Big Moment

This morning posits a big moment for me – truly. Here I am, once again. Finally. At my favorite local café where I wrote the majority of my manuscript and where I started to piece together a new life post-separation. And that new life looked like this: living alone for the very first time (well, the 50% of the time that I didn’t have the kids) while adjusting to single-parenting, a new fulltime job and, in time, a new relationship.

            I threw myself at my job with every ounce of energy I had. I was more committed to work than I was to my own children because I felt that I had no other choice. If I was to become financially independent, if I was to prove my worth in the workforce so that that I could secure a better future for myself and my children, I had to temporarily abandon the role of devoted mother and step into that of the stereotypical “new career father.” The one who has to build his reputation so that he can provide for the family. I needed a wife, but I didn’t have one.

            Everyone in my inner sphere was mildly disappointed with my new reality. I was less accessible to my friends, less accessible to my siblings, and my father and step-mother. When I went back east to visit with my family, I was no longer on vacation. Instead, I was working remotely and fielding constant phone calls and emails. I couldn’t step into the shoes as sister, aunt, daughter. I was distracted. More than that – I was consumed.

And my children were disappointed, too. Though they never said anything. They just silently retreated – behind their screens, behind their bedroom doors, into the audible and visual blinders of social media and AirPods. To be clear, my daily interactions with them never ceased. It wasn’t as if I left them unattended. I was always there, doing mothering things while trying to prove my career-worth. I packed school lunches while on work calls, served up eggs and toast while answering an email, rushed back to generating the utilization reports after briefly trying to answer a homework question and then, at night, kept slipping into a near-comatose state on the couch while one of my kids tried, in vain, to show me the dance she had just memorized, the new song he had just learned on the guitar, the journalistic evidence he had just discovered on the internet that, “fire-breathing dragons really do exist.”

No single child was left wanting. Laundry was cycled, the refrigerator was stocked, teeth were brushed, orthodontic appointments were maintained. But grades started to slip. My children’s engagement with life – real life – started to wane. A general apathy among all three of my children bloomed and then cast long shadows that seemed to creep into every crevice. Was it the advent of adolescence? Was it the advent of Covid? Perhaps it was a side-effect of divorce and the waves of mandated quarantine and society’s meagre attempts to connect to life through Zoom, TikTok, SnapChat, and Google Teams. Perhaps it had nothing to do with me so much as it was the unhappy circumstances of life at the present moment.

I was aware that we were swimming in muck and I was bothered by it, but I couldn’t stop to address it because I was too busy managing the endless details of keeping my nose, and their noses, above water. Every day was a series of checking boxes from the to-do list so that I could tell myself that I was managing, that I could do it all. The evidence of my success was right there – the bills were paid, the Christmas tree was put up and then taken down, the car was serviced, dinners were prepared, kids were tucked in by bedtime – all while my employer developed a stronger and stronger reliance on me and my job performance.

Yet somehow, despite all my ferocious treading, we were slipping beneath the waves. 

I realized that my life was out of balance but, despite the silent and slow retreat of my children, I continued to tell myself that all was well. That we were okay. I wanted all the pieces to come together and I was doing my absolute best to make it so – the new life, the new job, the new relationship; in sum, the new reality. So I kept jumping on the wheel. Kept treading. Kept fighting.

And then, after two years of proving my worth, I leveraged all my sweat equity and successfully convinced my employer to allow me to downshift to part-time. So that I could return to writing, so that I could have flexibility with my children, with my family back east, with my new relationship. And I got it.

Wow. Holy shit. I got it - here I am. First morning of my new part-time reality when I can finally restore balance. Finally thread significance and meaning into my daily life, as opposed to simple box checking. It’s a big moment for me. And one that will hopefully prove well worth it. But I seem to have paid the price – and a hefty one at that. For now it appears that the cost of my sweat equity was to have lost some of my children’s trust in me, especially my eldest. In fact, it feels as if he may even dislike me now.

Three nights ago I received a deeply painful phone call from my eldest son. He was calling as the spokesperson for himself and my two younger kids, from his father’s house on the eve of the day that they were supposed to return to my custody (hateful word – so legalistic). Their father had tested positive for Covid and, since they had all been exposed and didn’t want to expose me, they thought it was better if they rode it out at dad’s house. If they skipped a week with me.

I balked. I wasn’t going to lose time with my kids for fear of Covid. I wasn’t going to sidestep taking care of them while they were sick in order to protect myself. Covid be damned, I said. But still my son hemmed and hawed and the realization slowly dawned on me that his hesitation was about something else entirely. He was resisting not because he genuinely didn’t want to expose me, but because he and his siblings just didn’t want to leave their dad’s. Point blank. They didn’t want to come back to my house. They didn’t want to come back to me.

My stomach plummeted.

“Is there something else going on?” I asked. He continued to hem and haw. He sputtered his words.

“Our relationship with you is hurting,” he finally said. “All you do is nag and harass us. Is your homework done? Have you worked on your college applications? Did you remember to brush your teeth? Put your phone down and look at me while I’m talking to you. Time to go to bed. Nag, nag, nag. I’m the only 17 year old I know with a bedtime!”

“But we’re supposed to be together,” I said. “This is my week with you. I’m not giving up my time.” Long pause.

“Honestly, mom,” he said, “you gave up your right to fight for time with us when you decided to leave Dad. Your divorce from Dad was silent recognition that leaving him was more important to you than time with us. And that really hurt me.”

For a moment, the world stopped to turn. It wobbled on its axis. Oh, I finally thought. Other than the searing pain that flip-flopped in my stomach, oh was it - that was all that came to mind. Oh.

So what now? Does the parent that makes the incredibly difficult decision to leave the marriage lose their parental rights? Can that possibly be so? In the minds of devastated children who feel betrayed, apparently it can. In reality, definitively not. Marriage and parenting are two entirely different types of relationships. But they are not mutually exclusive and, for the first time, I finally realize how deeply my decision to end the marriage has hurt my children. It has upended their lives as much as it has upended mine. And although I still believe that when all is said and done, we will be fine – that we are, in fact, already okay – I see that I have some heavy-duty lifting to do with my children. I have some reparations to make.

And, even though I had to end my marriage for my own self-preservation, I was self-involved in the way that I went about divorcing. Perhaps I had to be just to survive the process. As they say, you have to put your own oxygen mask on first; you can’t help others before first helping yourself, etc., etc. But I can own that I have been immersed in self-justification. In the attitude that I’m busy because I have to be. Because that it what life demands of me. But in nursing this attitude, I have also missed the forest for the trees. The forest was the integrity of my relationship with my kids while the trees were the petty little details: the Excel spreadsheets, the grocery lists, the work deadlines, the detergent, scheduling the math tutor. In short, all those checked boxes that allow for management of essential life details but entirely miss the boat when it comes to true, real, honest engagement with a child.

So, I’m betting that honest engagement is the most essential purpose of my Big Moment, and is the nature of what I need to devote myself to in my new part-time reality. Yes, this big moment is also an opportunity to return to writing; to return to my own inner life-balance; to have flexibility with my extended family and in my new relationship. But, first and foremost, it is also an opportunity to commit to unflinching, raw and in-the-moment engagement with my children. To really see them as they are – young, yearning, confused, curious, bewildered and unsure. The exterior details are important, but they are secondary. They are merely management details, not engagement details. What’s the benefit in parenting if all you’re doing is checking boxes? A babysitter can do that. Anyone can do that.

So I’m going to lay down the busy-ness as much as I can. And I’m going to turn to my children and look at them.

Hi, I’ll say. I’m here for you. I see you. And I will always love you with all of my being.