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?

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.”