Terrible Mother: A Witness

Friday, my friend Tim-Tim* came over to watch Thing Three. He had been sitting her all week since her preschool is closed for much cleaning and staff training, much to the chagrin of all the single parents in the program. Tim-Tim agreed to watch Thing Three for a combination of reasons. One, he's a good person and a great friend. And two, I am paying him. But agreeing to spend 50 hours in one week with the youngest? Even doing it for money is an act of generosity, and he has, in every sense of the word, bailed me out.

What's more is that he did a fine job of it. He took her to the playground nearby, sometimes twice a day. He cooked her pancakes for breakfast, taught her to play checkers. They went on walks around the neighborhood. Friday, for the finale of Tim-Tim sitting, he took her to the Museum of Natural and Cultural History, which is about 3 blocks from home, then to watch the university's marching band, and then to the neighborhood ice cream parlor. He swept my floors, washed all the dishes. He was also gentle and kind with her, but firm when necessary. So, Friday morning, when he came over, sat on my bed while I put on my shoes and makeup, Thing Three in the background eating raisins with her mouth open, him talking and joking about our various love lives, I had this sudden pang.

I missed being with someone.

It wasn't about Tim-Tim, unless you can envision him as a placeholder, a talisman of sorts. Tim-Tim and I are great friends but, like most of the men in my life, only a friend. Friend R is much the same, as is Friend Two, which is good, preferrable even. But I've had these moments with all three of them, times when we are doing something with the kids, or the kids are there, and I feel an acute sense of loss.

Last year, Friend Two and I took the Things trick-or-treating. It was pouring rain, and we went to a friend's house, someone in the program, to show her the kids' costumes. We stayed there for 20 or 30 minutes, her boyfriend charming the kids with his guitars, she herding them through the big house. Friend Two watched the Things as well as I did, but that wasn't it, really.

That Halloween night, as we were getting ready to leave, Thing Three piped up that she couldn't find her sock. "A sock?" Friend Two said. Thing Three nodded. He took her hand. Then he called out, "Sock? Sock? Where are you, Sock?" I watched the two of them walk through the house, watched Friend Two act in mock surprise when they found the missing article.

I know what you're thinking. I know you're thinking it's about Having a Man or some such thing. It isn't that; I felt this pang often with Friend One. She used to come over and sit on my couch while we'd fold little t-shirts and shorts, and we'd talk about our days. Or she would herd the kids into the car, or help me cook dinner. Once, we took them to the movies, and when Thing Three wouldn't walk, transfixed as she was by the image on the screen, we exchanged amused glances, and I felt it again. It's having someone here, someone that is part of this life, another adult.

Friday, I came home from a long, terrible day. I had found out I tied for the job I applied for and interviewed for, the job I already have, the temp job I've been working for two and a half months. Tied. I have to reinterview on Monday. I was stressed about that, and annoyed too. I mean, I tied? But then, a mere 20 minutes later, I found out what John will pay in child support every month. $415. For three kids, total. My childcare bill averages $1175 a month (with summer childcare taken into account, which is costly). It doesn't even pay for half of that.

Then, a little while after that, my boss yelled at me about labels. Labels. As in ones that go on the outside of envelopes.

So when I came home Friday evening, I must have looked terrible, because Tim-Tim said, "Jesus, what's a matter?"

"I had a rough day," I said.

Tim-Tim herded the kids inside, asked me if I wanted tea. He started the water and brewed the tea while I fielded a call from John. I put "Matilda" on for the kids, and Tim-Tim and I sat at the kitchen table. I told him about my day, quietly. Then I rested my cheek on my hands on the table. All I could think of was the $415, the fact I must move in a month, that the kids need school clothes, the stupid job. "What the hell is happening to me?" I said. "I went through undergrad and grad school, and I can't even get a secretarial job outright." I closed my eyes, tried to think about something else, something to keep me from tearing up. I thought about, suddenly, the world's tallest thermometer, which you can see rising, like a mirage, from the rippled heat and the starched hills between Bakersfield and Las Vegas. Then I remembered my dad, coming home in the early dry morning of Sundays from the prison where he guarded men. And I remembered how he woke me up, only me, then would take me out to the Latino markets downtown, before the sun rose, for menudo. There is no one to be here, I thought, except for me. And then, even though I fought it, I cried.

Tim-Tim put his arm around me, rubbed my shoulder, soothed me. And that's when I realized what I missed most--having someone to bear witness to this life, to bear witness to, who bears witness back. And what I miss is so far gone, that what hurts now is realizing exactly how far gone it is, how long I've been doing this on my own in one way or another. John did it well, to some degree, years and years ago, but after Thing Two was diagnosed, he stopped that, then stopped talking, then shored up entirely, until he wouldn't say anything of importance. Until I couldn't move him at all.

"At least I didn't say 'I'm just so tired,'" I said to Tim-Tim, an old joke from the program. Every term, we'd take 16 units, a requirement, and we'd also teach. And every term, I'd get to week 10, the last week before finals, and I'd find myself somewhere, usually with Friend Two, and I'd be so painfully exhausted, so wrung out, that I would look up and say, "I'm just so tired." And at that moment it was so true, and relief would still be a week or so away, that I'd cry. Just cry from sheer exhaustion. I made it through the program on caffeine and weeks where I only slept 30 hours total, and it always caught up to me, came out in tears usually. The line became a joke eventually in the program, various people saying it to me, and me to them, always with affection.

This time, Tim-Tim smiled, but said, "I kept thinking about this all week. I kept thinking 'times this by three. And then times it by 52.' And then my head exploded."

I laughed. "I don't know how I did it, that last year," I said.

"Me either. But you did."

Friend Two likes to tell me that, "No one thing sustains us, TM," likes to quote the Gillian Welch lyric that asks, "what will sustain us through winter?" answering that nothing will. He's right. I did make it through the program, and I'll make it through this, but it was never one thing, and it was never on my own. I hate how up-and-down everything has been the last four months, how dramatic and scary and difficult. Part of me hates, too, how much I've come to realize that I need other people. The old TM would have never cried in front of Tim-Tim, let alone cried every term, and would have bristled at the thought of a regular joke being made about what she would have considered her weakness. As an undergraduate student, I took the hardest classes I could, wrote papers about ideas that astonished my professors, and walked around, kind but with a cold steely "fuck you" underneath it all, as though daring anyone to prove I didn't belong. That person is gone, burned away for lots of reasons, one of which is the realization that while John was shut off, I was coldly humorous. That I'm at least half responsible for the ruin of my marriage because I never wanted to need him or anyone.

Then I realized, perhaps, what I needed, have always needed, is something I've never outright wanted until pushed to this brink. What is a witness, but someone who sees? And what is it to bear witness, but to say what we experience, to put language to it, to tell someone what we see in them? And what is it to let someone do that, but to let them in, to be vulnerable, to be weak?

So, that evening, as the kids watched their movie, I let Tim-Tim comfort me, and then I asked him about his love life, the funny particulars of it, the drama he has by living in a co-op. We talked for awhile, were moments joking and serious. And I hoped that I was as half a good a friend to the people around me as they've been to me. And that I bear witness when they need me to.

*tm

*Tim Tim is the name the Things gave him. They are, like their mother, fond of making nicknames for people. For example, Thing Three has a teacher named Leslie, which she pronounces "Les-ah-lie." So, when she met my friend Leslie from my program, she annoited her "Les-ah-lie-Not-Teacher-Les-ah-lie." Now all of the Things call her that.

Comments

Hi TM.

First of all, I love and miss you a great deal and am sad I haven't been one of those folks who could be there to witness your days, as you haven't been there to witness any of mine.

Guess I haven't had the energy to dog paddle over to your end of the ocean, TM, as I've been having such a f-ing difficult time just keeping my own head above water over here at my end of this massive turbulent pond.

Today I get to make a choice: Pay my utility bill or buy fifty dollars worth of groceries, which as you probably know, isn't a whole hell of a lot of groceries.

Listen it must burn you just as it BURNED me when I could manage to move two thousand miles from home with a kid and lose my house and accumulate so much f-ing debt in order to make it through graduate school
only to find I couldn't secure employment with not one, but TWO college degrees. College was supposed to improve my chances. Except the year after graduate school I went on food stamps and had no health insurance and racked up an enormous childcare bill that took me six months to pay back.

I know where you are, TM. Probably more than your other friends, and yet, they are there for you, and I'm not. Sorry. At least it's comforting to know you have such a MARVELOUS support system.

By the way, $415.00? For three children? My kiddo's biological father pays more than that for one child. In Colorado, child support was determined by income, mine and his. Obviously he made a heck of a lot more money than I did, which is how I always assumed they came up with the amount he pays.

My brother has two children and pays, I think, like $375.00 per month, which again is not much considering the two children. However, there really isn't anything else to take from him, unless he doesn't pay his own rent and expenses.

Long heavy sigh.

Posted by: Alana | September 17, 2006 at 12:32 PM

Thanks, tm, for making me at least out to be a better supporter than I am. I get staggered by what you deal with, don't know what to say, run my recording that says something along the lines of: "It'll be fine." Which fails to recognize how hard it actually is, some days, many days. Too often.

Sometimes witness is all there is, someone else to provide actual, active evidence that yes, that happened, and so did that, and what the fuck?!? I'm glad that the combination of us folks with prefix 'friend' have provided at least that.

Posted by: Friend2 | September 17, 2006 at 05:20 PM

I think I meant title, not prefix. Before somebody leaps to point that out.

Posted by: Friend2 | September 17, 2006 at 05:21 PM

Handy tip for dealing with a stressful office environment: Post-it notes are the perfect size for hiakus, particularly negative haikus about your boss.

Example...

Elizabeth smells
She must bathe infrequently
If at all, that is

Or...

Workday conclusion
Liz M. is an idiot
When will she be gone?

Oh, my bendy straw
So delicate but assured
Bend, twist, sip, and sip

Okay, the last one was more out of boredom than anger. But you get the point.

Posted by: badfreak | September 18, 2006 at 08:38 PM