SHAY STEWART-BOULEY
hOW COULD I HAVE KNOWN?
For a long time, I tortured myself with that question. The day I sent my six-year-old son off to his father’s for Christmas, hundreds of miles away from me, how could I have known I would cease to be his custodial mother? How could I have known that the last six years of our life together, during which I’d raised him myself while working full-time, fully invested in his little life—in our little life—would abruptly end? And that my role as mother, in the traditional sense, would be wrested from me against my will?
The fateful day broke cold, even by Chicago standards—maybe that should have been a sign. I was worried about getting him on the airplane, as this would be his first time flying as an unaccompanied minor, so I was more impatient than normal. More anxious.
“Son, get your buns over here,” I said, using a brusque voice to force down my urge to weep. He shuffled over, and I straightened what needed straightening, smoothed what needed smoothing. Rubbed his nose with mine. “Nosey, nosey, nosey,” we said in our usual mantra.
My attentions were the almost unconscious, but still intense, hands-on nature of mothering that I had been doing solo for almost six years at that point. It was reflex in addition to love. When I hugged him, kissed him, and he said, “Bye, Mom,” I sent him off with tears already beginning to form, already eager for his return from Christmas with his Dad.
They wouldn’t be the last tears or the most fierce ones.
Because my son didn’t come back.
Up until that point, my ex-husband—my son’s father—had chosen to remain on the sidelines of our son’s life. We’d had a brief, volatile affair, then married too young, got pregnant, and became estranged and separated well before our son had even turned two. I’d finally gotten my divorce from him when my son was five-and-a-half, freeing me up to marry the man I’d been dating since my boy was four.
However, I didn’t anticipate how much it would chafe my ex-husband’s ego to know another man would have a daily role in his son’s life—never mind that he was a mild-tempered man with no aims to replace him as a father, only to fit in.
My ex-husband’s answer to the problem was brutally efficient. Without consulting me, he decided he wanted sole custody of our son. Or, rather, he simply did not put my son on the scheduled return flight home the day it arrived.
The only thing that flew that day was my heart. Shredded and wrested from my chest, it fluttered desperately, fruitlessly, toward Maine, to my son, leaving the rest of me behind in Chicago.
All I had left were tears. Self-recrimination. And fear. How was my son? What was his father telling him about me? When would I ever see him again?!
As added torture, little did I know that not only was I about to become invisible to my son as a mother, but also to the rest of the world as well. The day he didn’t come home, my status as a mother was unceremoniously stripped from me by the outside world.
Unless you’ve lost a child to someone else, you cannot know the fierce pain and desolation that comes in the aftermath. The despair, the worrying, the surreal quality that you’re living another person’s life and not your own. The aching sense of powerlessness you feel as a mother when your child needs you most. Did he miss me? Was he terrified? Did he cry himself to sleep, curled in despair and anxiety? Simply put, it is a tragedy beyond measure. During our phone conversations, which sometimes were separated by days no matter how hard I tried to get through, I did my best to be strong—to help him be strong—to let him know that no matter what, I was still his momma.
When he would say, “I’m okay” or “Everything’s good,” it was hard to tell if he was trying to make me feel better or telling the truth. But we could still connect. I could still be a mother, however awkwardly, however far removed by the miles.
A fast and furious legal battle ensued, and we ended up with joint legal custody. In a painful twist, primary residence was awarded to my ex: my son and I would now be separated by 1,100 miles, hardly a good setup for traditional “joint” custody. I didn’t want to drag our son through a long countersuit or make him have to “choose” between parents, nor could I afford to. Besides, I felt certain that, based on my husband’s past behavior, he would tire of being a full-time dad and send our son back to me. He was punishing me, I told myself. My son would come home.
I was wrong, and I was relegated to the status of “noncustodial” mother, a term that in our culture is a stigma, loaded with innuendo, failure, and neglect. I did not love my son any less; I did not invest any less in his life, his care, and his needs. I simply had to do it from afar and make the best of short trips to visit him. For his sake, I stayed positive and supportive and did my best to reinforce a sense of stability and security for him in this new dynamic. He flourished while I quietly suffered. Not only because I missed him, but also because, at best, to be a noncustodial mother is to be invisible to the eyes of the world around you.
We live in a society that only sees mothering through a narrow lens: If a mother is not physically with her children, we assume she is not a mother—or at least not a loving and good one. When we hear the term “noncustodial mother,” we assume the worst of her. She clearly must have issues. Is she mentally unstable? An addict? Or is she simply cold, lacking any maternal instinct? Judgment is quick and harsh, a knee-jerk reaction to the antithesis of what is presumed to be a Good Mother.
Precisely because I was a loving mother and needed to be near my son, I would eventually be the first to wave the white flag and move across the country to be closer to him, despite the fact it would devastate both my career track and my husband’s. But by the time I was able to make that happen, I had spent four years living more than a thousand miles away from my son.
During those years, I traveled as frequently as I could to see him, maxing out my credit cards with airfare, hotels, and the cost of little adventures to make the best of our once-a-month visits together. But those facts aren’t evident in the brief exchange when a person learns you’re a noncustodial mother. None of those people saw the countless packages of carefully selected clothes I sent to him, since I still held the responsibility of buying and replacing the ones he’d outgrown. Nor did they hear me on the phone scheduling his biannual physicals with his pediatrician, or how I managed his vaccinations and teeth cleanings, or read him stories over the phone. They didn’t know that those rare times my son was being a difficult child, his father would have him call me, knowing that hearing me say, “I’m disappointed that you did that” could have more impact from half a country away than a punishment from his father would.
My son was no longer under my roof, but he was still my primary responsibility and the center of my heart. But the distance was like a cancer, and I grew to believe that somehow I was a defective woman for “allowing” my son to live with his father.
The painful part is that when I did move to be closer to him so that I could truly have joint custody, nothing much changed from society’s perspective. Whether I was in Chicago or New England, I would often be subjected to the same level of scrutiny and judgment when people realized I had a child but not custody. Questions like, “Why doesn’t your son live with you?” or “How did you lose custody?”—as if I’d failed my child, which meant failing as a mother.
When my ex moved to a different (but at least adjacent) state, and I started racking up thousands of miles of extra car travel so that my son could spend most weekends with me, I got adept at telling people, “My son goes to school in New Hampshire” in a tone that shut down further inquiry. If their brains jumped to the conclusion that he went to boarding school, all the better. My son picked up the same habit over the years when he spent holidays with me and my husband, saying to people, “I go to school out of state.”
Sometimes, other kids would press him about why he didn’t live with me. “It was like they didn’t think you were involved, or didn’t care, or didn’t exist,” he told me once. “It made me mad, Ma. Sometimes, they’d even tell me I was a liar when I said I lived for years with you in Chicago.”
For me, what hurt the most personally was when someone would tell me—or make the implication when they didn’t say it outright—that I didn’t know what it was like to raise a child since my son no longer lived with me, as if mothering is only possible when you are physically with your child every single day. In the four years we were apart, I went back to school and earned my bachelor’s degree—for that I was called selfish. Never mind that years later, when my son would apply to college, my own experiences of having been through college and graduate school would prove vital in helping him navigate the maze of applying to universities. Never mind that by going back to school myself, I could earn enough money to help put him through college.
Never mind that I set the bar high for him, and he would end up clearing it.
Instead, most people only saw a woman who “allowed” her son to live with his father. I would learn, in time, that no matter what anyone else thought or said about me, my power as a mother was still as great—and just as important to him—no matter how far the physical distance between us.
When my son was thirteen, I gave birth to my second child, a girl. While I was no longer insecure in my parenting abilities, I did notice that by virtue of the fact that my daughter was physically present with me, people’s perceptions of me as a mother had changed. Suddenly I was seen as a “real” mother; I was now, by default, a part of the maternal tribe. Never mind that I had already been moving in that same circle, invisible, for thirteen years.
That’s when I started to speak up.
I remember the day that my daughter started kindergarten and someone commented how hard it was to let our kids go—funny thing was that the same week my daughter started kindergarten, my son started college almost 1,300 miles away. And I pointed this out, that I was letting two kids go at the same time.
“But it’s not the same, though, right?” the other mother said, once she had gotten the very short and highly sanitized version of my custodial history. “You’re used to him not living with you.”
“He spent the first six years of his life just with me; this isn’t my first time seeing a child off to kindergarten,” I said. “Just a kid with a very different personality.”
“But, well . . . going off to college after all these years not living with you,” the mother corrected herself, suddenly aware she’d hit a nerve but unaware she hadn’t really been any less insulting by changing her approach.
“It’s still a transition. It’s still letting go,” I answered. “This is new territory for him and for me. I’ve still been a big part of raising him for eighteen years.”
Once again, my right to claim my status as my son’s mother had been challenged by someone else because he had “already been living away from me.” This time, however, I didn’t play along. I was quick to point out why that theory was wrong.
I owned and declared my motherhood.
When I started my parenting journey twenty-one years ago, I was ambivalent. After all, finding yourself married and pregnant at eighteen is scary. Yet when I was that young, I never envisioned what my motherhood journey would look like. I went through the same highs and lows with my son that any mother experiences with her kids, and while they have not always happened under my roof, my son has always been in my heart and thoughts, even when he was not physically with me. I still gave him advice and comfort. I still had the phone or email.
Now, when my son comes home from college for a holiday or for the summer, he often engages me in the hour right before or after midnight for a long heart-to-heart in the kitchen, and not so long ago he said to me, “I know you still worry about the past, Ma, but I always knew I could count on you. I didn’t always understand what was happening or why, but I knew I had a mom and a dad—and I never thought you didn’t care.”
I was always a part of his life. I was always his mother. Present to him even in my physical absence.
The rest of the world might have seen me as invisible in terms of motherhood, but my son did not. I still feel a sting when I think of all the lost years I didn’t get to watch him grow up, but I am comforted that he felt me walking alongside him the entire journey.