NOT YOUR AVERAGE TEEN MOTHER /

ELIZABETH CROSSEN

iT’S RUSH HOUR ON FRIDAY evening, and the El train bounces on its tracks as it moves deeper into West Philadelphia, becoming less suffocating as it relieves itself of riders. Sitting in two of the fuzzy blue seats behind me are two small, giggly children, a boy and a girl. My heart aches in my chest as I watch them, their playful innocence a familiar trigger these days as I navigate the world away from my own. They’re splayed across the seats, playfully teasing each other like a big brother and little sister would. Their mother is sitting across the aisle from them, so absorbed by her phone that I am unconvinced the children are actually in her care. As the kids break into a tickle fight, bouncing and screeching with delight, the mother, clearly annoyed, jerks her head toward them and yells at them to be quiet. She is quickly consumed by her phone again, and the children play on. I study her as this pattern continues: she ignores them, they play rambunctiously as children do, and she snaps at them to behave. One stop before mine, they prepare to exit. The mother screams at them about empty juice boxes, and stray crumbs in the aisle. They are not quiet enough for her, they are not moving quickly enough for her. Her impatience and annoyance is the behavior of a mother who doesn’t know what it means to be without them. Her irritation chafes at me—but I also understand it. That was me once, flustered, exhausted, irritable, and jumpy from trying to navigate public spaces alone with two young children, myself barely an adult by then at nineteen. Had time and distance really molded me into a fresh-faced twenty-something, with my shiny new degree and underpaying first “real” job after college, disguising me as an anonymous voyeur, knee-jerking judgment at an overworked mother just trying to get home? Was I really daring myself to believe that I was doing it any better? The doors slide open, and the frazzled mom moves onto the platform, a child’s hand gripped firmly in each of hers. The doors close and they are gone.

I had just completed my sophomore year of high school when I found out I was pregnant. I had been on the pill since I was fourteen, so it was a shock. To make matters worse, I had just broken up with my boyfriend, so it was hard to tell him. It took two more tests and a trip to Planned Parenthood to convince him it was real. He was in denial and I was completely petrified. Without a compass to direct me, I relied heavily on the expectations of others. Their unwavering advice was to have an abortion, but what I really wanted was someone to validate my own desire: to keep this child, but I was too paralyzed with fear to admit it. So I went through the motions, navigated the steps toward an abortion, had the appointment, fought off the protesters at the clinic, and resigned myself to the inevitable. The deeper part of me resisted with a ferocity that ultimately won over. I cancelled the procedure and insisted that I would carry my son to term. There was a brief flirtation with giving the child up for adoption, under the pressure of others, including my boyfriend, but in that time, as my first child grew in my body, I cultivated the courage to announce my intent. I wanted to keep this child and raise it.

I wanted to be a mother.

The immense joy and gratitude I had for my new baby boy clouded the overwhelming loneliness that accompanied being a mother at seventeen. My friends were not interested in continuing a relationship with me now that I was a twosome. My boyfriend returned to school a week after our son was born and I finished my classes from home. Hours became days, and days became months of sitting on the couch in my parents’ cavernous living room, nursing and playing with my sweet boy, waiting for someone to come home and interact with me. I had been told all throughout my pregnancy how difficult and impossible caring for a child would be, but that was not how my life as a new mother proved to be. Caring for my son was fairly easy—he was such a joyful, mild-mannered baby, and I relished every moment with him. And yet, in looking back on it, I wondered at how I could feel at once so empty and yet so fulfilled. How I could pour myself into another human being, leaving me without any reserves for myself. It took years to really understand that dichotomy—when you are in so deep, it is impossible to see anything that is not immediately in front of you.

Rushing off the train, I use my small frame to maneuver through the mass of people moving at once toward their next destination, cattle squeezing through the livestock gate. Gulping air, I slide on to the calloused leather seats of the Norristown High Speed Line. Journeying from my awkward desk jockey post at a nonprofit in far away Camden, New Jersey, I am finally in the last twenty minutes of my commute to my boyfriend’s apartment in King of Prussia. The icy February sky now black, the enormous window is a mirror. In that reflection, I challenge the woman staring back at me to explore where her criticisms had come from. The truth, not so much deeply hidden as it is painful, was that I could no longer understand how the day-to-day, second-to-second stresses of raising children would make you want to silence their laughter, make them vanish into the scenery for just a little while, so you could be someone like me: an anonymous, child-free woman venturing out to spend the evening with her handsome boyfriend.

Instead, living without my two sons has turned such memories nostalgic.

The old feeling of swimming in a shark tank without oxygen that comes from tending constantly to the needs of two little people is now supplanted by the constant anxiety of missing them, worrying about them, wondering about them. Anxiety that could swamp me with such force, I would never stand again.

I was nineteen when my second son was born on a hazy blue morning in June. Their father began school that fall, so rather than continue working and even enrolling myself, I stayed home with the boys. My desires, passions, and hopes were eclipsed by the needs of two small children, fighting to keep the three of us entertained in a small college town built to be a playground for its enormous student population. With a full course load and a job delivering pizza—often until three or four in the morning—their dad was rarely home, and when he was, he would become furious that I had not cleaned the house thoroughly enough, that he was too exhausted for dishes and laundry. He had no frame of reference to understand, nor could I articulate to him, that if I could sprout six more arms, there would never be another dirty dish left in the sink; that I would never have to spend an hour getting from the driveway to the front door of our apartment because our two-year-old would become a willful noodle at some point along the thirty-yard walk, and I couldn’t tote his infant brother and wrestle him along too. There were days when I would get dressed in the morning, sometimes putting on jewelry, wondering what or who I was doing it for. Perhaps it was just a way to make me feel meaningful, even normal. The tension and loneliness would gnaw at what I could only guess was my soul, spending every day waiting for . . . something. Whatever it was, it never came.

When I started college at twenty-one, the boys were four and two. My twenty-credit course load and thirty-five-hour work week undoubtedly could make a zombie out of most, even those with titanium work ethics. But for me, it was like seeing the ocean for the first time. The world became infinitely bigger; it gave me such a strong, solid sense of self and purpose. At last, I had something in my life that was mine entirely! The boys’ father and I ended our relationship during this time, and my children stayed with me on weekdays. Our lives became a daily cycle of hurdles: from getting up and fed and dressed and off to our respective schools on time, to the day’s end, when my patience wore thin as I willed the hours to pass to the boys’ bedtime so I could study and write papers, often all night long. Dinners at hyper-speed, stories read as though I were set on fast-forward. Every Friday, I could not get them into their father’s care fast enough so I could live my uninhibited weekend social life. I was frantic to finish school in three years, to get into the best graduate program, to make a life for the boys and me that would ease some of this manic rushing. Everything felt so fucking important, so urgent and necessary, and I was so desperate to get from point A to point B, so desperate for moments to myself.

What is so painfully ironic is that all of my work, all of those sacrificed moments with my sons, was not in vain. I did graduate in three years, got into a top graduate program, and now work at a career-track job while continuing my schooling. Everything I set out to achieve, I did. All while having ten times the pressure and obligation of my peers. None of it gives me any real sense of accomplishment or satisfaction, because in many ways, I am emptier than I have ever been.

And here’s the truth of me alone in that train car: I left my children behind in order to attend graduate school, in order to take this job. “It’s temporary,” I tell and retell myself, in an attempt to reassure myself—and, more importantly, them. “It’s just this one year . . .” I am a broken record stuck repeating one refrain. But in spite of these internal placations, I know my sweet little boys, those innocent people whom I brought into this world, are hurt and confused and angry and scared. I worry that they’ll believe everyone leaves, that growing up will mean being without anyone in the world to love you. Will this be a pain they carry through their lives? Will they understand one day why Mama had to go for a little while . . . and forgive me for it? To know I’m doing it not simply out of ambition, but so they don’t have to struggle to pay for college like their father and I did, or sit in their apartments starving for days, wondering how they will cover the rent, pay to get to work, or buy new shoes when their only pair have worn out. And will they wonder, like I do sometimes, whether this time spent “getting my shit in order for our greater good” is worth this black hole of time apart? Is it worth their pain and worth the futile dance I do every day to suppress the anxieties of missing them and worrying about them: Are they ok? Are they safe and well-fed? Are they lonely, sad? Are they being driven around safely enough, sleeping in a locked house, going to public bathrooms with an adult standing outside waiting?

Are they going to be okay after this is over?

The crowd on the high-speed line thins as my stop approaches, the lights of cars jammed on I-76 below periodically provide hints to how close I am getting. Another day done, another week, all without much distinction from one to the next. I allow myself to breathe, to reconcile that the judgments I held for that woman were so futile and misplaced; she is no different from me—we are just mothers trying to do our best, in our myriad forms—for better or worse. Who am I to judge? There will undoubtedly be a time again when I want nothing but personal space—to be an individual, a woman, not just mother—and I hope that I can look back on this time now and remember how I felt the bittersweet yearning to press my face into those children’s hair, and my urge to scold that mother for not cherishing every second she had with them. I have traded the claustrophobia of everyday mothering for a life spent living so closely with myself, that every day is now a cycle of coming home, searching for company, for a drink, for a person to fill the faults and rifts of a life that I can hardly recognize anymore without my children to define it. And this is why I cherish my small pockets of time with them, when they come.

I step off the train and spot my boyfriend waiting in his warm car. He reaches to open the door for me as I approach. We begin to make the three-hour drive to visit those wonderful boys; they will be sleeping soundly when we arrive, but we will have the next two days to be a family, to make up for all that we lose between visits. And that will get us through for a little while, and maybe gain some restored faith that we can get through this and somehow be okay.