson]()
H.M. Jones is the B.R.A.G. Medallion honoree of Monochrome, now published by Booktrope’s Gravity Imprint. She has also written the Attempting to Define poetry collection, and is a contributing author to Masters of Time: A Sci-Fi and Fantasy Time Travel Anthology. Jones also teaches English courses at Northwest Indian College. She is a featured poet on Feminine Collective, moderator of the online poetry mag, Brazen Bitch, is the tired mother of two preschoolers, and in her “spare” time weaves, pulls with the Port Gamble S’Klallam Canoe Family, and attempts to deserve her handsome husband, whose lawyering helps her follow her dreams. You can find H.M. Jones on Facebook, Twitter (@HMJonesWrites), and her website and blog http://www.hmjones.net.
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