The Retreat -- My Mother Goes Away

A little sleuthing uncovered a newspaper article that is helping heal a hole in my heart. When I was in the third grade, my mother was hosptialized to treat what was then called a nervous breakdown. It happened a lot in the '50s. We lived in a small town in Iowa and one day I came home and my mother was gone. I wasn't deemed old enough to understand (or care?) so I was given a hasty explanation ... something about her having back trouble. It didn't make sense and I'm sure I protested and wanted more information, but my father's solution was to pile my two brothers and me into the car and take us to the Rootbeer Stand. I remember huddling in the back of the station wagon, refusing to eat.

In the next few days, my Aunt Marion arrived from back East. She was the designated caretaker in my father's family; I imagine she had a bag packed for her next family mission. She would take care of the three of us until my mother returned. No one knew when or if that would be, but life returned to a new kind of normal. I remember having a terrible teacher that year, a stern woman who didn't seem to like children. I turned to my aunt for comfort and, while she was a proper Eastern woman who didn't easily reveal her emotions, she seemed to care for me. She had a husand and a son back in New Jersey and a parakeet named Dennis who she told me stories about. She taught me to knit and took me to the library and made me eat my vegetables, something my mother had never cared about.

One day my best friend Gayle told me she had learned a secret about my mother. She didn't want to tell me, but finally she said she had heard her mother telling a friend that my mother was locked in a place with bars on the window. I ran home crying and asked my aunt why my mother was in jail. She finally gave me the explanation I wished I had received when my mother left. Something about being ill, not physically but in her mind, and that she was in a place where they were helping her get well.

So she was coming home someday? I wondered what would happen to Aunt Marian and I didn't want to think about that. One day I found out. Aunt Marian said she had some good news for me. "Who do you thinking is coming this week?" she asked. I made several guesses, none of them my mother. And my first reaction was to ask if she was going to stay. "No, I have to go back to my family," she replied. I was crushed that she didn't consider us her family now. It had never occurred to me that she would leave.

I talked my father into letting me go to the train station with them the day she left. It meant I would be late for school but I didn't care how I would feel when I walked into class and everyone turned to stare at me. I just knew my lifeline was leaving. She hugged me goodbye and and got on the train. I was sobbing and my father wanted to leave but I wouldn't let him go until we spotted her through the window. I waved and tried to get her attention but she didn't see me as she calmly settled into her seat and opened her newspaper. I felt betrayed that she was leaving so easily.

My mother came home and in time I accepted her again as the mother in my life. My aunt and I kept up a correspondence for years and my parakeet Pie still reminds me of her.

I still have unanswered questions all these years later. From a friend of my mother's, I found out that she had gone to a place in Des Moines called The Retreat. I just received an article in the mail that I found on the Internet. There's a picture of The Retreat, which was a beautiful Victorian mansion built in the early 1900's. The article says that the patients lived in small cottages and could wander the 17 acres of orchards and vegetable gardens because the staff believed that living in a home-like setting could help patients recover more quickly. It's somehow comforting to know that my mother wasn't in a sterile mental institution and seeing that picture helps me heal the part of me that didn't know where she disappeared to.