Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child

I arrived at college alone in the fall of 1978 with everything I owned stuffed into a paper bag and a rolled-up panda poster under my arm. Most girls’ dorm rooms were plastered with bands, actors, and the latest trends. I had none of that. I didn’t even know what I liked. At home, my room had always been bare except for that one poster—a panda I bought on the 4-H trip to D.C. It was my only possession that felt personal. I taped it to the dorm wall not because it was cute or fashionable, but because without it the space would have been as empty as me.

My first Christmas on campus, I excitedly bought a four-foot green tree and a handful of cute ornaments. My first green tree! No bulbs allowed—my rules. I threw myself a birthday party where friends helped decorate it. That little tree stood in my dorm as more than decoration. It was freedom. It was independence: my space, my choice, my joy.

College was supposed to mean independence, but it didn’t take long for my mother to pull me back into chaos. My first year, her doctor called to ask if I would permit her to undergo electroshock therapy. “I’m just a kid,” I said. “I’m not even eighteen. I can’t make that kind of decision.” She never had the treatment.

One benefit of being invisible was that I could float between campus groups without ever being an outcast. In the cafeteria, I could sit with the church kids, the theatre kids, the basketball girls, or the weirdos. Always on the fringe, never quite belonging—but never turned away. I wasn’t the only misfit, and that was its own kind of comfort.

One icy Saturday morning, Mom woke me with a hospital call. She needed a ride home. The roads were slick and dangerous, and I was exhausted, having been up most of the night striking a set after a play. But I drove.

The moment I dropped her off, she started in with her endless refrain: Nobody loves me. Nobody cares.

I was too tired to pretend sympathy.

“People don’t love you because you don’t let them,” I muttered, then walked out.

The roads were worse than before. The car skidded and slipped, and the sound that came out of me wasn’t human—some guttural scream ripping from my throat, scaring even me. I drove faster, almost daring the car to spin out, almost daring death to answer back.

When I reached campus, I collapsed in front of three classmates. They didn’t ask questions. One quietly packed me into her car and took me home to her parents. For a few days, they fed me, gave me a bed, and treated me like I mattered—a brief shelter from the storm. Her mother looked at my worn-out shoes in dismay and wanted to throw them away, but I clung to them. They were all I had. Safety was fleeting, but for those days, it was real.

My college rebellion, if you can call it that, was blowing off classes I didn’t care about. One professor told me if I was that disinterested, I should drop out, get a job, and get married. My advisor said I should have told her to go to hell.

I repeated the class with a different instructor. I called him “Uncle Jerry,” and I had no problem passing his class. I’ll never forget the summer night when my classmates all came to the ice cream shop where I worked and ordered hot-fudge sundaes just so the $10 sales prize would go into my pocket. That was the sweetness of a small university.

But I wasn’t away from Mom yet. She refused to fill out the financial aid paperwork for my second year. She claimed they wanted ridiculous things—how many trees were in her yard, her shoe size. I knew it was just another manipulation, another way to control me or push me to quit.

But the financial aid office found a solution. They put me on student loans for the semester, then helped me apply as an independent so I could finish school without her signature. I could do it without her—and I would. The words stayed with me, echoing into the years ahead.

I had started on a drama scholarship but quickly lost the passion I’d had in high school. With theatre behind me, I found myself in pottery. Working the clay and throwing on the wheel was therapeutic. It let me focus intensely, lose myself in the work, and connect with others in ways that felt safe. From there, I added design—and I was hooked. I didn’t have natural artistic talent, but I was creative and teachable when I respected the teacher.

Kent, the department head, was a sculptor, painter, and cattleman. A short man with a round belly and beard, always in a leather vest and boots, smelling faintly of cologne and little brown cigarillos—one of my favorite smells. If you got on the elevator after he got off, you knew immediately he had been there, and all was well in the world. His devilish sense of humor was never mean—his laughing eyes made you feel loved, even if you were the butt of his joke. He named all his cows after students—I had a namesake that mooed.

What I loved most in those days were the Raku firings. At night the kiln glowed hot, fire leaping into the darkness like a campfire for misfits. We stood shoulder to shoulder, waiting for the pots to cool, our faces lit by flame. For once, I wasn’t performing or pretending—I belonged.

Life in the art department wasn’t without disasters. During an independent study between spring and summer trimesters, I signed up for stained glass. The kiln still held greenware from the previous semester, and I got permission to fire it. The first step was simple: turn on the main gas valve, then light the three smaller ones. Only I didn’t realize the small valves had been left open. When I struck a match, the entire kiln exploded—and so did I, across the room.

A girl who had followed me into the annex screamed at me to shut off the gas before it got worse. My nylon top had disintegrated in the blast. I stumbled outside, burned and frantic, crying, “Steve! Steve!”—only to find my professor frozen in the parking lot, holding two massive panes of stained glass. Nurse Judy rushed me to the ER, and I dropped the class to recover from second-degree burns on my hands and arms.

I was convinced I’d blown my place in the art department, but instead, my story became infamous. At my 15-year reunion, I learned the professors had kept it alive all those years—retelling it with hand gestures, laughing about me running out topless, each one swapping in his own name as the one I supposedly called out. Somehow, even my humiliation became part of the department’s folklore, and my belonging there held.

Finding the art department was like finding home: belonging without a mask.

Except as a woman—and a fringe person—I still wore one, still trying to hide my family.

Each year, my mother’s mental health threatened to collapse, until one day it stormed right into my dorm. That was the time she checked herself out of the mental hospital and came after me, saying she was going to kill me. Fifteen girls stood between us, watching her jaw tighten and her head shake as she demanded I leave with her. They made a wall and didn’t let her through. When she couldn’t reach me, she went to my dorm room, found the door standing open, and took every piece of clothing from my closet, claiming she had bought them. My mother hadn’t bought me clothes in years, but she insisted they were “her property.” My sister finally paid her twenty dollars to get my clothes back, but Mom was adamant: I still owed her “a pound of flesh,” and she was going to take it.

That same night I was supposed to have a blind date. Imagine the scene he walked into—my mother raging, fifteen girls holding her back. Poor guy immediately wanted to rescue me, marry me, save me. My first thought was: Hell no! Poor guy never stood a chance.

The BSU director slipped me out the back door and took me home to his family for the night. He’d seen the dorm scene—my mother’s fury, the madness I could never fully explain.

Later, talking with him, I finally admitted the truth about home: I was just so tired of being the good girl. I had lived my life on eggshells, trying to protect the world from my mother’s madness while protecting myself from her control. I couldn’t keep up the dance anymore—it was exhausting.

He didn’t get it. He just looked dismayed. Baptists were quick to dangle damnation over your head—but never as quick to sit with your pain. I didn’t need a sermon. I needed someone to understand or at least try.

With or without his support, I made peace with the truth: I was already orphaned. I had grown up as a motherless child. It was my turn to choose, and I chose myself.