THE TURN OF THE CORKSCREW

The unusual part of this entire scenario is not only does she not have a mate and a protector and the burden of these three cubs, but she also doesn’t have a pride. And that’s very, very unusual for lionesses.

—Fresh Air interview with Beverly and Dereck Joubert, filmmakers, The Last Lions

At the time she was assuming the role of Speaker of the House, much was made in the press of Nancy Pelosi’s “mother of five” voice. As the two years Tracey and I lived together posthumously, no longer married, wore on (and on and on), I began to wonder what a “single mother of three” voice would sound like. An incoherent howl? A cackle of madhouse laughter? A shriek of blind terror? Or would it be the sound of silence, the emptiness of much too busy much too tired to say much of anything? I had been a single mother part-time almost as long as I’d been a mother. It had been a long time since I’d had a husband to share parenting or any other concerns with. To share an emotional or social life, to share intimacy. Yet I feared true full-time single motherhood even as I longed for it. The kind where no one is coming home tomorrow or next week. Or ever. Where there is no one to wait for. Or dread.

Then Tracey moved out. It was June, so that we had the relatively simple months of summer to adjust. In the fall there was the return to three different children’s schedules, three different schools in three different towns. New England winter on the way, the usual story: dark days, snow, ice, clogged nasal passages, a long, steep driveway to shovel. One September evening, though I couldn’t think of anyone who’d care to read such a document, I sat down to make a record of that (typical) day’s events. With adjustments for ages, schools, and schedules, it could have been written long before Tracey left or any time since.

A Day in the Life of the Busy Single Mother of Three

Rose at 4:30 a.m. on the dot, finished making my bed by 4:33, turned on lights, coffee, spent 20–25 minutes in the bathroom, arranged the lunchboxes and breakfast table, along with other miscellaneous tasks. Brought coffee to the couch, finally read a section of the Sunday Times (it’s Tuesday) while listening to the news on NPR. Checked email while exercising, finishing up just in time to wake a 13-year-old boy from a deep, exhausted slumber at 6 sharp. Ran back to bedroom, dressed, woke 7- and 4-year-old girls from deep, exhausted slumbers. Cuddled (coddled) and dressed 4-year-old, who refuses to leave babyhood behind, calling to 7-year-old to get up, use bathroom, dress. Listened to trope practice of Mr. 13, who is to chant from the Torah at the bar mitzvah of another 13-year-old boy next month, made girls’ beds, did hair of Ms. 7, got everyone to the table, tried to sit at table while they ate and at the same time run around the house doing what needed to be done. Was planning to use the morning to work on the copy editing project I’m engaged in, but when the phone rang before 7, agreed to sub at one of the public schools (fortunately, Ms. 4’s school) that morning: I’ll do the editing in some other time slot (when?!) and I need both these minute sources of income. Just before 7:30, got the girls in the car, leaving Mr. 13, who would be picked up any second by his carpool, and drove the 10 minutes to the center of town to put Ms. 7 on the van to her school, a further half hour away, at 7:45. If all went according to plan—were more dangerous words ever written?—that leaves exactly enough time to race most of the way back home to the parking lot of our town’s public school, where I put Ms. 4 on the van to her public preschool program in the adjacent town, the town that has a preschool program. All did not go according to plan. By the time we reached the center of town, Ms. 4, who refuses to toilet-train, admits she is in need of a change (she is wearing underwear, as required by her class). I call the school bus office, ask them to tell the driver we won’t make the preschool van. Ms. 7 gets out of the car. I attempt to get a bag of donation food for the survival center out of the car so that it can go with her on the van for her school’s collection. The bag tears. All the canned goods have to be left strewn over the floor of the car. Put Ms. 7 on van and race back home, engage in very lengthy poop change (including bath and clothes washing), race to Ms. 4’s school, install her in her class, race to school office to sign in, race from office to assigned classroom. Spend the morning attempting to take care of a first grader with Down’s syndrome who only understands Spanish and is decidedly out of sorts with me for being an unfamiliar face. Throughout the morning I am asked by every adult I encounter, “Do you speak Spanish?” “Are you bilingual?” and have to admit my hopeless limitations again and again.

I never made it beyond the morning. When I sat at my computer to write this, late in the evening, I didn’t have enough time to describe an entire day. I didn’t have enough energy.

*   *   *

A haunting sound track thrums throughout our house, our car, an a cappella chant for three voices. Goes like this:

Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama.

Three voices chanting in unison. Harmonizing. The primal, incandescently beautiful repeated syllable of need, of want, of the desperate life-and-death struggle for attention. My attention. Mine and mine alone, all three, at once, while I’m attempting a hazardous left turn or cooking dinner, writing an urgent e-mail, talking or listening on the telephone. I love this chant. It leads to crazy laughter (particularly when I echo it back to my trio of singers). It fills our home with the sound of life itself. And it creates in me the extraordinary sensation that my brain is being skillfully chopped into small, wet pieces of sushi, manipulated around balls of sticky rice, and offered up between the pointed ends of delicate lacquered daggers.

Somewhere I once read a story by a student of Zen meditation who was criticized by his teacher for engaging in animated dinner table conversation while reaching to serve himself food—rice, no doubt—at the same time. Sounds like a good time at my house, but for this Zen master it was symbolic of everything that was wrong with the student. “Do one thing at a time,” she admonished him. One thing at a time? I thought. This woman has clearly never been a mother.

Single motherhood has changed me. It has revamped the pathways of my brain. Along with greatly increased self-confidence and other benefits that my scattered thoughts, at the moment, can’t quite bring into focus, a constantly divided attention has made me brittle. Sometimes I juggle the multitude of tasks and enjoy doing it. Sometimes in a moment of calmly abstracted silence, I respond to a single voice saying “Mama” as if a mob had been yelling in my face all day. I jump. I snap. What!? I don’t want to learn to do one thing at a time. I want to do it all at once and do it better. Without snapping.

On one layer, the most mundane and familiar, mine is simply a story about motherhood. Single motherhood. Specifically being the single mother of three children of widely divergent ages, all with the multiple needs to fall apart, be reassured, be rescued, that one might expect of children in the thick of crisis and loss, two with “special needs” of the learning and/or health variety. And, oh yeah, all the usual needs to be fed and clothed and driven to school and tae kwon do and playdates and doctor visits and to celebrate birthdays and holidays. Anyone who has had more than one child knows that family dynamics complicate exponentially with the addition of each new member of the family. When children outnumber adults three to one, that one is walking a tightrope without a net. I’ve learned how to walk it alone—and sometimes how not to. With difficulty I’ve learned (sometimes) to reach out to others. To accept the hand that is offered. I’ve discovered friends ready to catch me when I fall.

Shortly after Tracey moved out of our home, the Great Recession began. I wouldn’t dream of claiming cause and effect. Still. The bursting U.S. housing bubble is generally conceded to have been the trigger that brought about national and international economic mayhem. There is no consensus about what burst the bubble at this particular moment in time. Kinda gives one pause, doesn’t it?

In any case, my life as a single mother has coincided with a time of widespread economic doodoo. What I read in the paper and hear on the radio and from friends exacerbates my financial insecurities, solidifies the none-too-nebulous prospects of penury. It hones my already sharp sense of gratitude for the variable-rate (but not subprime!) mortgaged roof I still have over my children’s head and my own. It reminds me daily that I’m not the only one walking a tight-budget wire strung across roiling seas. But then, I don’t need news stories to tell me that. I’d know that anyway. I have a village.

We help one another mainly with emotional support, but we’re also there with groceries, sometimes cash. Aside from a loan that enabled me to begin the process of divorce (To Those It Concerns: I remember! I’ll pay you back! Someday!), I’ve been offered help a number of times. I haven’t taken anyone else up on their generosity—yet. I tell people I’m filing away their loan offers for a rainy day. Or, okay, not a rainy day. If I called on my friends every time it metaphorically rained, they’d be cleaned out. In the meantime, I’m pleased to be able to help out friends with small sums myself on occasion. We all pass on the books we’ve read, the still wearable clothes we feel done with, the children’s clothes our own have shot out of.

An economist I know was asked during a lecture Q & A, “Do you think hard times are good for building community?”

By way of answer, he told his audience about my friends and me.

Best of all, the village mentality isn’t limited to our generation. Indira tells me that her six-year-old daughter was so pleased to see my youngest in the sneakers she can’t wear any longer. When she got new shoes, she said, “I’m going to take really good care of them so that I can give them to Lilly in good shape.”

How great is that?

*   *   *

As those on the ground in battle or single motherhood say, there are logistical challenges. Sometimes I have to be in three places at once. Sometimes I actually figure out how to be in three places at once. Sometimes I get help: from another parent, from a friend, occasionally from Tracey. Sometimes, rarely, someone has to miss something. Then that child is disappointed but gets over it. And I feel guilty, not for a little while but forever.

Tracey doesn’t help raise the children much. He is often unwell, and he travels even more than he used to, with frequent weekends away in addition to his workweek, plus longer trips to Europe, Israel, Africa. I don’t mind. A week without Tracey is a week without someone my children can be with for a few hours, be driven to school or picked up by on the odd day. But it’s an easier week for me, hands down: no stress of worrying about the children while they are with him. Easier for the kids: they don’t have to make the adjustments most (all?) kids of divorce have to make when they go from one parent to another. Especially when the parents have very different styles and values. Probably because he doesn’t see them all that much and because they live entirely with me, my children’s time with Tracey has the quality of visits with an out-of-town relative who drops into their lives, buys them lots of treats, and goes away again. Once my youngest told me, with panache and a touch of belligerence, that Tracey had said that not only did she not need to eat healthy food when she was with him, she didn’t need to eat healthy food when she was with me, either. I knew Tracey hadn’t really said this. (Right?) He did laugh when I repeated the remark to him as an example of how I take the kids’ reports with a grain of salt. Even so, Lilly’s statement came not out of left field, but out of some vague awareness that food is one of our (safer) areas of skirmish. It’s gotten a little less worrisome. In contrast with the early days of their visits with Tracey, they don’t come home and report that they spent an entire beautiful spring or summer day in the library, on computers, and were given no food at all. Now they say they spent entire beautiful days in his apartment, on the computer or in front of the TV, and were given unlimited junk food. Progress.

I would love to say that I have behaved well through all of this. I have not. I have behaved badly, often, though not so much anymore. Shortly before Tracey moved out, I confided in the divorced dad of one of my children’s friends that I would soon be wearing his shoes. Among the good pieces of advice he gave me was this one: “You can never criticize the other parent to the kids. It’s really hard not to, but you have to try to avoid it at all costs.”

It was clear that he was speaking from personal experience. Wow, I thought but didn’t say aloud. You mean you’ve actually dissed your ex to the kids? I would never do that.

Looking back, I find it hard to believe my optimism.

My children refuse (mostly) to blame me for the tensions between Tracey and me, to admit to anger toward me. I fear this is partly because at some level, having lost one parent, they dread alienating the other. But mainly their attitude toward me is protective. I suspect this is due to their perception (well, Adam’s perception, which Bibi shares a bit of and Lilly doesn’t share at all) of my vulnerability. Their awareness of how hard I work just to keep us all standing in one place.

My youngest child was blessed with a preschool teacher who struck me as a paragon of grace and intelligence. During a conference in our first year as a solo-parent family, she said to me, “You could give up, but you don’t. You keep going.”

I shrugged. “I’m just doing what I have to do. What anyone with children would do.”

She disagreed. “My husband was seriously ill a few years ago. A friend told me what I’m now telling you: You could refuse to get out of bed. You could pull the covers over your head. You could fall apart. People do. You’re choosing not to.”

I heard this at a low point in my life. I didn’t feel proud of getting out of bed every day. Of delivering three fed, washed, dressed, homework-accomplished children to the school system on time each morning. I don’t feel proud of it now. Still. At a time when I felt nothing but shitty about myself and the hands I was dealing out to my children, it was nice to think it might be possible to feel good—at least not shitty—about something. Racked by guilt, low of self-esteem, I could harbor visions of pragmatic grandeur. Aspire to the do-what-you-need-to-do-to-get-through school of parenthood and survival even if I couldn’t ever really feel at home there. Know, if not admit to it, that at the end of some days a single mother’s most important tool is her corkscrew.