Write a letter to your friend about your experience of a day when you were alone in the home and you got scared due to some unwanted happenings
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Leaving home should be a rite of passage, a time when you say goodbye to your parents to pursue a new life. Supposedly you're the one who ventures out into the world and they're the ones who stay behind. It didn't turn out like that for me. When I was 17, my parents both left home to pursue life-changing experiences and I was the one left behind.
How could this have happened? I'm still not sure. Both my parents were teachers, imaginative and loving towards myself and my sister. I remember growing up as a magical time full of attention, affection and security. My parents were married for 21 years and seemed to be close. There were moments when they argued but as a typically self-centred 16-year-old, I paid little attention to their heated debates.
It came from nowhere, the day it happened. I remember a row and raised voices upstairs. My mother dashed past me on the stairs carrying a suitcase, her face turned away from me. No explanation, nothing. I looked outside and saw a man sitting in a van. My mum got into the passenger seat and they drove off, followed by my dad who dashed after them in his own car.
I don't know what he intended to do if he caught up with them, but he came back shortly afterwards. My sister and I sat in the kitchen too stunned to talk. My dad was distant and uncommunicative.
The next day, he went to visit a friend in Yorkshire where he stayed for the next few days. Strangely I was relieved. He had always relied on me as an ally and confidante but I was finding it hard enough to cope with my own feelings, let alone take care of his. My sister went to stay with her boyfriend's family. My mum, I guessed, was with the man in the van. And that was it: the end of life as my family knew it. I was alone.
The days that followed were bleak, confusing. I tried lamely to relish my new-found freedom, but really I was frantically worried about my parents' wellbeing. My mum phoned, and although she wouldn't tell me where she was in case I told my dad, she reassured me that she loved me, and asked if I was OK. I was keen to assure her I felt fine; I didn't want to worry her.
About a week later, my mum arranged to meet me in a nearby park. She told me she was living about three miles away, with a man she'd met at the educational arts project where my parents had once worked. It was the first I knew of his existence. A few weeks later, my dad found a new job in London. He wanted me to go and live with him, but I resented being asked to leave everything and everyone I knew.
I was angry but I couldn't allow myself to admit it to either of my parents. Much easier to pretend I was coping admirably. I threw myself into socialising, inviting friends over for endless all-night parties. The family home I'd lived in for 10 years began to resemble a squat. My parents' bedroom, long since deserted, became a stopover for various friends. I lost the front door key, so we all used to climb in through the front window.
The upstairs lavatory fell into the kitchen below.
One by one, the utilities were switched off; the TV was taken away and the furniture mysteriously disappeared. Both parents sent me money (which I spent on extravagant, New Romantic outfits) and guilty letters telling me how much they loved me. Incredibly, social services were never tipped off. I fell through the net; everyone assumed I was being cared for by someone else - even my parents thought the other was looking after me.
Eventually the house was sold, along with many of the family possessions which still filled the shelves and drawers; relics from a time gone by. I moved into a flat with a friend, glad that I could finally leave home myself.
Friends have said my parents were irresponsible to act as they did. I don't see it that way and can't resent them for what happened. I'm close to both of them now and as an adult who has gone through dramas of my own, I find it easier to empathise with their motives. I now know that neither of them intended to end their marriage in such a devastating way. Events and emotions ran away with them and I got caught in the crossfire.
I used to feel bad when people asked, "When did you leave home?", not wanting to admit to such a complex, messy truth. Now I don't mind saying, "I didn't leave home - my parents did it for me."