It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been dumped before. Or ended my share of relationships that had disaster written all over them. But this particular break-up hit me harder than most, even though, technically, I wasn’t the one being dumped.
It happened at my eight-year-old’s school on her first day of second grade, the hottest day of the summer. Seeking shade while I waited for the screech of the bell to release her, I headed for the courtyard with the big oak—the one the kids called The Barney Tree—by her classroom. The mother of Sadie’s closest friend was already sitting on the wide, tile-studded concrete planter that surrounded Barney. I smiled and sat down beside her.
I liked Janet. I considered her my friend. We made small talk—about the weather, our husbands’ annoying habits—as we had so many times before while we waited for our girls.
That summer, they’d spent hours bouncing on the trampoline in my backyard, dissolving in peals of laughter as they played a game they called “Butt War.” They dressed up like Hannah Montana and danced around my living room belting out “The Best of Both Worlds.” They went to day camp together and called each other B.F.F.
Just before the bell rang, Janet turned to me and sighed. “I need to let you know what’s been going on,” she said.
My stomach clenched. I was pretty sure I knew what was coming.
She told me that during their last playdate, Sadie kept punching and pinching her daughter, Amy. It wasn’t the first time this kind of thing had happened, Janet confided. Sadie had even kicked her in a fit of anger.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said, her eyes wide.
I stared at the tawny oak leaves scattered on the asphalt and pushed them around with my foot.
Sadie was diagnosed with early-onset bipolar disorder when she was five. Frequent mood swings—including extreme irritability that can be triggered by something as innocent as a playmate saying “hi” to someone else—are symptoms of the illness.
Usually, she saves her explosions for home. It’s where she feels safe to lose control. Maybe all the time she’d spent with Janet and Amy made her comfortable enough to reveal her ugly side to them, too.
When the girls first became friends, I expected each playdate to be their last. Although she’d never physically attacked another child before, Sadie’s explosions had pushed most of her few other companions away. But as the months rolled by and their get togethers continued, I made myself believe everything was okay. I was desperate for my daughter to hold on to her one good friend. And Janet never mentioned any problems.
I’d told her about Sadie’s condition, although I’m not sure if she understood it. And I get that. It’s easy to see my little girl’s outbursts of rage as bad behavior. Or the product of poor parenting.
I wouldn’t want Sadie to play with someone who hurt her, either. But that knowledge didn’t soften the blow when, as the classrooms’ turquoise doors swung open and chattering kids flooded the courtyard, Janet said she thought our girls should “take a break.” It wasn’t hard to read between the lines: I knew their friendship was over. And so was ours.
I broke the news to Sadie as gently as possible on the drive home. She kicked the back of my seat and pummeled it with her fists. She shrieked that she hated Amy. But by the time I pulled into the driveway, she was sobbing as the realization of what her behavior had cost her began to sink in. Inside the house, she grabbed paper and crayons from a kitchen drawer to make a card.
“I’m so, so, so sorry!” she scrawled beside a giant purple heart with a sad face and a jagged line severing it in half.
I squeezed her tight and told her I was proud of her for taking responsibility for her actions. But I warned that the card wouldn’t magically fix everything. She said she wanted to give it to Amy anyway.
I wish I could say that I handled the situation with as much grace. I didn’t. I’d expected my child to be destroyed by the break-up. I wasn’t prepared for how devastated it left me. I missed talking to Janet, who, like me, was an older mom with one child. I missed our occasional outings to the beach, barbeques, and dinners at the girls’ favorite pizza parlor.
Like a scorned lover, I obsessed over every conversation I’d had with my former friend; I tried to pinpoint the exact moment our relationship had soured. Was it the afternoon when she’d called me a soft touch when it came to discipline? Or the evening I showed up at her house to pick up Sadie and she’d hesitated a second too long before answering when I asked how the playdate had gone?
“Great!” she’d said with a strained smile, peering over my head into the dusk. “Everything went just great!”
The more I kept hitting the rewind button on our relationship, the more bitter I became. I went out of my way to avoid Janet at school. One day at pick-up time, I saw her walking toward me as I sat in the car line waiting for Sadie. She was holding hands with Amy and another girl I recognized—a docile creature, who, I was sure, never lost her temper or hit anyone. As I slouched in my car and watched the happy trio cross the parking lot, a wave of envy and anger crashed over me. How could they move on so easily with their lives after leaving such a gaping hole in ours?
I hit rock bottom a few weeks later. I was walking my dog in our neighborhood when a blue minivan chugged by. The driver lightly beeped the horn to say hello. I recognized docile girl’s mother behind the wheel. I gripped Max’s leash tighter, wondering if this woman lingered in Janet’s living room to chat after playdates the way I once had.
From the back seat, Sadie’s ex-bestie and her new sidekick turned to grin and wave at me. I feebly wagged a few fingers in return. What I really wanted to do was flip them off. Because I so wished that my daughter was crammed in the back of that van with them. I ached for her to have a normal childhood, for me to be a normal mom. As the van disappeared around a bend in the road, it felt as if the life we were supposed to have was vanishing with it.
I yanked Max’s leash and turned for home, ashamed of the jealousy and self-pity churning inside me. Janet had every right to protect her child. That’s what mothers are supposed to do. It wasn’t her fault that Sadie is the way she is. It wasn’t my fault, either. A gray river of fog tumbled through the valley below the street where I was walking. I imagined it washing away the anger and pain I’d been lugging around since the break-up.
That night, I clicked on the website of a local support group for parents of kids with special needs. I’d thought many times about going to one of the group’s monthly coffees but always found an excuse not to when the day came around.
The following Friday, I printed out directions to that morning’s coffee and drove to the house. With a trembling hand, I pressed the doorbell. A woman with long black hair and a kind face opened the door and welcomed me. She led me into her living room where a dozen or so other women sat on a cream sofa and dining chairs, nibbling blueberry scones and talking. No one looked shocked when, after introducing myself, I told the story about Sadie hurting her playmate. They just nodded or flashed sympathetic smiles.
The next time I saw Janet heading across the school courtyard in my direction, I didn’t look away. I said, “Hi,” and asked how it was going as we passed each other. It still stung to know that she and Amy weren’t part of our lives anymore. But I was finally ready to start moving on with mine.
•••
DOROTHY O’DONNELL is a freelance writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and daughter. Her stories and essays have been featured on greatschools.org, brainchildmag.com, mothering.com and NPR. She is currently working on a memoir about raising a child with early-onset bipolar disorder. You can find more of her writing at dorothyodonnell.com.
When I responded to the email and signed up our family for a shift, the details of exactly how we would be spending our Saturday morning didn’t dawn on me. I didn’t pause to picture myself and our older son standing on the edge of a puddle of cindery snow-melt, cigarette butts, and crumpled receipts, the cuff of my jeans trailing over my sneaker soaking up the cold water. We stood outside the Market entrance to Wal-Mart, the only magnet big box superstore in our rural area. My husband and younger son occupied the Home and Garden entrance, engaging anonymous strangers and occasional acquaintances. And we panhandled.
The mom in charge of the booster group for our kids’ basketball team arranged the permissions from Wal-Mart, set up the shifts, and provided us with a laminated 8”x11” sign naming our cause and an empty pretzel jug. Surprisingly, that’s all it takes for an activity that yields a one hundred percent profit margin. No Wal-Mart employee checked on us, and we must not have provoked any complaints, although one skeptic shrieked, “It’s a scam! It’s a scam!” as her companion dropped a dollar in the can.
Fortunately for us, the temperature on the day we panhandled was thirty-five degrees, not the twelve it had been for weeks, and the burst of sunshine seemed good for donations.
•••
When the boys were toddlers, I always gave them each a dollar or two to put into the Salvation Army kettle or for a poppy for veterans or into the offering plate at church. That’s how I’d been raised, and the kids couldn’t see the checks my husband and I wrote over the years—to the United Way and the Volunteer Fire Department, to a scholarship fund established in memory of my grandparents and a scholarship fund at the school my friend founded in rural Nicaragua, to NPR and the Fish and Game Club, to the Cancer Society and the March of Dimes. I wanted our boys to have tangible experiences of giving. My hope was to nurture their giving hearts, for them to grow up never remembering a time they left some stranger poor.
In early adulthood, I passed the particular homeless man who stood outside the corner bagel place near my apartment in Hyde Park in Chicago frequently enough that eventually, I didn’t buy myself a cup of coffee without coming out with two. If I didn’t have enough money for two overpriced luxury items, then I probably shouldn’t be buying one, I reasoned. I’d give him a couple dollars here and there, and once a sandwich I’d packed for lunch. After a few months, he disappeared for a week or so, and then reappeared, looking one hit away from death. His actions embodied the reason most people don’t give to people who act like him. Of course I didn’t want him to die, but I honestly didn’t really care what he did. All I knew about him was that he liked three sugars in his coffee.
Eventually, though, as our kids entered the world of organized activities, and as the tide of fundraising rose around us, irritation about giving rose within me. I found myself constantly buying or selling, for my kids or my friends’ kids, to support a variety of worthwhile activities. The homemade frozen pie sale for the preschool was my gateway.
From there it has been all downhill in the currency exchange that supports field trips and field improvements, playgrounds and pay-to-play. The catalogs of overpriced junk—nine-dollar bags of gummy bears or ten-dollar rolls of wrapping paper—from the PTO go immediately into the recycle bin without hesitation. The fifteen-dollar dollar tub of cookie dough my friend’s son delivered went into the garbage after one batch of plastic flavored cookies. A year’s worth of organic gardening magazines piled up, unread, on an end table in the year three of my friends’ kids sold for the magazine drive for the senior class trip to Washington, DC.
I’ve refused to let the kids participate in most fundraisers for a while. Instead I grudgingly write a check for the buy-out amount rather than guilt our relatives into a quota’s worth of Zap-A-Snacks. But now my husband and I figured it was about time the kids do something to support their activities other than sell raffle tickets to their grandparents the night before money had to be turned in to their coach. Thus we signed up for “the fundraiser” and pretty quickly, the details of what we were doing sank in.
•••
Our younger son learned in the first five minutes to drop the direct appeal. He tried initiating contact—“Would you like to support our basketball team?”—but that caused people to turn and run, and his contagious smile turned out to be the best ask. A few commented on the basketball logo on our sign, but most people didn’t ask what our cause was before dropping a dollar in the can. Between the two entrances we covered for two hours, windshield washer fluid and fifty-inch TV sets seemed to be the most obvious hot items, amidst carts of mundane groceries.
The older fell into a script. “Good morning!” Eye contact. A couple dollars or a handful of change later, “Thank you, Sir.” “We appreciate it, Ma’am.” I’d echo his thanks, maybe comment on the warming sun. The wind thrashed the clouds back and forth, flooding us in sunshine or shadows, warm enough to remain gloveless, but with only one hand exposed at a time, while the other warmed in a pocket.
“Sorry, no cash! You should swipe debit cards!” fortyish moms would call out to us as they rushed their cart to their crossover vehicle, acknowledging us over their shoulders. My son would look at me skeptically and I’d shrug. I could equally believe or disbelieve each one of those moms that passed us by. You’ve got to draw some lines somewhere.
People who appeared most able, based only on appearance, usually made no eye contact and a beeline for the side entrance where we could be avoided entirely. That reminded me of a comment an adult paper carrier told me knowingly: “The longer the driveway, the smaller the tip!” Even though I know that it’s not a good indicator of generosity for people who probably itemize their charitable giving, it does sting to be ignored. Elderly and disabled people, people who looked to have enough on their hands by just getting out of their cars and into the store—let alone endure the exertion of their shopping experience—hardly ever ignored us. They paused, painstakingly extricating wallets from pockets and dollars from wallets, smiling softly. People who know what it feels like to be ignored don’t seem to pass that feeling along.
•••
During a pause in the action, I asked my sonhow he felt about our efforts and how a person decides how to give. Does the cause matter? In a world of limited resources, how do we make good decisions? “You think too much, Mom,” he responded, a twelve-year-old feeling the success of what he was actually doing in the present moment. I came with him into the present, and when the grainy wind picked up, peppering us with the silty dust of a three-acre parking lot, we’d squint and lean into each other in solidarity. When the twenty-something skateboard type blew past us with a quick hey nod, and we realized he’d dropped us a tightly rolled ten, we shared twin feelings, reflected in each other’s faces.
He’sright, though, I have reflected a lot about giving well. My uncle contracted AIDS in the eighties, and died in the nineties, before protease inhibitors, but not before devising an intricate estate plan. He established a charitable trust of which his nine nieces and nephews would be the trustees. Until the youngest of us turned thirty, we would distribute the interest annually, then eventually, the principal. The annual distributions weren’t huge amounts of money but certainly more than any of us would have been giving out of our own resources. We rotated the decision making, and then made the big decisions on principal together, through email and on an Adirondack porch, over lots of wine, tears, and laughs, lining up our memories, values and our dollars.
I think there is a tendency to want our giving to mean something, to make a difference, to influence a change for the better. Most people like the idea of teaching a man to fish and feeding him for a lifetime. I get that, but there’s a bigger and bigger part of me that doesn’t like it at all, that doesn’t like the potential for superiority that can accompany the transaction of money, knowledge, or power. Sometimes hungry people just want a fish, not because they like fish, but because they are hungry, and they will figure out how to get something different than fish next time. Lately I see myself less persuaded by mission statements and program descriptions and find myself more likely to pull out my moneyand just give away the damn fish. Somewhere where are no expectations involved—hopes that a scholarship recipient will excel or a belief that the advocacy will yield a certain result.
“What’s the point?” one may quite reasonably ask. Isn’t there an inevitable futility to this approach? An endless string of coffees with three sugars?
I suppose there is, and for me, that’s okay. It falls in with the lot of our common humanity, and the likelihood that anyone is as likely as anyone else to need the unexpected compassion of another. I won’t sign up for another shift panhandling outside Wal-Mart to fundraise for youth sports again anytime soon. The generosity of strangers overflowed our cans. As we got home, warm and clean, the kids counted the money, enthusiastic and reflective, and they promised themselves never to walk by person collecting without pitching in. Turns of fate are often hairpins, it seems to me, and in the switchbacks, in the ebbs and flows, keeping my balance requires a give and take.
•••
ELIZABETH CAMPBELL is a pseudonym for a clinical social worker who, because of the nature of her work, seeks to limit personal information available online.
My three-year old son and I are on the floor. Bless his occupational therapist, but her daily home-based tasks are killing us. I place blocks in a line and run a car over this road. “No!” Alex charges between me and the blocks and tries to rip the cars from my hands. “No! You don’t! I tell you!”
“Well, you can play your way”—I point to his pile of blocks—“But I will play this way. We can play differently.”
You and I are different, we are different people. His therapist (the “feelings” one, not Speech or OT) pushes me to say this, after I have explained the hairdryer battles, the sign-he-saw-that-I-didn’t-see, his new insistence that I have a penis, although he was fine before with me and my vagina for babies to be born out of. Babies like Alex? Did it hurt? Did we do it in a hospital?
But now his fears and his tantrums have settled around the truth that he and I do not always match. Over and over he tells me that I have a penis—I TOLD YOU, I TOLD YOU, as if his insisting on it will make it so. When I try, “We are different,” he goes crazy: “No! Not different! Not different! No! Please!” I reassure him that I love him, nothing is changing, we are already different, we are, after all—a bizarre sort of Platonic evidence I pull out of my ass—not always in the same place at the same time.
But the cars: “Alex will accept adult variations in his play.” He seems to know that this is an object lesson, a battle of reality paradigms, a showdown. “No! No! I’m so mad at you! I want to poke you in the eye [and does], I want to hit you [and does]!” And I hate my whole life. I hate every imaginary parent who has ever played cars with their imaginary child. I hate all my other imaginary children: those twenty eggs I saw on the ultrasound that month he was conceived. Nineteen other possible Alexes, but none of them here to help us, now.
Why? Why? Why no cars allowed on the road? And yet, the next day—“I want to play cars, Mommy”—he lines up the blocks, runs the car over the top, and eyes me carefully. “This car needs to wait his turn. Uh-oh! We can solve the problem! Look, relax and solve the problem!” Trying again. Showing me. So, what can we do to get second-day Alex on the first day? How do we beat down first-day Alex so second-day Alex can live, live, live?
If I had another child in my house, a child that picked up the car and ran it on the road, easily, heedless, I would backhand that child. I would sink my teeth into his shoulder and suck.
I tell my husband that, in my secret evil angry head, I call the therapy programs that are saving our lives—saving our son, by line items and inches—the Ghetto Where What You Wished Wouldn’t Happen Happened. That when I see the words “Special Needs” (especially if they are surrounded by rainbows or smiley faces), I think they should be renamed “Outrageous Needs.” That is how I think of Alex’s needs, on those days when he is just a bleat of screeching irrational anxiety—“Give me my blanket! No blanket! Take off my sock! No sock! [Hits me.] Mommy, I’m sorry! Mommy don’t go!” Outrageous needs!
And, I tell my husband, I am scared I have a worn spot in my mothering now that just won’t go away—a worn out, sagging, trampoline spot that other parents have time to patch up because it isn’t so often used, so outrageously. And it is holding—it has to hold, I have to make it hold. But what if it breaks? What if my love somehow leaks out?
The next day there is third-day Alex—not struggling, not overcompensating for having struggled, but just himself, total, complete. We have a great time at the park. We ride the swings and the slide and play pretend in the way that feels safest to him, in exaggerated fake voices, with the reminding anchor, “This is just pretend” sprinkled throughout. An old woman gives him a huge lollipop, spontaneously, and I let him take it, not thinking how close it is to Speech.
I spend the ride setting it up: “We will need to say goodbye to the lollipop, for Speech, but I promise it will be in the car when you get back.” And he does it voluntarily, giving it up, even waving the lollipop bye bye. But then he can’t hold it together. He lies down on the sidewalk, telling me with his body, I am overcome. He doesn’t want me to hold him, but I say I love him, touch his hand, and we count to ten and to ten again, calming.
After Speech, his therapist says, “He actually did great today—he used a big word, ‘promised’!” We look at each other, my son and I, co-conspirators.
Back at the car, the lollipop is waiting, and I grind it in for next time, the prophecy I’m determined, through all my human resentment and selfishness, to make true. “If Mommy promises, I will only promise when it is true. I will only promise if I am certain.”
And he says, sincerely, “Thank you mommy Alex promise.”
•••
NICOLE MATOS is a Chicago-based writer, professor, roller derby girl, and special needs mom. Her work has appeared in such publications as Salon, The Classical, The Rumpus, theNewerYork, The Atticus Review, Monkeybicycle, THE2NDHAND txt, berfrois, Chicago Literati, and many others. Follow her on Twitter at @nicole_matos2.
It was a joke to begin with, a half-serious attempt to persuade my parents to move from their coast to ours: “The Baby Corps seeks qualified volunteers to aid developing families,” our pitch began. “Do you have what it takes to serve?”
“Think it’ll work?” my husband asked, looking up from the scribbled draft of our “recruitment” letter.
I shrugged. “You never know.” But I come from a two-generation Peace Corps clan, and I knew my audience. They’d be tempted. Especially considering what we were offering as an incentive.
I never expected to live near my folks as an adult. When I was growing up, my parents lived far from their own hometowns. For my siblings and me, visiting grandparents involved hours in the car and the crossing of state lines. The books I read as a kid reinforced this scenario. Fairytale heroes sought adventure far from the home castle and didn’t tend to return once they’d found it. Ma and Pa Ingalls set out for the prairie, leaving the old folks behind in Wisconsin. That was the model I absorbed. The idea was to go to college, get a job (the eighties was a happier era for English majors), and settle in some distant city. I loved my mom and stepdad. But I did not imagine that one day I’d be scheming to lure them to my neighborhood.
Some thirty years later, that day arrived. Like many otherwise rational women, I took a good look at my two-year-old—verbal, finally sleeping through the night, potty-training underway—and concluded that what I really needed was another baby.
“Are you insane?” asked my husband.
I wasn’t offended by his query. The prospect of another child terrified me, too. Simon was a charming kid now, but as a baby, he rarely slept longer than twenty minutes at a stretch, day or night. Persistent breastfeeding problems added anxiety to the miserable fog of sleep deprivation that enveloped us. Another child was appealing in theory, we eventually agreed. But we dreaded a return to all that fatigue and stress—this time while chasing around a lively little boy.
“And I wouldn’t be able to help as much,” worried my husband; in addition to working full-time, he was now enrolled in a graduate program that entailed night classes and weekend fieldwork. “It would be different if we had family around,” he added. “Like, if your parents lived here.”
I stared at him, arrested by this novel concept. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco, I had observed the way extended families shared the burden of child-rearing. I realized, of course, that people right here at home benefited from these arrangements, too. But I had never imagined partaking in such a set-up, myself. Now, as though I were watching a soft-focus movie montage, I saw how it might play out: my mother taking my energetic son for the afternoon while I napped peacefully with the baby; my stepfather cooking meals for us after the birth; maybe even—hoo boy!—a regular date night for me and my husband. Mostly though, what I envisioned was less tangible: a sense of security I hadn’t realized I’d been missing, the comfort of having family close by—even if I didn’t need them exactly the way I used to.
I couldn’t help wondering, however, if this scenario would be attractive to my parents. Retirees on a budget, they found plenty to keep them busy in Maine. But what really fired up these former Peace Corps volunteers was finding frugal, creative ways to travel. Over the past five years, while my husband and I were fixing up an old house and settling into domesticity, my parents had swapped homes with a family in Spain, worked their way across Ireland on organic farms, and volunteered at an archeological dig in Romania. Currently, they were spending a year in the Czech Republic, teaching English. My folks were accustomed to renting out their house and setting off to roam the world. Would they really want to shlep to Oregon to change diapers?
On the other hand, my mother had long been campaigning for me to have another baby. I had practically memorized her current stump speech, “The Pathetic Life of the Only Child.” (It was a marginal improvement over a previous effort, “You’re Not Getting Any Younger, You Know.”) Perhaps, we thought, there was a way to leverage mom’s lust for grandchildren into an arrangement that would make everyone happy.
That was when we came up with the Baby Corps. Its mission: to serve the needs of developing families (ours, anyway) by recruiting volunteers with years of parenting expertise. “Only an elite cadre of highly-qualified and experienced candidates will be accepted into the Baby Corps,” we wrote, cunningly. “Will you rise to the challenge?”
Then we added the kicker: If my parents signed on for a two-year stint with the Corps, we’d be delighted to give them another grandchild. My husband tweaked the design of the Peace Corps logo, with its stars and dove, to create an official-looking letterhead for our recruitment letter, and we sent it off.
Would we have gone ahead and had another baby on our own? Probably. But we never had to make that decision. Three weeks later a letter arrived from the Czech Republic. My parents were charmed with the notion of the Baby Corps and flattered that we wanted their help. They would be delighted to rent out the house again and move across the country for a couple of years. “So, get busy, you two,” my mother finished. I could practically see her smirking.
A few months later, I was pregnant. My parents returned from Europe and settled their affairs on the east coast. My husband and I found an apartment for them in a nearby Victorian and spent the summer furnishing it from Craigslist and yard sales. By now I had tempered my expectations of the next two years. My mother and I have never shied from speaking our minds to each other. She sniffs at my reading habits (“lightweight”); I frown at her wardrobe (“shmattes”). (My stepfather wisely keeps his distance.) There would be highly charged discussions, that was certain. Still, I knew that our differences would always be bridged by our shared love of PBS costume dramas, the novels of Ursula le Guin, and the wedding page of the New York Times Sunday Styles section. Besides, we had a history of supporting each other when it really mattered.
When our Baby Corps recruits arrived, it became clear that they regarded this move not only as a grandparental mission, but as another opportunity for adventure in a new location. Within a few weeks, my mother had signed up to audit Latin classes at the university. My stepfather was investigating the local art scene. They were raving about fabulous cheap restaurants we’d never heard of.
But when I went into labor, three weeks after their arrival, my parents were at our house in minutes to take charge of our now-three-year-old. The next day they brought him to the hospital to meet his baby brother. When we got home, a big pot of curried red pepper soup was on the stove, along with a tray of fresh biscuits. “I’ll be back tomorrow to take Simon to the park so you two can sleep,” promised my mother. “And don’t forget,” she instructed, pulling on her coat, “At five o’clock, put your feet up, nurse that baby, and have a big glass of red wine. Millions of Frenchwomen can’t be wrong!”
When I told people that my parents were coming to town, I invariably got one of two reactions. “Is that a good thing?” asked some, poised to commiserate. Others were frankly envious. “They’re moving here just to help out? You guys are so lucky.”
We were lucky. Parenting a three-year-old and a newborn was every inch as difficult as we anticipated. But over the next two years, our Baby Corps volunteers stepped up for us in countless ways, taking on tasks that might look minor—like staying with Simon while I took the baby to the doctor—but which made our lives inestimably easier. Weekends, when I was running on four hours of sleep and my husband was analyzing bioswale diversity, I could walk the boys to my parents’ sunny apartment, where a special stash of toys waited and I could count on conversation that wasn’t about fire trucks. And eventually, once we were all getting more sleep, there was Date Night.
True, my mother and I had our moments. Many times, I was the beneficiary of her unique brand of childrearing advice, a whiplash-inducing combination of old school techniques (“Just rub brandy on those gums.”) and woo-woo theories (“No learning to read before the first tooth falls out.”) She deplored the “draconian” hospital policy dictating that we produce our carseat for inspection before taking the baby home (“I held you in the front seat and you were fine!”) She was disappointed that, unlike her, I wouldn’t consider Waldorf education for my kids—even if I could have afforded it.
On the other hand, Mom was unfazed when her grandson wanted to wear a dress at age four, pronouncing him “adorable” in the blue-checked frock she’d saved from my own childhood. (“It’s just a phase; he’ll get over it,” she told me—correctly.) She demonstrated admirable stamina for reading aloud, delighting in introducing Simon to my old pals Frog and Toad, and that canny bread-and-jam lover, Frances. So when, at the conclusion of their official Baby Corps service, my parents elected to settle in our neighborhood permanently, my husband and I were thrilled.
My boys are in elementary and middle school now. It’s been a long time since we needed to rely on my folks for the logistical and emotional support that saw us through those first, hard years with two kids. These days it’s not their help that I value (although we never take Date Night for granted). It’s the way my parents have become a part of our lives. What I savor now are the birthday dinners and Thanksgiving feasts, the latke parties and impromptu calls: “We baked a pie, come on over.” I’m happy that for my boys, the seven-block walk to their grandparents’ house is a familiar routine, and that visiting can be as simple as stopping in for a quick hello on the way home from the library.
I’ll always be grateful for what our Baby Corps volunteers did for us. And while nobody’s looking forward to it, I’m aware that one day it will be our turn to render whatever assistance my folks may come to need. It may not be for a while, but as I like to remind my mom, “You’re not getting any younger, you know.”
•••
KATE HAAS still regards her three years in Morocco with the Peace Corps as one of the highlights of her life.She is a creative nonfiction editor at Literary Mama and the publisher of Miranda, a long-running print zine about motherhood. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Brain, Child, Babble, and TheToronto Star. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family. Read more of her writing at www.katehaas.com.
When he first started to stay over at our house, my then future-stepfather brought my mother a curious gift. It was a rather large brass horn, used by hunters, he said. The brass curled around itself; the flare of the horn was handsome. But it was odd, this object. We all stared at the horn and then at him when he presented it to her. The gift wasn’t romantic, nor did it have to do with dreams of hunting trips. It was supposed to be practical. “If I snore too loudly,” he explained, “just blow the horn.”
My mother practically giggled at the gift. She certainly blushed. She mumbled something along the lines of his snoring being “not that bad.” She was happy, that much was clear, and I was relieved and pleased for her.
By rights, though, he should have brought me a kazoo—or a foghorn. His snores traveled through the ceiling of what had been her room and quickly became theirs right through my bedroom floor. He was, indeed, a loud snorer—the loudest, in fact, I’ve ever known. The sound resembled a cross between a drone and a series of honks. You could picture some cartoon character with a big bill or an outsized schnozz.
Their romance began near the end of my high school career and my leaving for college. The snoring served as a tiny sign to get out, a harbinger. Things were changing in the household. That was fine—I was ready to leave. Most of the time, I found the incredibly thunderous sounds from below more amusing than annoying. It was loud, but it was at a safe remove.
•••
Years later, I met the love of my life. It turns out that Hosea, too, snores. His snoring is a honking, snuffly, schnozzy, start-and-stop affair. Sometimes, it reminds me of a monologue, comedic to the listener, dramatic to the performer. Except the performer sleeps through it and the listener finds herself in a tragedy, the one of being awake to hear it in the middle of the night. I can’t say whether he snored less early in our relationship or whether I was so entirely smitten for the first decade and a half that I just didn’t care. I care now.
My boyfriend-turned-husband displayed an uncanny ability to sleep through anything. Hoseasnored and he slept, the one never disturbing the other. At the beginning of our relationship, in fact, I was in the midst of a kitchen renovation that required some work on the roof just beneath my bedroom. Think hammers that pounded loud enough to seem as if the work were going on inside your bedroom. He slept right through the ruckus morning after morning, long after the sun rose high in the sky. My usual wakeup time was more in the dawn hours and so I’d go about my day, incredulous that neither heavy construction nor full sun woke him. He often worked into the wee hours; he wasn’t a slacker. Our opposite tendencies had advantages from the perspective of an early riser: Hosea didn’t bother me when I did my best work, because he was fast asleep during my most cherished work hours.
When we became parents, his natural night owlish tendencies cut both. Chicken or egg, the first baby was a night owl, too. They hung out—and the baby slept in, once he was old enough not to wake up all day and night long. We had to wake him for preschool. On the positive side, the middle-of-the-night stuff could fall to my dear husband before he’d actually want to go to sleep. On the negative side, every early morning waking—with each child, the hours got more “kid normal”—fell to me and my precious early mornings evaporated. Back on the up side, Hosea can drive teenagers at night and recently chaperoned a cast party at our house that began at one a.m. and ended at four. I slept through the entire shebang. Also on the up side: I tend to go to bed before he does. Often, he’s in bed, reading, and turns the light off for the two minutes it takes for me to drift off. That’s sweet—quiet and sweet.
I’ve come to imagine snoring is much like the ripeness of high school and college-age males. Back when our bodies first discovered one another’s, the funky ripeness became part of the appeal. A strong scent was a strong sensation. Their funk was, when we were together, mine in a way.
At some moment over the last few years, when the very dear and lovely and loud husband’s snoring woke me, I ceased to be charmed—or forgiving. I went from unflustered to fully furious with flip-of-a-switch speed. I’d poke him. “You’re so loud!” I’d call out, not quite yelling but certainly not whispering. Whispers had no impact at all. I needed to put more muscle into my voice than was readily available in the middle of the night, which is part of why I got so enraged. Ginger prods did not rouse him either. I had to poke or shake. This required effort. The act of attempting to get him to roll over or shut up woke me up more, after I’d already been awoken by his sonorous snores. This was a recipe for a trip to nowhere good and quickly.
Every next snore that he snored once I was awake and trying to get him to stop snoring just pissed me off even more. This assault on my sleep, after years of babies and toddlers and anxiety over the babies and toddlers, was kind of a final straw. I didn’t want to be bothered by my husband. All those parenting hours that had chipped away at our alone time and our romance time were compounded in the middle of the night by his being the one to steal my rest from me. It was the opposite of romantic. It was burdensome and enraging.
Still, divorce did not enter my mind.
I began to fantasize about separate rooms. Sometimes, when it gets bad, Hosea shifts to a kid’s bed or the couch in the room off our bedroom. Sometimes, if a kid has already moved into our bed, he’ll simply take the kid’s bed. Mostly, though, he prefers our bed and his position beside me. Lucky me. I mean that, you know, except for the sleeplessness. “Would separate rooms help?” he asked one morning after I hadn’t slept much at all. “If that’s what it takes, let’s do it. It’s not like we’re doing anything in our bed at night surrounded by all these children other than sleeping.
“Sleeping,” he added, “if we’re lucky.”
It was practically the most romantic offer ever made under the circumstances. I felt cared for and understood. Our romance remains alive, despite all those children. Our love is strong. Partners in exhaustion (and often in anxiety, too), we both covet ever-elusive sleep. Regardless of whether I’d like my own bedroom—and I know I’m not the only woman to want one—the truth is we don’t have an extra bedroom.
•••
After years of practice, Hosea responds pretty well to being jostled. I don’t have to shake so hard or poke so pokily or yell so loud. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles whenever I have to do so. He is, I know he is, as he slumbers on and I lie awake for a while. Unromantic as snoring is, insomnia is pretty much of a mood dampener as well. Some nights I lie awake, perplexed that I’m awake and that what bothers me are such silly things as snoring—or teenagers’ socks strewn across the floor or loads of other things I never thought I’d be bothered by, for that matter. I don’t know what I thought would preoccupy me. It just wasn’t stuff like this.
Rather than simply have me furious at him every single night, we began to seek solutions. Hoseawears anti-snoring nose strips when he sleeps. They resemble band-aids. Some nights, they really help; other nights, they seem decorative, like the Dora the Explorer band-aids my daughter insists on wearing. After years of my badgering, Hosea finally visited an allergist. The allergist identified allergies and prescribed new medication. The snoring has decreased in frequency and audibility.
The white noise machine I bought to help drown him out helps some, too, although not once I’m in awake and especially not once I’m kicked into worried mode. My mother’s white noise machine is the public radio station, which drones on all night long—and serves the secondary purpose of distraction if she wakes up anxious. Also, my son notes her hearing isn’t quite what it used to be. We got into her car recently—the radio blasting—and I’d have to agree with him. I guess I’m still hopeful that, like my mother has somehow done, I will eventually reach a state of accepting accommodation in regards to my husband’s snoring. She continues to insist it’s “not that bad.” Hosea hasn’t gotten me a horn, and I haven’t begun to lose my hearing, not even selectively.
•••
SARAH WERTHAN BUTTENWIESER is a writer living in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband and four children. Her work has appeared recently in the New York Times, Salon, and Brain, Child. Follow her on Twitter @standshadows.
After over a month away, my college freshman sends me an email containing, in its entirety, her opening paragraph for an essay (probably due in a couple of hours). No need to comment; she wants me to check the commas. It is our only inside joke; she doesn’t “get” commas. More precisely, she gets that commas are the only necessary punctuation, allowing the harried, headlong writer to separate ideas, go to the bathroom, dramatically pause, enumerate, whatever—commas are like school paste, hastily completing one ring before the next in the brilliant paper chain of her thinking.
She is brilliant, let me not fail to mention, attending a, cough, elite university. She’s also sensible and diligent, witty, humane. How terrible is it to have one grammatical fault?
Not very. But I know what you’re thinking, you, parent-who-is-not-me. You’re thinking she should be correcting her own comma errors. You’re thinking, how terrible to have only one funny intimacy between you and your daughter, one (count it) joke, after eighteen years of positive, thoughtful, healthy, creative, stable, mindful, whatever, parenting? How lame to get one lousy email in a month?
You tell me, chuckling momma. And I know you will, momentarily. I became a mother just in time for the zeitgeist of self-conscious parenting—we stared, compared, wrote books (guilty!), blogged, bragged. Currently, we buzzfeed our anxieties across the wired universe—Are You Enabling Your Adult Child? Is 25 the New 18? 10 Signs You’re a Helicopter Parent. Or Are You a . . . wait, what’s the opposite of a helicopter?
Tricycle? Dirt bike? Wheelchair? Somewhere on the primitive terrestrial level of emotional locomotion is where my daughter and I bust our moves. My cousin and her daughter exchanged 212 texts and seven phone calls in her first week at college—in this digital parenting age, there are so many new ways to keep score—but that’s not how we roll. We don’t talk, much, my daughter and me. We don’t text. A grammatical point is the center of our intimate universe. So boo me.
Boo her, too, charging ahead, comma-tose, in her spectacular, mother-free life. I envy her, let me put that out there. I’d like to go back to college, belly-up to the buffet table of knowledge, and feast. I’d like to peek out from behind my shiny hair at the smart and sultry guys peeking back.
But that’s a feeling I like to keep separate from missing her. She’d like that, too, and if we had one other joke, she and I, that’d probably be it. How can I miss you if you won’t go away?
Do I miss her? Yes, no. No, yes.
2. Use a comma to separate the elements in a series (three or more things).
Like you, attached parent, I’ve spent the better part of two decades observing this beautiful human. I watched while she composed her tiny arguments with me. At two, holding my gaze, she walked backwards with the juice she was not allowed to take out of the kitchen, already seeking an escape hatch from the Mothership. First sentences included “You’re not the boss of me,” and “I want my privacy, please.”
She was tough, contained, stubborn, true, quick, observant, thorough—from the very start of life. Unfoolable, she refused all bottles and pacifiers, forcing me to breastfeed until she finally got a cup with her own damned name on it.
From the moment she could write, she liked to bring her universe to order by making lists: Jews We Know; Christians We Know; Ask Mom About. One of her lists, “Rules,” composed in crayon during a particularly disastrous play date, virally migrated to copier rooms across America after I taped them to my office door at work:
Rosalie’s Rules
No telling secrets!!!!!
No whining.
No phisical contact.
No trowing shoes.
Listen to grownups.
Don’t waist electrisedy.
Have fun !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Be nice.
Be polite unless your being funny!
Always follow theese rules!
My brother-in-law used to begin corporate staff meetings by handing out Rosalie’s Rules. In fact, all of us who took this list to work understood that following Rosalie’s Top Three Rules—No telling secrets. No whining. No physical contact—would pretty much eliminate conflict. And it was sobering to realize that this insight came from a six-year-old.
My six-year-old. I remember her early bodies. Fine white hair standing straight as wheat on her head. Her fat square foot in my palm. The berry birthmark on the side of her nose, fainter each year. Her delicate frame in a white tee-shirt, pink rosebud on the collar. I was watching, admiring, evaluating—every minute, all the time—like the rest of my friends did with their kids. And for a time, in clear violation of Rule #3, I’d catch her up just to dance with me; she’d kiss me as many times as she could count; I’d knead the warm dough of her after a bath, when we played “Make me a pizza!”
At thirteen, however, she reverted to Rule #3, stopped returning hugs and accepting kisses, pulled up the drawbridge of herself and peered down at me from a high parapet. She was polite (Rule #9), but not funny. I couldn’t get a laugh out of her to save my soul (which sorely needed to hear her laugh). It was a long and difficult period, five years of her disciplined, disapproving distance—my girl backing away, still holding my gaze.
In the spirit of Rule #1, I should say that before she was born I feared having a girl, and this is precisely why: this regard. I know, because I was a girl who once regarded her mother from the same high place—with love, but without mercy. I needed my mother in very specific ways(a pumpkin pie, a prom dress, a crisply ironed shirt), but I couldn’t, for a long time, talk to her. Like Rosalie, I was never one of those girls who told their mothers everything. Yet I couldn’t help feeling, over the years of my daughter’s childhood, that I should become one of those mothers.
I simply didn’t know how. Shamed, I listened hard while other mothers filled me in on juicy news my daughter never reported—classroom antics, crackpot teachers, drama-club drama, teen romances, breakdowns, and bad behavior. I accepted their pity—their daughters dished, while I got my updates from the school website—and internalized their unspoken question: Doesn’t she know her own daughter?
In the newly empty house, her wee face on a stray refrigerator magnet can slay me.
3. Use a comma + a conjunctionto connect two independent clauses.
So I’ve been getting out more, and today took a walk when no one else thought of it. I had the park to myself, sky quietly blue and the trees starting to riot. A shift in season announced itself in my lungs. As I got into rhythm, I felt my energy rise up to my demand: heart delivering, muscles stretching, bones holding everything aloft. A shift in me, a space in me, opened up. Here I am, I thought: moving, alone, separate.
It was a concrete experience, nothing mystical about it. I’ll turn fifty in a few days. I’ve been a woman for thirty-eight years, a wife for twenty-eight, a mother for twenty. My body, me as object in space, has been caressed, ogled, stretched, shoved, squeezed, sized up, sucked, fucked, fondled, leaned on, burdened, stuffed, starved, examined, cut, drained, cleaned, sullied. There have been many hands upon me, hands I love and want to return to. Hands I slapped back (or should have). But this body, and the mind inhabiting it, has been returned to me, whole, completely capable of its animal and spiritual work: propulsion, going on.
And along with the impatient leaves, this other, thrilling idea came down: No one is watching. I have my privacy, thank you.
Like most empty nesters and the officially middle-aged, I certainly have regrets. But one of them is wishing for the wrong things. I wished for childhood to be perfect for my kids, not one molecule damaged or opportunity ignored. I wished to be perfect myself—more ambitious, more confident, less judgmental. I wished my daughter and I were closer. But I didn’t wish for this—for my sole self returning after a long journey through other lives, other bodies, other selves.
Of course, I wished my kid would get into her dream school, which, in fact, she did. At the freshman convocation, I squinted from the bleachers to pick out the pony tail that belonged to me—my beloved yellow head bobbing in the sea of promise. But the chaplain who delivered the invocation caught me in the act. “These are your children,” he said to the flock of proud parents, who, let’s be honest, felt we, too, had arrived. “But they don’t belong to you. They belong to themselves.”
My daughter has been telling me this very thing, in various ways, her entire life. There’s a difference between privacy and secrecy, and I suspect that in prior generations everybody knew that, not just six-year-olds. Gathering a new space around her (albeit with a roommate I don’t know much about), I think my daughter has been returned to her self, too, untethered, no one looking over her shoulder, however lovingly. That’s a heady feeling, I know. In the compound sentence of our lives, we’ve both arrived at a comma. Something has gone; something is coming, but we’re going to stop here a moment and, privately, catch our breath.
Don’t judge us, oracles of parenting, friendly rivals I run into at the coffee shop who ask how Rosalie is doing at school. (I don’t know; fine, I guess.) We’ve taken a break from judgment and are composing ourselves for our futures. No secrets. No whining. No throwing shoes.
And in this new, quiet space I hear a faint voice calling from the distance. I love you, now, will you please, shut up and tell me, where the commas go?
•••
KRISTIN KOVACIC is the editor, with Lynne Barrett, of Birth: A Literary Companion . She teaches in the Literary Arts department of Pittsburgh’s Creative and Performing Arts School and in the Masters of Fine Arts program at Carlow University.
I’m watching the water roll in, walking quickly along the shore while there’s still land to walk on. I know I could make it around the whole tidal island, back to the wooden stairs set into the rock face, and then up to the summer cottage, before the tide stops me. But I was delayed setting out—by what, I don’t remember now: an unexpected load of laundry, a lost Pokémon card, a creeping Daddy Long Legs that spooked my daughter out of her nap.
I walk briskly, but I can’t make up the time: I’m three-quarters of the way around, but the beach gets shorter and shorter. Now I’m walking right up next to the rocks. Now I’m tying my sneakers around my neck and water splashes over my feet.
I’m walking faster, grinning as I try to outrun it although I know I can’t—it’s much more powerful than I am. Now I’m hiking my skirt up to keep it dry, and finally I have to swim. As I ease into the water, I’m laughing that it beat me, and I’m more than a bit exhilarated, hooked. I was ripe for the taking, ready to be swept away by it or by something else.
•••
When we first arrived here, we’d driven slowly, the way you do when you don’t know the roads yet, where each turn in the road or unusually shaped tree might be the landmark that you’ll imprint on your memory. We worried, driving beneath the canopy of old pine and oak trees, that we’d missed a turn—wasn’t there supposed to be a bridge?—then the road dropped off abruptly, and a wide salt marsh spread out endlessly left and right: long, waving grass, divided by a gray wooden bridge. Across it, the narrow road climbed steeply into the pine forest, winding across the island to cliffs facing Cape Cod Bay. Only it wasn’t an island, just then, because the tide was low.
After we found the cottage, the rest of my family ran to climb down the cliff to the vast, shell-strewn beach, but I stayed to explore the inside. I found that the owners had left us a calendar. It showed the phases of the moon and the height of each day’s tides, drawn as parabolic curves along the calendar page. Each day, I saw, as the moon waned to a crescent, the high tide water would surge higher. It would cover the beach to the rocks. It would fill the creek below the bridge we’d crossed. It would overflow whole salt marsh, cover the tall grass, spill onto the pavement, make the road impassable, at first for minutes, but then longer and longer each day. By the new moon—they called it the “astronomical high tide”—the road would flood for hours, cutting us off from the bridge, the rest of the Cape, and the world.
Courtesy Meredith Fein Lichtenberg
•••
Vacation is always lulling and maybe a beach vacation even more so, but this cut-off place that’s drowned twice daily makes me feel almost drunk. Since the road floods at inconvenient times, and I’m not a planner, we rarely get off the island. I never get away from it long enough to come down, so I keep feeling all I want is more. It is enjoyable in a way that feels a little naughty, like a cocktail hour that goes on for weeks.
In the hall, there’s an aerial photo of the island. I can make out the pitched roof of our cottage, a speck of reddish shingle visible through the knot of pine branches and scrub oak. The Bay water swirls around like a Van Gogh, but the colors are blurred, so you can’t tell whether you’re looking at water or sand or marsh. I pore over the photo, and the tide calendar, and my maps, obsessively. I don’t want to think about anything else.
I take down the photo, and soon I’m carrying it with me from room to room. Each time I look at it, hungrily, it’s like I’m taking another hit. This was how I was when my kids were infants: they cried, or even just peeped, and I became dopey with the strength of the call, impelled to respond to it. I was obsessed with their rhythms, disinclined to get far enough away from them to sober up and see it more clearly. This didn’t happen the instant they were born, of course; at first there was the shock at what I’d lost.
But when that subsided, it was obvious: my babies’ needs were clear, irrefutable. When they needed, simply, my breast, all I had to be was the breast they needed. It made me docile. Every time I looked at them, I was drunk with it again. It wasn’t just that I was broken, or that my instincts rose up and I saw I was perfect for the role just by being a mammal. It wasn’t even that, as the weeks passed, I did it for the sake of the love growing between us. Yes, it was those things, but more than that, living so completely constrained by them, living utterly in their minutes, there was so much about me that I did not have to decide. It was heady. For a while, I could be simply a mother with her young, fecund, legitimate, uncomplicated.
•••
When the tide comes in, we walk down to the bridge and see teenagers who gather there to jump into the cold Bay water. A handful of skinny boys with farmer tans goggle at the curves that half a dozen sunburned girls are trying to camouflage under shorts; their play-acted confidence is punctuated by giggling. When the intensity peaks, they all jump off the bridge to cool off. Wading in the marsh, collecting green crabs with my kids, I’m aware that I have all the freedom the teenagers imagine they want, and even access to adventures they haven’t dreamt of yet.
And, yet, I am spending my vacation at the one shelly beach near the cottage, snacking on stale bunny-shaped cheese crackers because we’re out of peaches and the tide too high right now for me to cross the bridge and drive off-island to the farm stand. I’m not restless. If I stay here, in sync with spring tide and neap tide, it will shape the day for me. And that feels, at the moment, perfect. People talk about freedom like it’s only a good thing, an ideal, the ideal, but it’s also so damn demanding. This feeling of containment—we can’t leave because the tide’s in—takes the pain of decisions away; it’s easy to surrender to it.
Surrender is so unlike regular life. It’s not maybe we should stop using plastic wrap is it worthwhile to buy Ad Words for my website do you think we should talk to your parents about getting long-term-care insurance I wonder if that conference is a good networking opportunity or a waste of time, and by the way who might I be in this life I’m making? Only, simply, yes, now, for you. Regular life has freedom. But there’s a different liberation in being defined, for a while, by something bigger than you—the ocean, the infant’s hungry mouth. It made me happy for a long time.
This summer, for the first time since I last looked, Henry and Jane are not babies. Being fundamental to their hourly survival has, I realize, long since given way to lovable, fungible parenting. There is time now to attend to questions of plastic wrap, Ad Words, long-term care insurance, networking, other things. But I’m soft and used to surrender. There’s a vacuum where babies’ rhythms once defined me. In the vacuum, I reach for something else to contain me, to numb me, to let it stay simple a little longer, and in flows the tide, also gigantic, demanding, beautiful, and simple. It carries me along, willingly.
I walk around thinking “water.” Water. Water and water and water and water and water and what more would I want and I’ll be the island and let it suffuse me, shape me, create me. I feel I am helpless for it, that sparkling feeling that takes over, makes me feel something-like-happy, and a little dumb. I just want to think about it again and again, to be near it and let it command me and keep out all the other big stuff. I feel I am in love with the rhythm of the tide. And is that so weird, really? I was also, twice, in love with babies who were, then, little more than mouths, lungs, and assholes. They were my flood and ebb, and I loved them, and I love this.
•••
Somehow, though, one day, we venture out to see friends. We return home late in the evening, sleepy, and as the car comes over the hill, I literally gasp to see the marsh, spread-eagled, careless, before us, and island rising up beyond it, awaiting inundation. The bridge is dimly lit by a handful of stars to the east and the last bit of sunset to the west. Water is everywhere, and I’m so instantly pulled back into its magic that it takes me a minute to realize that we misjudged the timing. It’s half an hour before high tide, but already the pavement is wet. A man with binoculars tells us we can’t cross safely till the tide turns and water ebbs away. His shoulders are low and his feet are in waders. He speaks in a slow, authoritative cadence. “The road dips down on the far side of the bridge. Even if it’s still passable here, it’s too dangerous on the island side.”
I blink dumbly, repeatedly. “We have to wait?” I ask.
Greg quietly suggests we leave the car and hike home in the dark, and some tiny fraction of me briefly imagines us wading across and climbing through woods lit only by a merest sliver of moon. It’s what we’d have done before the kids. But Henry worriedly asks what we’ll do, and Jane observes that it’s very dark. I am as slow as a cow, disoriented, but I can see that she would need to be carried and he would complain all the way back. My habit of surrendering doesn’t lend itself to adventuresome thinking.
So we wait. A long, cranky hour passes in the car. I open the windows and look out at the stars and the marsh. Even in darkness, I can see the water moving in; I can hear it, moving towards me, relentless.
The kids respond to long periods of confinement with a kind of hideous duet—each takes solo verses to opine about the injustice of having had to share the one good fishing net all day, or our present lack of snacks and entertainment. Then they come together for a complain-y, bickering chorus that would sober anyone up, their voices joined in harmonious resentment. It is my least favorite sound track.
I think of whole days trapped with them—hundreds of them—with a toddler insatiable for endless rounds of The Erie Canal or a preschooler smelling every dog-piss-fertilized flower on the way to the store. How lovely it had been, at first, to surrender to them each time, to find their helplessness or curiosity thrilling, their appetite for repetition fascinating, clues to the people they’d grow to be. And yet sometimes I spent—I spend—a whole morning waiting for naptime, searching among my feelings for the peaceful surrender that came so naturally at first. Sometimes I find it again. Other times I feel, I want my fucking freedom. But motherhood deadens your impulses. You don’t leave a little one behind. You don’t even fantasize about it. You look at her and she pulls you back in and the restive feelings are all against your will.
The high tide finally rolls in and then begins to recede dreadfully slow. I am itching to get moving but I’m so tired. The sea’s undertow pulls some kind of crazy love out of me, undeniably; I don’t wish it away. It is irrational, the way it’s irrational to love being your babies’ bitch. But right now, strung out on the tide we’re tied to, I want to go home.
•••
On the day of the New Moon, we finally join friends off-island, at the ocean. My toes sink in to the loose, white sand dunes there. Compared with the packed, moist Bay beach near our cottage, it’s hard to walk. The sun blazes, reflecting diamonds all around me, so bright that I’m confused; between the glare and the deafening surf, it seems our island is a cave we have hibernated in, and now, away from it, I’m jolted awake by hunger, amazed to reencounter the world—it’s huge and beautiful, and I’ve been asleep for years.
All at once, it’s evening. The idea of folding ourselves into the car, back to the cramped domesticity of the cottage is unbearable. I am suddenly ravenous. I want French fries and onion rings and fried oysters and stuffed quahogs, a baked potato with a little plastic container of sour cream and beer on tap and soft-serve ice cream. I want everything you can’t get at home.
We end up at a local place with a hundred other vacationers in skin tones ranging from sunburnt to roasted. We share a long picnic table with someone else’s bickering family. The kids, restless and whining, draw on paper placemats with broken crayons, and solve the word-find with the improbably misspelled “seafod.” The adults are clutching plastic lobsters that will light up and vibrate, eventually, to let us know our order is up. It’s too bright, too loud, hard to wait. Everyone is cranky, and I don’t feel like trying to make it better. I think, longingly, for a moment, of our tidal island, dark, limited, yes, but also a buffer against these harsh wilds of Tourist Restaurant Hell. It is a nest whose beauty makes me so dopey I call the drudgery of cooking and cleaning and caring for my little ones a “vacation.”
My life is that nest. I designed it to fit my peculiarities, to comfort me so I could brood and nurture my young and learn to be their mother. I placed each leaf and feather and twig painstakingly, then filled it with people I love. It limited my world, so I could focus on theirs. I made it so beautiful that living in it seemed like a terrific deal in exchange for my time, my body, my freedom. It was, once.
In the loud restaurant, now, everything seems distorted, pointed the wrong way, poking me; I have no room. This life I’ve so carefully built, loved ferociously, found so much more than satisfying, this nest, which suited us so well, it’s not just a nest, anymore. It’s a cage. And its bars, woven all around me, are the twigs and scraps I chose myself, placed with my own hands and heart, according to my own design, to contain me. The kids are hatched now; it’s only me still hoping to be comforted by containment—grasping at anything else that reminds me that for a brief time there was a role that suited me so perfectly I was willing to enslave myself.
My cheeks are hot with shame. Even birds, with their almond-sized brains, know that after the little ones hatch and fledge, it’s time for the mother to fly, again, too, to go anywhere, alight unsentimentally for sleep on any old twig. Even the most lovingly built and well-used nests are just for a sojourn. Only human mothers try to remain there so long that they go crazy. Only human mothers could try to stay in a cautious, protective role that fits less and less, a little longer, a little longer, to avoid seeing the loss, the heartbreak of being outgrown, the terror at what we might become next.
A while after the plastic lobsters vibrate, I want to get going. The high tide isn’t until late. “But it’s the new moon,” I say, over and over, more to myself than to anyone. But Henry and Jane dawdle with French fries, and on the way to the parking lot there’s No we can’t do mini-golf tonight and Fingers do not belong in your brother’s ear and Let it go, she said she was sorry. I gun the engine restlessly while everyone straps in.
Off the highway, I fly up the road with the pine canopy. I take the hill so fast that my stomach springs up to my throat and down to my groin. As we crest the top, I see alongside the marsh, several cars parked and slow-moving folks wading down to the bridge or standing, hands-on-hips, gazing into darkness. They’re here to see the astronomical high tide.
The water is already creeping up the road, farther than we’ve seen it before. In a wordless, agonized split-second calculation, Greg and I meet eyes and realize we’ll be trapped here till midnight.
I open the car door to see water already inches up the tire. It is closing in. It’s not containing me, holding me, providing me the structure I need. Not anymore.
Our eyes meet again for a moment as I make the decision. Then I drive forward, not testing, tentative, but lurching, foot to the floor. The water is deeper than I had guessed, the steering wheel not so responsive. But my foot is an anvil. The world dwindles to nothing except for my certainty that I must get across immediately. The car is listing to the left as we descend, deeper, towards the bridge, and it occurs to me that I could miss the bridge entirely and go straight into the creek. I think: I must get through this motherfucker! And then: This mother really may be fucked.
I’m loony, I think. But it’s moonless tonight, and I’m the opposite of loony: I’m emerging from a years-long dopey haze, and now getting out of it, I’m newly reusing a muscle I can only barely control. My pacing is wild. All I can think is that I must drive forward.
My aim is decent, and we’re up on the bridge, momentarily on dry ground, and I’m elated. We’re halfway there. We thunder across only to descend with a belly-flop splash to the further side. The causeway here is deeper, and for a moment, I can’t quite feel the pavement; are we floating?
My head is roaring, a chorus telling me to GO! GO! GO! Water is splashing over the hood of the car (GO!! KEEP GOING!). I need to turn on the wipers (GO!). It’s so dark that I can’t see where the road ends and the marsh begins. Are we veering left? If the tires go into the marsh, we are sunk (FASTER!). I can’t see the road at all (DON’T STOP! KEEP GOING!). There is no road (GO! GO GO GO!).
I hear Greg’s voice, as through a tunnel—is he telling me to slow down? I am afraid to listen, afraid that whatever he says will be like the newborn’s cry, like the rising tide, a Siren’s wail, tempting me back to the habit of following, surrendering, but I am in the driver’s seat now. We all need me to jam the pedal down and go forward, with no compass and no way to steer, navigating only by the imagined road ahead.
Then I’m on dry land, heading up the hill onto the island, speeding, now that I’m not dragged down by feet of water. We whip along the sand road, through the trees, the last mile through the steep forest.
Shaking and triumphant, I’ll be sore tomorrow, but for now, I’m laughing uncontrollably, giddy. I feel soaked with tears and sweat; adrenaline races through my arteries. Soon all four of us are whooping and giggling. At home, we put the kids in bed unceremoniously, still covered in beach and dinner, and Greg and I walk back down to the causeway without a flashlight. The pines above look like pulled cotton balls against the black sky, and the moonless night is so dark we navigate purely by memories of where the road curved or bent or rutted. We walk without speaking, dumbfounded, holding hands, and arrive exactly as the tide is high. The marsh is so full it looks like a lake, covering even the tallest grass, deep enough to reflect us, and the trees from the island and even the stars above. The sky and the water go on and on, even farther than I can dream of.
•••
MEREDITH FEIN LICHTENBERG lives in New York City where she is a prenatal and parenting educator and a board-certified lactation consultant. Her writing has appeared in Brain, Child, The Mom Egg, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere, and she can be found online at www.amotherisborn.com. Her kids aren’t really called Henry and Jane; she wonders how life would have been different if they were.
The author takes a picture of her son taking a picture from the top of l’Arc de Triomphe.
by Katy Read
The words surprised even me, tumbling from my mouth before my brain had a chance to process them.
“If you quit asking me for money for clothes for the whole school year then I’ll, um … okay, next summer I’ll take you to the European city of your choice, for a week.”
“Are you serious?” my son said.
Wait—was I?
On that night last fall, my son wanted a new shirt. I wanted peace. Both of my sons, at seventeen and eighteen, have higher sartorial standards than my budget allows—just one of many catalysts for the wearying intergenerational conflict familiar to parents of teenagers. No doubt I could have gotten him to drop the subject for the moment. But drop it for a whole school year? In eighteen years of parenthood, I had not found a way to achieve that. Clearly, it would take a bribe. A big bribe. A bribe so huge it would cost about twenty times more than the price of a few wardrobe updates.
“Let me think about it,” I backpedaled.
I thought about it, discussed it with others. Family and friends encouraged me, in the way of loved ones who like to imagine you having a delightful time overseas. My ex-husband had a different reaction, in the way of an ex who likes to imagine you paying your share of the college bills.
“Oh. My. God,” he said.
•••
Let me be more explicit about my financial situation, indelicate a task though that is, because this is the sort of story that certain internet types tend to dismiss as just another privileged person whining about her overblown problems. Fair enough, if your definition of privileged encompasses the middle class, including those of us who have slid down the ladder in recent years but are still clinging to a rung.
Yes, I know there are more harrowing recession narratives out there than “I stressed over whether to take the kids to Europe.” But this isn’t a tale of woe, really. It’s a tale of recklessness, a tale of casting aside common sense, a tale of shelling out money to buy something intangible and possibly foolish, and hoping desperately that it was not.
For most of my life, I have occupied the reasonably comfy middle of the middle class. I have acquired—through a combination of effort, luck and, okay, privilege, not necessarily in that order—typical middle-class advantages and buffers: a college degree, job skills, a resume, some savings. These can be parlayed, at least theoretically, into moneymaking opportunities not available to those who lack them. I live in the city, in a neighborhood of tidy little houses and gardens, trendy cafes, lush parks that I go out of my way to drive past when commuting to work to remind myself how good I have it. By national standards, I’m doing okay, at least for now. By global standards, I’m positively swimming in luxury. The fact that I can physically scrape together the means to pay for a trip to Europe—while others lose homes or shoulder crushing medical bills or line up at dawn to collect their family’s daily bucket of fresh water—unquestionably proves me fortunate.
It’s just that I’m not quite fortunate enough to afford a trip to Europe.
The past few years have left me, along with many of my middle-class cohort, financially bruised. My ex-husband and I split up just as the recession hit. For the previous twelve years, I’d been a freelance writer and at-home mother, developing my writing career in exciting ways but never earning close to enough to live on. I had some savings, mostly invested in mutual funds and whatnot, which collapsed by about a third in the fall of 2008. Meanwhile, my former employer, the newspaper industry, was not only not hiring; it was shedding jobs as fast as it could.
I desperately needed a steady paycheck. And it appeared to be the worst possible time to look for one.
I sold pieces of writing here and there, mostly for sums that wouldn’t have impressed a freelancer time-traveling from the 1970s. I slung sweaters at Macy’s for a dollar above minimum wage. For a few dollars more, I worked shifts monitoring online newspaper comments and deleting the vilest ones. My combined paychecks approximately covered our grocery bill. Child support and a little spousal maintenance covered the mortgage and utilities. For everything else, I liquidated investments at recessionary lows. I was so scared to even look at my bills they sometimes piled up unopened—never a smart strategy for establishing financial health.
Finally, after three years of job-hunting, I got hired as a staff writer for my local newspaper. It’s a fun, creative job and I’m thrilled to have it, but my financial problems aren’t over. The job is part-time. Nearly half my income comes from child-support payments, which will be going away before long. My retirement savings are a fraction of what financial experts say you need —and that sum is more than twice what I will gross, at my current salary, over the next two decades. Retirement is a dot on the horizon, a distant posse in an old-fashioned Western, inexorably crossing Monument Valley as a silent cloud of dust kicked up by thundering hooves.
This was hardly the time to be jetting off around the globe.
Unless … unless it was exactly the time.
My older son would be leaving in the fall for a college across the country. The younger would be a senior in high school. They would soon move past the stage of their lives—so endless while it’s happening, so telescoped in retrospect—when taking a big trip with one’s mom is a culturally approved option. They were almost grown men, and the image of a grown man traveling with his mother is considered so ridiculous that Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand mined it for laughs in The Guilt Trip. Since long before Kerouac, young adults have hit the road with their peers. A young person’s travel is a proclamation of maturity and independence, an act of mastering the challenges of adulthood, a quest with solidly mythological underpinnings—concepts squarely at odds, in other words, with our cultural views about attachments to one’s mommy.
Said mommy, of course, holds a different perspective.Listen, I believe teenagers are programmed by evolution to drive their parents crazy—if they didn’t, we’d never let them leave, and the human race would die out. My kids are admirably fit, in that Darwinian sense. But lately, the surges of annoyance had been accompanied by twinges of foreshadowed loss. Already, I was too aware of the sound my footsteps made in an empty house.
So as I mulled over Europe, certain stock phrases kept floating through my head. This would be the Trip of a Lifetime. It’s good to Live in the Moment. I won’t regret it On My Deathbed. Besides, Anything Could Happen: I might get hit by a bus or win the lottery (note to self: buy a ticket). And especially, What Is Money For?
Financial advisors would call these terrible arguments. I’ve written some personal-finance articles, so I’ve interviewed a bunch of them over the years. One time I made a bad joke about how I’d be living in my car someday. Politely but firmly, the financial advisor told me that’s the way people talk when they haven’t faced facts.
What is money for? Why, it’s for security, these smart experts would counsel. It’s to save for a rainy day, to replace a blown hot-water heater, to ensure a comfortable old age.
But what about the age I was right now? What about the ages that my sons were about to leave behind?
It’s on, I told my son. We’re going. And I offered the same deal to his brother.
•••
I rented an apartment at a great price from generous friends-of-friends in Paris who were serendipitously leaving town for a week. First, we spent three days in Barcelona, thanks to a travel agent who explained that buying three nights in a hotel somewhere in Europe would cut the cost of our plane tickets, oddly, by more than the hotel would cost (if you glean nothing else from this essay, remember: always check hotel-airfare packages).
Barcelona was sunny and warm and relaxing. My older son practiced his impressive Spanish. My younger son rode his skateboard and took hundreds of pictures. In the afternoons, I left the boys to mingle with other teenagers on the beach while I wandered further down the sidewalk, past the huge glittering Frank Gehry fish, to a seaside café with wireless. I spent the afternoon of the solstice sitting beside the Mediterranean, reading and eating tapas (and posting on Facebook that I was spending the solstice on the Mediterranean, reading and eating tapas). In the evenings, the three of us ventured out for sightseeing and gazpacho, pan tumaca, paella, more tapas.
In a poetic way, I felt we were traveling back in time. When my sons were little and we spent most days together, I took them around to beaches and playgrounds and sliding hills and apple orchards. When they entered their teens and started hanging out with friends, those outings receded into the past. The boys hardly remember them now, and to them it’s almost as if they’d never happened. But I remember them. And now we were enacting a brief, improbable echo of those long-ago adventures, with tapas filling in for Happy Meals.
Paris was cooler, cloudier, more contentious. It was June, but the air felt, at times, almost autumnal. I broke out my creaky high-school French. We saw Notre Dame, Château de Vincennes, the Louvre, Versailles. We browsed in a fashionable clothing store my older son somehow knew about. My younger son took hundreds more pictures. We climbed l’Arc de Triomphe’s 284 steps. We ate escargots and cassoulet and pate and lamb confit and pastries. We sat up late around the kitchen table, discussing sights we’d seen and people we’d met, good-naturedly debating politics or culture, showing each other YouTube videos we liked.
We fought twice. The first time was mild. My older son complained of boredom after a couple of hours of aimless strolling around Île de la Cité. After seeing my feelings were hurt, he apologized. From that point on, both boys showed apparently genuine interest in every painting and statue and gargoyle.
The second fight was bitter. The boys were roughhousing in the garden at Versailles and I got angry. I was spending thousands of dollars on this trip, I scolded, and the least they could do was knock it off when I say so. The fight escalated through the evening until my older son swore not to speak to me for the remainder of the trip. Fine, I told him, I would leave his pre-purchased Louvre ticket on the table and he could do whatever the hell he wanted. He announced he would not be going to college after all because he could not stand to live his entire life with his mother constantly reminding him how much he owes her.
The next morning, as the boys slept in and I drank my coffee, I saw that he had a point.
My anger over the misbehavior was reasonable. But it stemmed, I realized, less from the money I was spending than from the emotions I had invested. I feared any conflict could mar our Trip of a Lifetime. Now here we were, in danger of ruining the whole thing.
So when he got up, I pretended the fight had never happened. My son followed suit. From then on, all was friendly and peaceful, or close enough. The fight didn’t wreck the experience but became just another piece of it—another echo of what, frankly, things were often like when they were little and our days were punctuated with slammed doors and “you’re the worst mom in the world”s, eventually followed, usually, by an olive branch from one side or the other: “Clean slate?”
•••
A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay complaining about having had to sacrifice financial security in order to stay home with my sons. I criticized American cultural and workplace structures that tempt parents to reduce paid work to raise their children, but deny them a financial safety net, and even resist letting them back in the workforce afterward (a major contributor to poverty among older women). Some commenters and bloggers missed my point, thinking I regretted having spent the time with my sons (“Let’s hope they never read this and find out how much she hates them,” one hissed). And more recently, otherwriters have begun publishing high-profile pieces expressing regrets at having opted out.
The fact is, I don’t regret those at-home years. Especially not now, as my sons prepare to leave home. My neighborhood attracts a lot of young families, with its elementary and middle school, playground, and starter-size houses. When I’m out for a walk and pass little kids with their parents, I sometimes feel a stab of nostalgia. Then I remind myself that, though those years are behind me, I made the most of them while they were happening. However financially risky, that time was priceless.
Oh, I’d be much more financially comfortable if I had kept my full-time newspaper job all these years (although that’s far from certain, given how many reporters I know who’ve lost theirs, including half the staff at the last place I worked). The idea of living in my car someday would just be a bad joke for a financial planner, not a sort of real, if remote—knock on my particleboard desk—possibility.
In my mind, I liken being a part-time stay-at-home mother to taking a long vacation I couldn’t really afford. Not the relaxing kind, with umbrella drinks by the pool—more like an arduous trek through the jungle. But still, an expensive luxury.
Now here I was on a literal vacation, taking another ridiculous financial risk, for much the same reasons.
The analogy isn’t perfect. I’m not blaming cultural pressures for my taking the trip, nor asking society to make it more affordable. (Come to think of it, though, that would be awesome; I’ve saved receipts!) The connection is that I did both things—two costly, possibly foolish things—ostensibly for the boys’ sake but really more for my own.
Kids, as a group, are resilient and resourceful. I imagine my sons would have been fine in daycare. And someday, they’ll probably manage to get to Europe on their own, if not too burdened with college debt.
But just as I wanted time with them when they were little, I wanted this last adventure, this last opportunity to just hang out, in a relaxed way, and do fun stuff together. What, in the end, is money for? In this case, it was for enriching my own personal Trip of a Lifetime. Not the eleven-day one to Europe, but the big one, the trip that takes you through childhood traumas and dumb mistakes and jobs that suck and ill-starred romances and unforeseeable crises … and, when all goes well and you grab the opportunities as they come, some excellent experiences and wonderful memories.
•••
On the plane home, we sat apart: the boys side by side, me a couple of rows behind them. I was absorbed in Life of Pi when my older son stood and twisted in his seat to get my attention. Look out your window, he gestured.
I opened the shade and almost gasped. Below the plane, the world was all white. It wasn’t clouds. It was snow. Stretching to the horizon, for dozens if not hundreds of miles, nothing but blowing, vacant snow.
I put the movie on pause, unable to pull my gaze from the view. I squinted against the sunlight angling off that stark but dazzling land, a part of the world that I had never expected to see.
•••
KATY READ (at Twitter here) has published essays and articles in Salon, Brain Child, Brevity, River Teeth, More, Working Mother, Real Simple, Minnesota Monthly and other places. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and been honored in literary competitions including the Chautauqua Literary Journal Prize for Prose, the Literal Latte Essay Awards, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition and the Mid-American Review Creative Nonfiction Competition. She is a reporter for the StarTribune in Minneapolis, where she lives with her two sons. She won a 2013 grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board and is working on a collection of essays about the culture of motherhood.
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