Do You Have Children?

It was true. I didn’t think I was a good mother. I often felt angry and frustrated. Lonesome and cut off from my life. Writing seemed a thousand years in my past. The Husband didn’t want me to work and he sneered when I sold one little article for twelve dollars.

I minded the kids, cooked, entertained, decorated the house and kept a lovely horse. Rode with my girlfriends when the kids were in school. I gardened and raised dogs. I visited my widowed mother. Kept supper warm when the husband came in late.

“You better find yourself a place to live,” he said, opening his suitcase on our bed.

“I don’t want this,” I cried. “I won’t sign a divorce.”

“If you don’t sign, I’ll have the sheriff put you and the kids on the street,” he said.

Boy, I could see it. I could see it. The idea of separation from him was terrifying. Where would I go? Where would we go? The dog, the cats, the horse, my garden—for surely we couldn’t continue on what he would provide. And sure enough, we didn’t continue.

“What if I don’t take the kids,” I said, trembling at such an idea.

“If you won’t take the children,” he said stiffly, “I’ll put them up for adoption. My sister will take them.”

Indeed his sister, whom he had barely spoken to since I’d known him, nine years, could afford to take them since she’d divorced very, very well. What a fool I was.

I couldn’t let them go. I set my oars and headed my little boat into the stormy seas.

Of course I was delighted to let the Ex have the kids anytime he wanted. And my mother, lonely in her widowhood, was thrilled to have them singly or together for a week or two. She felt she was a great help. And she was. She was. Then, this, out of the blue.

“You know, Reedie, you should let me have the children,” she said one rainy spring night as I prepared to head back home, leaving them with her.

“What?”

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “I could do a better job. You’ve always been so impatient! They need more love. I have the time and I know your ex would pay me the money he pays you.”

Alarm bells went off.

“Thanks, Mom, but I don’t think so,” I stammered. How could this sixty-two-year-old woman with a terrible bad back who spent most of her days in her bed-nest with the TV on and her nights listening to rabid talk radio, a woman too acrophobic to go to a movie, who slouched around the house in a nylon mu-mu from the discount store, how could she possibly raise two kids who had music lessons and sports and, shit, I put in five hundred miles a week carpooling.

“No thanks,” I said, icily.

(More tomorrow)