What If She Abandoned You on the Side of the Highway?

A child should never have to become their mother’s therapist, or her scapegoat. But I did. And I survived.

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

Let us begin with a question: What if, at seven years old, you learned the hardest lesson of your life? Not in a classroom, not from a mentor, but on the side of I-80 in the middle of Wyoming. What if the teacher was your own mother, and the lesson was this: You are unlovable. You are disposable. And no one is coming to save you.

By the time I was seven years old, I had learned the worst kind of math: how many minutes pass between betrayal and realization. I learned it not in school but off the shoulder of I-80, Wyoming, land of sagebrush, stark honesty, and zero room for metaphor. There, on asphalt that shimmered like a lie under the sun, my mother told me to get out of the car. Said I talked too much. Said my father would come for me. And then drove away.

The breeze was dry and ironic. The kind that keeps its distance.

If I were writing fiction, I’d give that girl a plucky ending. Maybe a kind stranger in a pickup truck. Maybe a reconciliation arc. But this isn’t fiction, and I’m not interested in redemption stories where the villain gets a violin. Because what happened that day wasn’t a one-act play. It was just the overture.

Later, the abandonments got less cinematic and more intimate. They happened in kitchens. In church pews. At parent-teacher conferences. In moments when I needed a mother’s eyes to say, “I see you,” and instead got something vacant, something resembling guilt glazed in detachment.

She left me at the hospital once after a minor surgery, didn’t answer her phone, claimed later she forgot what day it was. She “forgot” a lot. Birthdays. Field trips. Whether I liked my eggs scrambled or fried. But what she never forgot, never once, was her own pain. That she carried like an Olympic torch.

Seven is too young to realize you’re completely alone in the world. At seven, you’re supposed to be learning how to ride a bike, not how to stifle your own voice. You’re supposed to be worrying about whether your crayons are the good kind, not whether your family will ever come back for you.

But there I was, standing on the side of the highway, my voice stolen by the weight of the moment. I stared down the asphalt and learned a new kind of quiet: the kind that comes when you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that your mother doesn’t love you. Not in the way a mother should.

It would be easy to write this off as just another story of a "difficult childhood," but here’s the thing: when your foundation is abandonment, every relationship feels like it’s built on quicksand. You start to expect everyone you love to leave. You anticipate the exit before they’ve even stepped into the room. And worse, you begin to think it’s your fault, that you’re too much or not enough, and that’s why they walk away.

Spoiler alert: It’s not your fault. But try explaining that to a kid on the side of I-80. Or to the adult they’ll become, who’s still learning that love isn’t supposed to be conditional, transactional, or temporary.

If you’re wondering whether my dad did come for me that day, he did. Eventually. But by the time he arrived, something had already shifted inside me. I stopped believing in unconditional love that day. I stopped expecting it from anyone. And honestly, that belief has been harder to shake than I’d like to admit.

Her cruelty evolved. Grew sharper. Stopped pretending to be about discipline and started wearing the perfume of disdain. I learned to read her moods like weather reports. Some children memorize multiplication tables. I memorized the angle of her wrist on a doorknob: twisted meant rage. Straight meant detachment. Slammed meant “run.”

People love to ask: But was she mentally ill? And to that I say: what an elegant dodge. What a profoundly lazy inquiry. Little girls shouldn’t have to diagnose their mothers. Shouldn’t have to stand in the wreckage wondering, “Is she well enough to parent? Or am I just defective?”

But I did. I wondered. I performed daily evaluations. Emotional triage. Risk assessments. I learned to spot a lie before I knew what truth sounded like. I turned myself into a lighthouse she could ignore—shining for someone who never looked up.

The cruelty metastasized over the years. Became a blueprint for every relationship I entered. I dated people who needed rescuing. People who vanished without warning. People who shouted when I spoke the truth. I reenacted the abandonment on loop, not because I liked the pain, but because I understood it. It was a dialect I’d been taught to speak fluently.

And still, for years, I tried to earn her love.

I thought if I achieved enough, she’d come around. If I was thin enough, smart enough, kind enough. If I explained my pain in language even a mother incapable of empathy might understand. But there is no translation for “please love me” when the other person has closed their ears to every frequency but their own grievance.

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"I was born longing for a mother I would never meet, though she raised me. Her arms held weight, not warmth. Her voice echoed but never answered. And every day since, I have been mourning the ghost of a woman still alive." Chaotic Goodisms |~V

So, it didn’t stop on I-80. Of course it didn’t. That was just the first performance in what became a full-length horror show of psychological avant-garde parenting. That moment was merely her thesis statement.

See, abandonment is never a one-act play. The first time is a shock. The second time is a pattern. And by the third time, you start packing for the exits during the prologue. What I didn’t understand at seven and only began to whisper toward understanding in my twenties, was this: some people don’t just fail to love you. They choose not to. And worse still, they pretend it's your fault.

Little kids aren’t supposed to evaluate the mental health of the very woman who pushed them into the world with clenched teeth and colder eyes. They aren’t supposed to peer behind the gauzy curtain of “motherhood” to find a narcissist with a martyr complex and an uncanny ability to cry at the drop of her own guilt. But I did.

I had to.

Because the narrative I was handed, "You’re too sensitive," "Why do you always provoke her," "She had a hard life, give her grace", required that I do Olympic-level emotional gymnastics just to survive. If I couldn’t rationalize her cruelty, it would crush me. So, I did what all abused children do: I turned my mother’s inconsistency into my pathology.

The other abandonments weren’t as cinematic as the one on the highway. Some were stealthy. Quiet. A refusal to pick up the phone when I was hospitalized. A cold stare when I brought up the past. A flat denial of every wrongdoing, like gaslighting was her native tongue and I was simply bad at translation.

Others were volcanic. She once locked me out of the house in the rain for talking back. Another time, she told a boyfriend I was “emotionally disturbed” because I refused to lie to him for her. Love, in her world, was a manipulative ledger: you owed her for your existence, and she would collect at intervals of her choosing, interest compounding.

But nothing prepares you for the most invisible form of abandonment: the emotional kind. She’d sit at the dinner table with the warmth of an ice sculpture, asking pointed questions that already had predetermined answers, waiting for me to stumble. And I did. Of course I did. Because it’s hard to win a game when the rules change every five minutes and the referee is also the executioner.

Eventually, mercifully, tragically, I stopped trying to win. That was the bravest thing I’ve ever done. Not because it was loud. It wasn’t. There were no shouting matches. No court documents. No Facebook posts. Just a quiet, final no. A closing of the curtain on a stage that had burned me alive more than it ever let me dance.

You know what they don’t tell you about cutting off a parent? It doesn’t feel victorious. It feels like amputating your own limb, one she rotted from the inside, then shamed you for noticing the smell.

I don’t forgive her. That’s not a failure. That’s an act of integrity. She was the vessel that brought me into this world, not the hand that held me in it. Forgiveness is not a trophy for the one who harms. It’s a door we sometimes close so we can build a house without rot in the foundation.

She is not a tragic hero. She is not a misunderstood sage. She is not the main character in my life story. She is the vessel through which I arrived, and that is all. I owe her biology, not allegiance.

People don’t like hearing that. Especially the ones who still believe in the fantasy of "all mothers love their children." I don’t blame them; it’s a prettier story. But fairy tales are for bedtime, and I’ve already lost enough sleep.

What I’ve gained instead is clarity. A brutal, holy clarity. The kind that makes you rewrite your own mythology. I stopped calling myself “broken” the day I realized she was the one with shards for bones. I stopped seeking approval the day I saw the whole rigged game for what it was: a test I was never meant to pass, administered by someone who never learned to love herself, let alone a child.

I learned to stop dragging my own bleeding heart to her altar, begging her to love me differently. I walked away. And it hurt like hell. But not as much as staying.

Now, when people ask about my mother, I don’t flinch. I say: She birthed me, and then she tried to unmake me. I survived.

If you’re reading this and thinking of your own mother, your own side-of-the-highway moment, let me offer you this: It’s not your job to heal someone else’s wounds by bleeding out.

You can walk away. You can name what happened. You can write it, scream it, whisper it into a journal under your bed. You can call it what it was, abuse, and still be worthy of love, peace, and mornings without dread.

I’m no hero. I’m just someone who finally realized that the cost of proximity to her was too steep. That my life deserved more than survival. That maybe, just maybe, the love I give myself now can reroute the map she burned.

And I’m not waiting for rescue anymore. I built the life. I found the key. I became the parent I never had. And some days, I even laugh.

Because despite everything, I made it.

And that, is enough to turn a highway into a home.

And survival, my friends, is the most exquisite form of rebellion.