The Seeking Daddy Project Day 35: Do they care?

“Honey, my email’s the same,” she said laughingly - almost dismissively.

It was Homecoming Sunday last year at the church I’ve attended regularly for the six years that I’ve lived here.  The woman I was speaking with had been like my second mother, helping me move, graciously storing some of my belongings in her home while I was between apartments, acting in plays I directed, giving me delicious, easy recipes with which I built out my culinary repertoire – until she and her husband moved four hours away to the mountains several months earlier.  I miss her terribly.

I had sent her an email several weeks previously after not hearing anything from her for months, asking how she was.  There had been no response.

“I emailed you a few weeks ago…” I said meekly.

“Well I didn’t get it, sweetie,” she said, still laughing.  I was stung by her joviality. Didn’t she realize how much I missed her?  Didn’t she know that she’d been so important to me, and then she’d just left?  Didn’t she care that I was hurting?

I guess it’s a double-edged sword that I grew up and lived in the same town, on the same street, in the same house where my parents still live, my whole life until I moved out in my mid-20’s.  They moved into that house in 1979 and have been there ever since.  In the town where I grew up, people of their generation tended to stay right there in that town.  My parents were high school sweethearts – Mom went with Dad to his senior prom at the high school from which my sister and I graduated more than 30 years later.  There is very little moving away.  There is very little leaving.

What this has meant for me in my adult life is that I feel personally betrayed and forgotten by anyone who dares to leave me in any capacity.

“Just email me again!  I’ll get back to you,” she concluded, before starting up a conversation with someone else.

Now, I admit, this may be a childish, whiny, immature thing to say, but here it is:  I don’t want to have to email her.  

I want her to email me!

I’m 25 years her junior.  I’m wet behind the ears.  I’m struggling, I’m unsure, I’m floundering.  I’m sad and lonely.  I miss her.  I miss my old pastor.  I miss the people at my ex-boyfriend’s previous church who were always so kind to us.  I miss feeling like I have a support system.  I miss having people who cared.  

I miss the people who were supposed to be there for me and I want them back.

Even more so, I want them to want to come back.

I want them to reach out to me, to check on me, to ask how I'm doing and to genuinely care.  I want them to say they miss me too, that I am important, that I matter to them.

I want to have mattered to them.

I haven’t emailed her.  I’m not going to force someone to care about me.  We invest in the people we care about, and if she can’t be bothered, then she must not care very much and the last five years meant nothing to her.

That’s how I feel about nearly everyone these days.  

That time meant nothing.

And that’s even harder for me to deal with than the fact that they left.