Do You Have Children?

Men never ask me this question but mothers always do. If I hesitate and answer that I have two children, she may imagine they’re dead. So I hasten to add that we are only estranged. Have been estranged for years. This leads down a path I do not want to tread, at least not with someone I’ve just met.

You, however, I know you. I can tell you a little more of the story. But I must begin with the Great Disclaimer: I was a Monster. Yes, it’s no wonder they got rid of me. Although I didn’t beat them, didn’t chain them up—quite the contrary, I let them go where they wanted. They visited their father, my mother and their friends whenever they liked. I packed them up and spent the holidays alone.


Or with a boyfriend. Single for eighteen years I confess I did have lovers and yes, sometimes they stayed overnight but not in the same room, not until the boy was home from boarding school at fifteen. Even then I was discreet about the bedtime romps.

I was lonely. I like company. I like men and yes, sex. Of course I want to say, my only sin. Now that I’m digging into it, I see there is an underlying, original sin.

I never wanted to be a mother. I never babysat, never played with dolls or imagined what kind of a mother I would be. Never had a crush on a girl, either, although that may be irrelevant. Babies were just outside the picture. The first baby was an accident.

I married Mr. Executive to escape my mother, a woman obsessed with my virginity. She’d have locked me up in a chastity belt if there were such things. The pill came along ten years too late for me.

Frying pan into fire. Without birth control, illegal in Connecticut in 1960 even for married folk, I was two weeks along when I married and a mother a month after my twentieth birthday. The second child was meant to save my marriage.

As my husband prepared to move out I screwed up my courage and asked if he would take the children. I was just twenty-six, still young enough to finish college and start a career.

“You’re a good father,” I said. He had a great job and the kids adored him. “You take them. I’ll have visiting privileges.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I have a job. I can’t be a full-time parent.”

"You can hire a nanny and a housekeeper. Stay in this house, keep the kids in school. I’ll be around."

“And,” I confessed, “I don’t think I’m a very good mother.”