I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway Read Online Free PDF

my own (stroller-hating) son, I started to realize what it might have meant to be carried around by him all the time. When you are a baby being held by someone, you absorb all their energy, you see the world from their viewpoint, you smell their hair. They, in turn, have full access to your face. They can kiss you whenever they want, and you can see all their expressions in extreme close-up, like being in the first row at a movie theater. I don’t know about you, but I get motion sick in the first row.
    It’s no wonder, then, that I’ve always felt so connected to my dad. For the first three years of my life I was literally closer to him than I was to anyone else, emotionally, physically, and metaphysically. I’m so close to him, every choice he makes in his life reverberates through mine in a very big way. So when he gets his first major prison sentence, there is only one word for what I am.
    Fucked.

Three
I Love You, but I’m Stuck in Here
    I ALWAYS GET A NEW DRESS for visiting day. June Ericson takes me to Dayton’s Velvet Coach and we pick out something special to wear to see Daddy. This time I get a dress the color of cotton candy with a full skirt and a big sash. I’m pretty confident I’m going to be the best-dressed girl at the prison.
    Leavenworth is a long way away. Four hundred forty-eight miles, and those are circa-1970 miles, before the interstate was built. We take a very impressive Braniff 747 and get there in two hours. I’m one of the only kids at my school who has been on a plane, so I feel really special. Even though the only reason I got to go on one is because my dad is stuck in prison for the next four years.
    June is my new mommy. She is forty-one years old, pleasantly plump, and wears her hair just like Carol Brady in the early episodes of The Brady Bunch . She is the nicest person I have ever met. The fact that she promised my dad that she would drag me all the way to Kansas to see him twice a year gives you an idea of just how nice. This is probably because she is a minister’s wife. I forgot to mention, I am a Lutheran now, baptized and everything. I’m not sure what I used to be.
    Last summer, we came here in a car, detouring a couple hundredmiles out of the way on our family vacation to see June’s sister in California. I spent most of the journey in a Dramamine-induced stupor on the floor of our wood-paneled Ford station wagon. I regained consciousness just long enough for June and me to pop into the prison for a quick visit. My dad totally mentioned how calm I seem now.
    The rest of the family—my new dad, Pastor Gene Ericson, and my three new sisters, Faith, seventeen; Sue Ann, sixteen; and Connie, eleven—waited for us in the prison parking lot. My other new big sister Elin doesn’t live with us because she married a guy with serious facial hair and moved to St. Paul. Neither does Carl, my new older brother, who is studying to be a minister, just like Daddy Ericson. I’m not the only kid the Ericsons picked up in an act of Christian kindness. My new sister Connie was adopted from Korea when she was four. We share a bedroom, which is unfortunate for her since she’s super-perfect and quiet and neat, and I am Pippi Longstocking without the monkey or the chest of gold doubloons.
    In Leavenworth we always stay at the Cody Hotel, which was once owned by Buffalo Bill’s mom. I think that might be her behind the front desk, with a tall chestnut-colored beehive and a twang to match. The lobby crawls with large men reading newspapers and exhaling thick blue smoke from filterless cigarettes. Who knows what they’re doing here? They don’t look like their daddies are inmates.
    We call a cab to take us to the prison, about a fifteen-minute drive away. Just outside of town, the road gives you two choices: go straight to something called Fort Leavenworth, which has to do with the army, or take a left and go to the prison. I don’t know exactly how—maybe it is the cab driver’s