Being left behind and moving on are not so different after all

I have a fear of getting left behind.

It’s a fairly legitimate fear — I believe, at… I have a fear of getting left behind.

It’s a fairly legitimate fear — I believe, at least — considering that I was left behind several times during my tender, formative years. I was left at church when I was about 6. My parents even remembered to take my grandmother, for crying out loud! My siblings realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t there but chose to remain silent regarding my absence. After about 10 minutes, my parents finally realized that I was missing and turned around.

Now, they should have noticed right away, considering that there were so many of us in the car that I had to squeeze in the middle of the front seat — and I typically got car sick at least one time during the trip. I just can’t imagine why they would leave me behind.

The second time I was left behind as a child was at our county library. My dad left me on the children’s floor to find books while he went downstairs to get his own. No big deal. After I had found “Snowy Day” and “Goodnight Moon” and all of the other stimulating literature I was reading those days, I waited patiently for my dad. The employees began to close up the children’s floor and dim the lights. I started to panic.

Apparently, the children’s floor closed earlier than the other floors and my dad didn’t realize it until he tried to take the elevator to the children’s floor and it wouldn’t stop because it was programmed to skip the floor. He had to find an employee who called the children’s floor, and the librarian there brought me downstairs to my dad.

My mom later worked at that library. I wonder if they looked into my parents’ history of leaving me behind before hiring her.

Then, as I started to get older, my siblings started to leave me behind. It’s not always sunshine and butterflies when you’re the baby. Nope. They pick on you and hold you down and pretend to spit on you. You, in turn, break their most prized possessions, and just when you start to like each other and develop a friendship, they up and leave.

My sister and I shared a room until she left for college when I was 9. We joke that the first time we lived under the same roof and actually liked one another wasn’t until last summer. I moved in with my brother-in-law and sister during her last month or so of pregnancy and the first few months of my niece Ellie’s life.

Ellie Bean and I bonded a lot that summer — I read her “The Da Vinci Code” and she slept through most of it — but our bonding time is much more meaningful now. She’s going to be 1-and-a-half soon, and she loves to dance, so I twirl her around the kitchen, and if you ask her who Aunt Jessie is, she smiles and points to me.

Good thing the child at least knows who I. You know it’s bad when my mother, who spends a great deal of time with her grandchild Ellie, begins to slip and call me, her youngest born, “Ellie.”

Yup, I’m sure it’s not some psychological reversion to the fact that I am the only single, childless one still remaining of her children.

“No, no, Jessie, it’s not that we love our children who got married and had babies more than you. We’ll just make shrines of photographs from their weddings and the births of their beautiful babies. Look, we still have that 3×2 from your graduation on the bookcase behind Uncle Denny’s picture.”

OK, enough picking on the family. When we’re sitting around Thanksgiving dinner later this week, I can guarantee you that this column — and how I take “liberty with my creative expression” — will be a topic of discussion. I only speak the truth, people.

So, I guess I can admit my true fear, and it’s not getting left behind. Instead, it’s leaving my family, friends and the amazing people with whom I work behind when I get out in the “real world,” get a job and move after I graduate in the spring. I think anyone would be lying if they said that doesn’t scare them.

What saves me from panicking, like I did at church or among the bookshelves of the children’s floor, is the excitement of experience. You see, I already did it once. I came to Pitt and left everything I knew behind. And I got a pretty strong backbone as a result. Now I’m ready to go further and to try to catch my dreams. Plus, I’ll always be a plane ride away.

I guess it’s not about getting left behind or leaving things behind. Rather, it’s about going forward and turning the page. As my favorite fictional femme columnist, Carrie Bradshaw, said, “Maybe we have to let go of who we are in order to become who we will be.”

E-mail Jessica at jrp@pitt.edu, but don’t forget.