Because I Said So (26 page)

What I am reading, on my computer in my improvised office, is a custody agreement for my children: entirely extralegal; fraught with bold letters, red letters, asterisks, and parentheses. We have passed it back and forth, my husband and I, questioning, amplify-ing, rejecting, and not yet taking the actions we are negotiating because no lawyer has seen it. If this is not par for a New York divorce, it is for mine: we have no legal “grounds” except for having spent the last two years unable to speak to each other without sarcasm and pain eating into at least the edges of our words (and too often choosing the words themselves, words that we would never, I
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am sure, have formed if our conscious minds had not been knocked out already, TKO’d or at least on the ropes and whimpering), and so, in the strange configuration of New York law, since we have not yet behaved so badly that one of us can take the other to court to sue for a divorce, we have to work together to draft a formal separation agreement and then live under it for a year. We have started and stopped this process more than once, and have now begun it again with the good of our children, with their well-being, as a center-piece, because they are the closest thing we still have to a common interest.

It has been two years, and still they ask me, lying on my lap, heads on my heartbeat,
Mommy, why don’t you live with us anymore?
They listen for the hollow drop behind the face of the answer.

Your daddy and I don’t get along anymore. We fight too much.

What is that answer? What is any answer? I am scrolling through the agreement on my screen, looking for it: watching Christmas run by, and vacations, graduation, questions of risk, of who decides in an emergency and what constitutes one, of when a new spouse gets as much priority as the used one. These were the things that were important to us, about which we are now fighting, and our new mediator may throw them out the window (where the shouting is still going on—“Call the cops then. Go ahead. I dare you!”—still with no audible response), because they are things that cannot be set in legal stone. We have written them because we want them set; we want to be correct and also to have some protection against the pain that still lashes at us, especially after weekends when one of us has had hours on end with the children to introduce wildcards and realign bonds. We want the law to keep us safe, unflayed; my husband wants closure, he wants judgments handed down—right and wrong, with wrong banished—and I have condemned him for wanting the end and the answers so badly that they don’t have to be the right ones, but at this moment, I, too, would give anything to have an answer.

The answers I am seeking are not the same as my children’s are. Mine are more numerous, and less heartbreaking.

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Your daddy and I don’t love each other anymore.

How bad is that to say to a child? How true but terrifying to a young mind who must surely be certain that the same thing could happen to him? If there can be, in this world, the decision not to love, and if it can happen to the two people whom he loves the most, then what hope is there for the child to find love and keep it? Of all the answers to their question, this loss of love is surely the worst one. But right now, if someone handed me these words and told me that they would release us, I would speak them.

Yesterday my husband and I fought again. It was entirely unintentional and exactly what we always do, except that, this time, things blew apart. I walked in bleeding; I think we both did—it is the chronic consequence of being too long separated without being truly separate—and I came out stunned. And now, as I try to decipher the latest annotations to this custody agreement, I am afraid of the ugly things we said, of the lawyers and locksmiths and restraining orders that were born in our “conversation.” Of the threats that
I
made, hearing them at the same moment that he did, then hearing his response. I couldn’t believe that someone would say those things, would push me so far off the path that I had hoped to chart for my life, let alone say them in a voice that sounded just like mine. There are promises that we make to ourselves—that we will remain who we are and not turn into the people on TV—and these are the promises that we break.

I don’t know how we can climb down off the peak of fear and anger that we raised yesterday. And so I have come back to our last relic of semi-agreement, to mourn. There is finally a response to the voice outside my window. It is a woman, yelling in Spanish.

I don’t understand Spanish, so I go into the kitchen to stretch my shoulders and get something to drink.

I am the one who left.
The calculus will never be quite that clear, but it is true, a fact: I am the one who moved out of the house, and I chose to give my husband custody—to create, instead, my own equation between “undivided attention” and “part time mother”

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and “life on my own terms.” And so, when I give my son a small medallion and explain to him that the figure on it is his guardian angel, who will be with him always and who can see into his heart, I am also the one who cannot breathe when he hugs me and asks sadly:
Can she see that I miss my Mommy?
I am haunted by the image of my son graduating from college, his tender chin shot through with a man’s hair, with me, and his father, and my replacement at his side. What will she have been there for that I missed and what will I have given my son instead, and will it be enough?

Divorce is hell on grownups; how do we make it work for children?

And when you are the bad guys, fighting in court over—what?

Whose pocket the children’s money should be in? How well a woman should know their father before my children are crawling into bed with them on Sunday morning?—how do you look at yourself in the mirror and like what you see?

These are the questions that I carry, the ones that come back with me from the kitchen, as I hear the man in the street yelling, and the woman yelling back, and the man saying in English, “Let him decide then.”

I don’t even have to go to the window. Standing at my desk, I can see out clearly, down to the sidewalk immediately below, where the man and the woman are fighting. Between them, there is a young boy, about six or seven. He is crying, not touching either adult, and as I watch, he sits down flat on the concrete as they both look at him.

The man is screaming: “Let him decide who he wants to go with.” The woman responds, and the man says, “I can take him.

Who do you want to go with? I’ll take him. Who do you want to take you? Her or me?”

I have started to cry, framed behind glass about ten feet above them. The boy answers, and the man explodes.

“You don’t understand, do you? She left you. Don’t you get it? She abandoned you.” He grabs the boy’s arm and yanks him standing. “Get out of here, bitch. You aren’t even supposed to be anywhere near him. Get out of here now or I’m gonna call the cops.”

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She yells back, but her voice is getting fainter.
Cops
is the last word I hear him utter, and then all three of them are gone.

I am sobbing in my chair; the distinction between me and them has collapsed. I cannot breathe and I cannot identify myself on the telephone clearly enough to call anyone for help. Not for the boy—he is gone, and though I could have been downstairs to save him in a matter of seconds, it never occurred to me. I am the one who needs help. I have made too many promises that I did not keep, and I need someone to wrap me in loving arms and make a promise for me: that I will never be so weak that I will find myself ripping my children limb from limb in my own pain.

I love my children. It is not enough. It never has been.

Read to us, Mommy
, they say to me, and then they curl, one under each arm, still young enough to rest their heads where they can cover one ear and hear my voice muffled through my ribcage, much as it must have sounded before they were born. This is not what I intended for them when I had them—these scattered nights and weekends when we can sink together into the book that I loved as a child, which I can now share with them before I send them home—and I will not allow it to be the sum of what I can offer. I am more than the number of hours I spend with them, and if I have chosen not to live with them and their father, I can still be a mother: I can find a way down from this saw-toothed peak for them, keep this out of court and in a place where my husband and I both have a better chance of remembering who we are.

One small promise at a time,
that
I can give, fulfilled at the same instant when I make it so that it will not be lost: I page through the custody agreement to find the point of contention that means the most to their father, the one I hate more than all the others and thought I would perish on the spot before I allowed—and I agree to it. I want to reread, to hedge; I want to condition, but I cannot afford it. This is for me, this is for them.

This is what I can give to my children: the custody agreement in the queue; the arrow pressing the button “Send.”

Chaos Theory

M a r y M o r r i s

It is a Tuesday morning
and my daughter is heading out the door. She has showered, preened, put on her Urban Decay makeup, properly gelled her hair. She’s wearing a cute little skull-cap, various baubles, dangling earrings, layers of T-shirts, her pants slung low.

But her bed isn’t made. Her drawers and closet are left open.

Her floor is strewn with homework assignments to be completed later, thongs that the dog will walk around with all day, scribbled notes to herself, textbooks, a collection of stuffed pigs thrown haphazardly around the room. The phone, removed from its base, rings somewhere beneath a pile of clothes.

In the bathroom nothing has a cap. Moisturizer, toothpaste, acne medicine ooze onto the counter. And then there is the hair.

My daughter has a head of thick auburn hair that can only make one think of chestnut mares racing through open fields. When she showers, she takes the strands that come out and attaches them to the bathroom wall. She does this, she explains, to prevent them from going down the drain. I spend my showers trying to decipher some message encoded within. I see dolphins, ancient roads, my daughter’s dreams.

I grit my teeth and kiss her good-bye. I tell her I love her. In another era, another moment in time, I would have picked a fight.

Or worse, I would have spent an hour or so cleaning up before I
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settled down to my own work. Instead, as soon as she leaves, I shut the door to her room. I put the cap on the toothpaste. I locate the phone.

This, of course, is a classic teenage M.O., except to me it is something else. It is chaos—the nonlinear dynamic system with which I must cope. It is my Achilles’ heel. The stumbling block down the dusty road to martyrdom. The thing I was put on this planet to overcome.

Once upon a time,
before the life I am now living began, my goal was simple: I wanted to have everything put away and in its place. I even had fantasies of this. The Hold Everything catalog was my idea of heaven. In some ways it still is. Kate and I know this. Just last year I received a refrigerator magnet in my Christmas stocking. It featured a fifties housewife with her head on a pillow. The caption reads, “I dreamed my whole house was clean.”

I identified. Never mind that I was a cliché on a refrigerator magnet. I wanted to have all my papers filed, books in alphabeti-cal order, photos in albums, spices labeled and on a rack. I wanted archives, a Dewey decimal home. It shouldn’t be so hard to achieve. In fact, before I had a child it even seemed an attain-able, if not admirable, goal.

I lived my life at right angles, and by that I mean I created piles of bills, books, work, pencils, erasers. Whatever I needed had to be neatly stacked. No one could move these piles except me. The dirty secret is that I wasn’t
really
neat because drawers were full of broken earrings, scarves bought in marketplaces around the world that I’d never wrapped around my neck, shoes worn to the soles. I had no mind for throwing out; for the decision-making that entails. But I needed a sense of external order, at least, on the surface of things.

It was a solution to ordering the mess I was inside—the swirling mass I could never straighten up.

I wasn’t always this way. As a little girl, I wallowed in disarray. My room looked as if a bomb had gone off. Those expensive
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clothes my parents bought me never found a hanger. They were unceremoniously dumped onto my spare bed. My assorted collec-tions of rocks and insects, jars of caterpillars, books and dolls were scattered around. It looked as if I was moving.

Once my father picked me up at a girlfriend’s house and he came upstairs. He stood in that girl’s room, staring at her shelves, admiring all her dolls carefully displayed. In the car home he asked why I couldn’t keep my dolls on their shelves, neatly dressed and combed, and I replied, “Because my dolls are having more fun.”

But fun was a concept that would soon drift away. I didn’t grow up in a household that was fun. What I grew up in would come to terrify me. My childhood was a minefield that I navigated with mixed results. My father could easily have been the official spokesperson for Worst-Case Scenarios. It was rare that an ordinary household object did not pose a serious threat. A pencil, a kitchen knife, a drinking glass could all somehow become the instruments of my demise. If I walked with a sharpened pencil, I risked tripping over some unseen object and stabbing myself in the eye. Kitchen knives could be mysteriously launched. A glass could fly out of your hand and smash into your skull.

The problem was that these things not only incited my father’s worry, they also set off his rage. In the language of fairy tales, the house was booby-trapped and he was the dragon, lurk-ing behind its doors, ready to catch us off guard. I recall the way he looked when one of these rages came over him. A handsome man whom people compared to Cary Grant, with dark skin and dark eyes, but when he went into his rages, it seemed as if those eyes were lit with a fire from within. His words flew out of his mouth like flames.

His paranoia about the physical world translated itself into the social order. At any moment one could fall from grace. Table manners apparently insured against such a fate. There was a list a mile long: about how bread was to be broken, pieces chewed, soup sipped, cutlery put on the edges of plates once eating was done. I had to get into the habit of being a lady. Perfection was a kind of norm. Children, as we know, are not very good at perfec-176

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tion. They are snotty, dirty little beasts. They are reluctant to fit the mold.

My mother was not immune to my father’s extremes, though she had her own version. If his had to do with how I behaved, hers focused around how I looked. It wasn’t quite JonBenet, but it was close. My dresses had to be just right, my hems just so.

Outfits had to match. Everything had to be neatly pressed and sewn.

An afternoon comes to mind. It is spring and the weather is nice. There is a smell of cut grass, fresh blossoms. I am perhaps twelve or thirteen, and I’ve been given some cash. Sixty dollars—I remember the amount. My mother came into my room and said I needed some clothes. “Go to Fell’s and pick out some things.”

I can still see myself perfectly. I’m riding my bike into town. I go to Fell’s and try on matching sets—shorts and shirts. I try them on, one after the other. I have never been given so much freedom.

I find it exhilarating, standing before the mirror, turning from side to side. I like a lemony yellow short set, another in pale blue.

Then there is one that seems a little bright—fuchsia or crimson. I take it as well.

I pedal home, my purchases in my bike basket. I pedal fast, eager to show my mother. She is waiting for me when I return.

“Oh, let’s see what you got. Try them on.”

I do. We go upstairs. I try them on one after the other. “I don’t think yellow is your color,” she says. The blue outfit is too tight, the fuchsia too bright. In the end she decides they’re not right.

“No,” she shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”

Inside I begin to seethe.
I rage. But I keep my anger under wraps. If what I felt inside is volcanic, I manage to keep it capped.

Of course I want to be loved for who I really am, but if that isn’t possible, I can compete. I learned well from my parents’ wacky rules and perfectionist goals. If my inner life was the equivalent of a garbage dump or a seedy alleyway, my outer world was going to be museum quality. Papers in neat stacks, clothes put away. No
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clutter, no debris. I knew the best way to get from A to B. I knew the best table in a restaurant. In other words, I became a control freak—a rather accomplished one, I must say. I was a big success at living alone.

Then I had a child.

I had my daughter because I couldn’t not have her. I had her because I was looking at forty and got pregnant with my partner of five years—a professor of international law. When I asked him if he wanted to “make it legal” and he replied, “Legal in what sense?” I knew I’d be going it alone.

I had her on my own, as they say. The right decision, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was quite literally clueless. But I planned carefully, carved out a space for my daughter in my well-ordered life. I had a deadline of four essays for the
New York Times
all due in the week before Kate was due. This would be no problem. I’d get my work done and then I’d have my baby.

My water broke on a cold winter’s night. It had been snowing all the previous day and my back ached. I went to the park and made snow angels. I lay there, a beached whale, wondering what I was doing lying in the snow. That night I couldn’t sleep. Sleep had been eluding me for weeks, to such an extent that my downstairs neighbor asked me what was wrong. When I told her I wasn’t sleeping, she said, “The baby’s coming now.”

She came three weeks early and I wasn’t prepared. The shock took me completely unaware. Briefly, I contemplated returning her as if she were something I’d picked up at Bloomingdale’s.

“That’s not your color,” I could hear my mother say. “Let’s take it back.” But the first six months were a cinch. I wrapped her up in a blanket and she rested beside me as I worked. She would gaze up at the sky. One afternoon I curled up beside her to see what she was seeing. I saw clouds rolling by.

This is going to be easy, I told myself. I’ll get a lot done. Then she started to move. She moved everywhere: under beds, into drawers, near electric sockets. Of course, children by definition bring mess. Once, before I had Kate, my cousin came over with
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her twins. I made them spaghetti and they threw it all over my house. I begged them to leave. No splotchy fingerprints for me.

But Kate brought chaos with her wherever she went. She ate sand. She jabbed her thumbs into the shells of living snails. She pulled whatever was in her reach off the shelves. To dress Kate, I had to sit on her. She hated being dressed, hated putting clothes on.

She resisted me. Fought back. I was astonished at the strength in less than twenty pounds. Was this a pit bull I’d given birth to?

At a time when I neared single parent exhaustion and collapse, I met Larry at a writer’s conference. Kate wasn’t with me. After a week of what became friendlier and friendlier exchanges, I told him that I had a toddler and she would be arriving on Sunday with my mother. Without batting an eye, Larry said, “What time do we have to pick them up?”

The first moment Larry saw Kate, she dashed off the Jetway, through the airport terminal, and was heading for the revolving doors. My mother stood dumbfounded, bags in her hands, as Larry ran after the fleeing child. They began a game, this stranger and my child, racing here and there.

I was amazed at his ability to play. He could roll around on the floor with her for hours. He could be a horse. He could squeeze his body into the narrowest of spaces, just to come jumping out while she feigned surprise. I was too busy rinsing out her dresses, wiping tables clean. But entropy was winning and my energy depleting. I couldn’t keep up with the mess.

Larry and I got married. One night, when Kate was three years old and I was multitasking—paying some bills, trying to make dinner before Larry got home—Kate asked me to be a gorilla. Sure, I can be a gorilla. I began jumping around, scratching my hands under my arms while stirring a pot and rinsing the dishes. She looked at me, dejected. “I want you to be an upstairs gorilla, not a downstairs gorilla.”

An upstairs gorilla.

She wanted me to stop what I was doing—to leave the dishes in the sink and the meal half-prepared before my husband got home. But I wanted to straighten up; I had to get things done. Why couldn’t I be
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a downstairs gorilla? I want to know. We began to argue about this.

I knew this was stupid. I was arguing with a three-year-old, but the fact is, I have trouble being an upstairs gorilla. I have trouble allowing disorder, letting tasks go unfinished. I tried to stop what I was doing and go upstairs, jump up and down. I tried to let debris accu-mulate, let chaos reign. But my mind was elsewhere. Did I turn off that pot? Who paid the electric bill?

One Sunday we had somewhere to go that must have been important. As we were about to leave, I went upstairs and found that Kate had made a funhouse out of my scarves—the ones I’d purchased on a million journeys and never once wrapped around my head. My room was a cross between a harem and an obstacle course, and she had created elaborate rules for crawling through, which I was expected to follow. This was unbearable to me. I dis-mantled the funhouse, then spent an hour folding every scarf, putting them back into the drawer.

I tried to remember my dolls that once had fun. But somehow I’d taken all the disappointment and anger I’d ever felt and found a place for it, tucked away neatly on an upper shelf where no one could reach it. Not even me.

Then one night it happens. It is late and Kate won’t go to bed.

She has to have one more story, one more song. There is always one more thing. The house is in disarray, her room is a mess. I have failed as an upstairs gorilla. I have lost the battle of the scarves. And now I have a child who challenges my sense of order and timing. She won’t sleep. She won’t leave me alone.

“Go to your bed,” I tell her the third or fourth time she reappears at my door.

“I don’t want to,” she says.

I am staring at the book I want to read. “Go to bed,” I say once more.

“No,” she says. “I want you.”

And then I yell. I roar. I order her to bed. I can hear her in her room whimpering. I race in and grab her by the shoulders. I shake her and shout. I scream things at her that make no sense. I tell her she is selfish. (She is four years old.) I tell her she is wearing me
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out; I can’t take it anymore. Then she looks at me, sobbing, straight in the eye, and seems older than her little years as she says, “You scare me.”

I stand there as if nailed to the floor. A bolt goes through me.

Call it an awakening, an epiphany. I stop, pull away. I remember how my father’s rages terrified me. How he screamed about a light left on, a dish in the sink. How afraid he was of taking the wrong road or being in a restaurant where the soup wasn’t hot.

And how frightened we were of him.

I walk out of her room. I shut the door. Never again, I tell myself. That’s it.

I begin small.
I allow stuffed animals to stay on the floor. I stop inviting over the one friend she doesn’t like—the girl who will spend the better part of a playdate cleaning Kate’s room. I stop making elaborate meals, and while making dinner, I allow myself to be enticed away. “Mommy, be a snake and I’ll be a frog escaping.” Sure, I can do that. Snake, frog. So what if dinner is late? I get on my belly. I learn to slither and crawl, not unlike a baby, I think, as Kate hops away. I can do this, I think. I’m even good at it.

I let little messes go. I give in to entropy. It’s a law of physics, after all; a close cousin to chaos, I’m sure. And it always wins anyway. Systems come apart. I’m going to try and go with this flow.