Project: Abandonment Collection

April 4, 2023
By Vicki Entreken

On a brittle yellowed piece of paper, my mother’s words express decades of fear. She wrote it some time during the late 1960s or early 70s, after she became a wife and mother, still haunted by being abandoned on a farm in 1947. It only takes once to break a child.

“You Were Gone” is one piece of a broad collection of poetry, short stories, and essays that hint at the abandonment and abuse she suffered after her mother gave her away when she was eight years old. I found this poem in a secret box under her bed after she died.

I can’t help but wonder what inspired my mother to think and write about being left behind again, decades later. Did someone close to her, like a friend or family member, move away? Did her father call, prompting memories of waiting by a window for her mother’s return, to come flooding back? Did her mother die, leaving her no way to finally get the answers to her actions? Why didn’t she love me? I can’t know what triggered this piece to be written. I can only feel the pain and fear in my mother’s words.

If you’d like to know more about her story, I’m sharing it as part of my revision of Waif: A Memoir of Buried Secrets.

This Abandonment Collection is one of three digitization and archive projects I’m currently working on. Plans for this one are to scan my mother’s poetry, short stories, and essays encompassing the theme of abandonment, preserve her work by archival methods, and publish it in a beautifully bound hardcover book. Stay tuned for more on this collection.

If you’re working on a similar project, I’d love to chat about it! Please reply and share below.

Thank you for reading. 
I appreciate you.
~ Vicki