Do You Have Children?

“You should think about this, Reed,” my mother continued. “They prefer to be with me. You know that.”

Ouch. Could that be true?

“Oh yes,” she continued, seeing my face. “They’ve told me. Many times. It breaks my heart to tuck them in at night and hear their prayers. I don’t think they say prayers at home with you, do they? No, I thought not.”

Impatient, yes indeedy. My fury rose to my ears.

“They do NOT prefer to be here with you,” I snarled, at the same time, asking myself if perhaps they might prefer her house alone in the woods to mine. No other company, just Granny and they, all the time. She’d have to drive them to school and drive them to friends. Find friends because my mother had cast off all hers. Alienated them. Her phone never rang.

“Oh, yes they do. And I can prove it. Right now!”

“How would you do that?” I choked.

“Ask them,” she said with a triumphant grin. My gut clenched.

"They’re asleep! It’s ten o’clock at night.”

“We’ll wake them up right now and let them choose. You or me.”

I woke them, all right, and stuffed them back into the car, drove the hundred miles to my own house and never spoke of it.

So I didn’t get to start a career. I bought cheap houses and fixed them up and set the table with good silver and packed lunches and took them skiing and sent them off to see their father and yes, my mother, whenever they wanted.

I pitched just one Little League game until my son walked off the field, bored. I bought him a pony. My daughter had her Barbies, my son his Tonkas. Bikes, skates, swimming and tennis and sailing lessons, cooking, Europe and even six weeks in Greece with just me. Nightly readings by the fire. They had fabulous Christmas presents, the poor little broken-family orphans. Everything my parents did for me and more.

Men came and went. Very few wanted to take on two young kids and to tell the truth, I had had my fill of being a wife. So it was the open sea for me.

The daughter, Sarah, was ever distant. I never knew when she menstruated. She did not want me to hang her one art project. She did not want to paint or cook or sew or knit or plant anything. She lived behind a closed door from the time she was eleven or twelve. She went to boarding school in ninth grade and spent her holidays with chums. At the senior year celebration of her B.U. Women Crew she told me I was not to come because her father would be there, instead. Not a shortage of tickets. She didn't want to see us in the same room. Was I sorry I had supported her team with actual money?

Nick left boarding school under a cloud before the end of his ninth grade. I got him into Germantown Friends Dayschool and for a time he had a nice little job opening up the corner store on the same block. He was funny and lively and popular and acted in the school productions. But his father was not pleased with his low grades and never attended any functions. The kids always went to their father, in Paris, in Teheran, in Newport or Florida.

When Nick abandoned school in his junior year to play with cocaine and the Philadelphia police would not enforce the curfew unless they caught him on the street, I begged the ex talk to the boy.

"Don’t bug your mother, you’ll be out of there pretty soon,” was his advice.

Indeed, before senior year, the boy left for his father’s, dealt more drugs, flunked public high school, flunked a semester at UTenessee and tried to kill himself. He let me rescue him, then disappeared into that awful, Arctic world of dealing. I bailed him once and then set myself against that tide. No more money, just straight talk. He fathered a child, abused his wife and abandoned them. I chose her and the kid and haven’t heard but once from him since. When he sees his kid, begging to be forgiven his child support, he forbids the boy to see me. We ignore this admonition.

My daughter has not spoken to me in almost ten years. Who knows if my mother told the kids I was a crazy, drunken lesbian? I’ll never know if the ex’s bountiful supply of money lured them away.

So you, my sisters and brothers, you asked what happened after the horse kicked the kid’s head in. Now you know. Tell me, do I still have two children?

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)