The morning I quit my job, I climbed down our stairs, careful not to trip on the trail of detritus leading to the sofa—Barbies and board games, the once-walls of a blanket fort. There were your pajamas plus my pajamas plus the clothes you’d worn to your prohibitively priced preschool. There were the unpacked paper bags from Monday’s trip to the grocery store, plus the unpacked plastic bags from Tuesday’s trip to get whatever we’d already decided we couldn’t live without. A pizza box the dog had emptied was propped over his water bowl like a book he meant to finish later.
Then there were shoes: slippers, flip flops, sneakers without laces, which reminds me now that I promised you rainboots after we passed several pairs on a grocery store endcap. How was I supposed to explain that I did not want to buy rainboots from the same place we bought our toilet paper and frozen pizza? That was not the kind of life I was trying to convince myself I had.
In his best-selling treatise on the origins of the universe, Stephen Hawking explains, “an event is something that happens at a particular point in space and a particular time. . . . Given an event at P, one can divide the other events in the universe into three classes.”
One thing happens, and suddenly we have a means to measure all others—a “here,” a “now,” and a “then,” which depend on everything before them, that are measured by everything that happens next.
So if the sink and the table and the bar stool that gets used for a table were covered with empty bowls, plates, and half-finished mugs of coffee, there must have been a set of events that brought us to that moment. From the window, there was also a perfect view of where we set your booster seat in the driveway, stripped bare of its dressing after you lost control of your stomach on our way home from frozen yogurt.
I put the vomit-soaked fabric cover in the washing machine, but its black plastic skeleton had set out for days facing the road like a monument to our madness—nights we’ve raced through the world without thinking—applesauce dried like splatters of squashed beetles, the Doritos you call “cheese chips,” crinkled paper straw wrappers, what is left of what was once a gummy bear.
For most of my life, I’ve thought my “P” moment was the day your Grandpa Chuck sat your Aunt Jen and me down at the kitchen counter, in the place where your Grandma Kathryn had already spent the future of her own “P” slicing our hot dogs into pools of ketchup. Your Grandpa announced that the job he had worked for seventeen years with the General Motors corporation was moving to Ramos Arizpe, Mexico.
“I’ve given that company my blood, sweat, and tears,” he told us.
I remember looking past him at the grackles raiding the bird feeder in the window, sure this speech was about something more than he knew to say. Now, I’m sure there is always something more than we know how to explain.
There is much I struggle to explain too. What we are doing here, in this city, in this house, just the two of us, hundreds of miles away from the city where you were born, away from your father and the woman he married after I turned him down.
Your father insists the reason I am a single mother is because I am a disagreeable person, because I take what I want without asking, and I do what I want without caring. “You are the worst of America,” he told me when I refused to give you his last name. I offered him all manner of in-betweens and hyphenations. But he maintained that his family would see a compromise as something Americans did.
Now you want to know more about his tight circle of uncles and cousins who’ve you’ve never met, who all immigrated to Chicago from Nigeria, who you’ve seen in pictures wearing long flowing agbadas at church and round, satiny Igbo caps, or your two half-siblings who show up to your playdates so quiet and polite.
I can offer you the facts, how you barely had a heartbeat when I blocked his number, how when I told him I was pregnant, he was the first to use the word “co-parent” after I insisted our romantic relationship was over. Still, he kept calling and calling. By then I’d learned to understand a man’s persistence could be dangerous, so I followed my fears out of the city and into this new life, into the present, a place in the universe so much farther away from where I thought I’d be.
Fear is a powerful compass. It can fuck with even the best mapped journeys. I should not use the word “fuck” around you as often as I do.
Recently I was reading what I thought was going to be a book about mothers—Terry Tempest William’s When We Were Birds—in which she explains how in her family’s religious tradition, women are expected to keep a journal, to create a record of one’s life and the gifts within it and to pass that record on to their children.
You and I have no religious tradition—perhaps for the same reasons I am a single mother—to avoid the dangers, the heartbreak. But I like the idea of having something to hand to you and say, “This is what things looked like from where I was standing bent over the laundry or holding you while you threw up in my best mixing bowl.”
GG, your Grandpa Chuck’s mother, kept a journal.
For each day of her life after your Great-Grandpa Joe died, she recorded the morning, afternoon, and evening temperatures in a ledger and noted the events of the day as she remembered them:
48 72 71: she wrote, KATHY CALLED AT 7.
57 65 62: LUKE GOT ME UP AT 5.
56 71 70: WENT TO FRANKS AND GOT PEAT MOSS.
58 67 62: FOUND LUKE DEAD BY THE PATIO DOORS.
I have been fond of the dot grid journal—drawing little checkboxes using multi-colored markers:
- ANSWER SO-AND-SO’S EMAIL
- ORDER DOG FOOD
- DO YOUR BEST TO REMEMBER THAT THIS IS THE LIFE YOU ASKED FOR, THAT THIS IS THE LIFE YOU TOLD YOURSELF TO WANT.
The moment I left home, my life became a to-do list. Since I was seventeen, I have dragged myself from bed long before the sun rises to scrub toilets, to rock other people’s sleeping children, to fill grocery store shelves with lemon lime soda and electrolytes.
I have incrementally turned time itself into a commodity—earning a little more with each passing year, or the accumulation of education: $18 an hour logging video timecode, $2 per word writing speeches for a university provost, $1,475 teaching research writing to students who neither wanted to research nor write.
Each morning, I bobble toward the coffeemaker with a catalog of what is not yet accomplished, log into one email inbox or another, and make PowerPoint presentations for businesspeople I’ve never met. At 6:00 a.m., I wake you in time to get ready for school.
I set a timer to rush you through breakfast, into your clothes, into the car, into your classroom, so I can rush back home again to grade papers and answer emails for universities where I’ve never stepped foot on campus.
I’ll point out sentence fragments and incomplete citations until noon, when I’ll have to open the second computer and begin editing the magazine that pays for the toys and the shoes and your Montessori tuition, that keeps us insured and fed with organic fruit snacks, clothed in whatever name brand fabrics I find most representative of what I want for us—Nike or Nordstrom or North Face—whatever I can purchase at the outlet mall.
But it’s my work for the magazine that makes me manic, that lands you in front of YouTube while I reply to all those readers who email me in ALL CAPS because their issues have been lost in the mail, or my boss who, God bless her, is always calling at 4:15 p.m. even though I keep saying I need to turn my computer off at 3:45 p.m.
Your Grandma Kathryn says I’m being taken advantage of. She insists that I simply should not look at the phone when it buzzes past the time I said I would be monitoring it—though it’s not like your Grandma Kathryn isn’t also always answering her own phone after hours. The truth is we are just doing our best to keep what we’ve been told we are so lucky to have—a regular paycheck, the means to visit an emergency room, a retirement account.
Take GG, for instance, born in 1923 on land north of the Flint River in Genesee County, Michigan, near what is now the entrance to the Westwood Heights Mobile Home Park and Light N Up Provisioning and Microbuddery. GG’s father brought his family north to this patch of land hoping that Flint could do for his family what Pittsburgh had done for steelworkers, or what West Virginia had done for coal miners, but if your great-great-grandfather’s dream for himself was clear, his dream for GG had been less ostentatious. “You’re too ugly to find a husband,” he declared on more than one occasion.
And if GG’s mother thought differently, she didn’t say so.
She insisted GG marry the farm boy who lived nearby, the only child whose parents would leave him everything. And if GG knew then, as we do now, that she was certainly worth more than her parents’ fears for her, that she was a beautiful girl with the resolve of a pack of wild hogs and the wit to outsmart them, she also knew that by the time she was old enough to leave home, she didn’t have many options. To marry the farm boy was GG’s best chance to get by, so she did. She made two babies with him—your Great Aunts Geraldine and Mary Louise—and then, one quiet morning, Japan rained down bombs on Pearl Harbor. The men who’d been making automobiles were called overseas to avenge America’s losses. The assembly lines hired women to piece together fighter planes instead of horseless carriages. America’s “day that will live in infamy” became GG’s stroke of good fortune. She walked herself the eight miles between the farm and Industrial Avenue and got a job of her own. She got her own apartment. She fell in love with a man down the assembly line from her, your great-grandpa Joe, and together they went on to create a life separate from the life their parents had handed to them.
Maybe you will also need a life separate from what your parents have handed to you. The people I descended from have always believed we were entitled to comfort so long as we were willing to show up and make ourselves look busy. The City of Flint Grows Up (a book published in 1945 with the financial support of General Motors) claims: “America is a thousand Flints, and those who are familiar with the story of Flint know the story of the industrial development which has brought us such a high standard of living.”
What it means when it says, “America is a thousand Flints,” is that since white people crossed the ocean to take this country from the people already living here, America has been one gold rush, one bank run after another.
Your father has been more realistic about what money can buy him. If before we parted ways, he kept begging me to make time for him instead dedicating my time to the slow accumulation of hourly wages, together we might have both found more balance. Perhaps we would have made a great team.
“Consider the pieces of a jigsaw in a box,” writes Hawking. “Suppose the pieces of the jigsaw start off in a box in the ordered arrangement in which they form a picture. If you shake the box, the pieces will take up another arrangement. This will probably be a disordered arrangement in which the pieces don’t form a proper picture, simply because there are so many more disordered arrangements. Some groups of pieces may still form parts of the picture, but the more you shake the box, the more likely it is that these groups will get broken up and the pieces will be in a completely jumbled state.”
There are far more jumbled states possible than whole ones, but occasionally in the shaking, maybe a piece or two comes out together. Close-up, you think you’re looking at a whole thing. You try to make sense of the world based on what you’re looking at. You extrapolate. You see all the other strangers punching the time clock, and you do what they do. Soon we are all doing it, and we don’t know why or for what or for how long, but we do it because everyone else does, because everyone else has come to believe that this is the thing we are meant to do.
When Grandpa Chuck tells the story of his life, he begins it with a push mower, how he ventured out after school in search of lawns to cut, then used the proceeds to purchase an ice cream cart from which he peddled popsicles during baseball games in the park. When he was old enough, he hired into the lumber yard, where he unloaded 2x4s from the Grand Trunk Railroad.
Because he was young and lean and spry, it was his job to climb up into the railcar and throw the boards down into the waiting hands of the next man. Working day after day like that, his muscles grew strong and sinewy, his skin bronzed and glowed under the summer sun, and soon the neighborhood girls took notice. Hard work and a bit of hustle turned him into the kind of man he was proud to be.
When his draft notice came for him, Grandpa Chuck’s vocational aptitude test placed him in the payroll office at Fort Knox. He waited out Vietnam doing paperwork, and when he returned home in 1979, his ticket was waiting. General Motors offered him a full-time job as an automatic press operator, where day after day he stamped car parts between steel plates in exchange for health insurance and the promise of a pension. He made enough money to buy his own single-wide trailer in the Indian Hills Mobile Home Park northeast of the factory. He bought a General Motors car at a discount. He bought his own groceries and his own cases of beer, and he did not have to ask anyone else to weigh in on his decisions. Grandpa Chuck worked hard, as I understood it, and in exchange for this work, he got to be the person he wanted to be.
I must tell you what I misunderstood about Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds.
In the Mormon church, she writes, “women are expected to do two things: keep a journal and bear children.”
I thought what she meant was that it is only mothers who keep the journals, but it turns out that everyone in her religious tradition lives with this expectation.
The way I decided I wanted to keep a journal is the same way I’ve decided everything else in my life: based on a misunderstanding.
You can be handed an absolute fact and still be wrong about what it means.
You can also encounter information that contradicts the misunderstanding and decide it doesn’t matter—especially if everyone around you also seems to accept the misunderstanding as truth.
I thought Grandpa Chuck’s lament at the kitchen counter was about work, about value. I thought it was about what would be lost in the years that followed—our home, our family. The little league trophies. Aunt Jen’s ballet recitals and the state-of-the-art VHS camcorder we used to record them. After seventeen years of having every last thing he dreamed of, Grandpa Chuck was given two options for his future: (1) He could take another job making some other thing for General Motors in the next closest factory in Detroit or Toledo or wherever, or (2) he could accept a sum of compensation for his troubles. If he chose to take the pension rather than the commute, I assumed there must be a reason, that he must have known what he was doing.
In order to afford life on less, he moved your Grandma Kathryn, your Aunt Jen, and me twenty miles down the county highway from the city where our entire family had lived for nearly a century to a town where the living was cheaper but where we knew nearly no one, and it didn’t occur to me to ask why this was the better of the two paths.
On my first day of fifth grade at a new school, when the teacher asked all the students to break into groups of three to practice our math skills on the blackboard, I looked around the room and saw Matthew B. (who grew up to be a doctor in Miami, by the way), as he was busy pairing off with his best friend Matthew C. (who grew up to be a cameraman for ESPN), and I used my powers of deduction to place myself among them. I was confused when their faces suggested there was something unsavory about me. I had not yet registered that the circumstances of my homelife had already become such that I could walk around smelling like an unwashed armpit and no one in my immediate family would notice. I was entirely unaware that my family had already begun unraveling in such a way that Grandma Kathryn didn’t have time to tell me to brush my teeth.
Now there are too many nights when you and I also spill into bed with our toothbrushes untouched on the bathroom counter. You refused to let the dentist numb your jaw for your first filling, and the office manager pulled me aside to suggest we try to regroup and make another appointment. “We’ll just charge you for the office visit today,” she said, trying to be generous, and I insisted on being charged for all of it: the paper bib and the sterilized instruments. Penance for the way history repeats itself when we do not have the mental capacity to slow down and ask ourselves why we are making the same mistakes again and again.
“We find ourselves in a bewildering world,” Hawking tells us. “We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?”
“To try to answer these questions,” he continues, “we adopt some ‘world picture.’ . . . [But] it turns out to be very difficult to devise a theory to describe the universe all in one go. Instead, we break the problem up into bits and invent a number of partial theories.’ Each of these partial theories describes and predicts a certain limited class of observations.”
I have looked around me and thought what was missing was something that other kids had that I didn’t: The 14k gold tennis bracelet I heard Aubrey J. discussing in the girls’ bathroom, the three-stripe Adidas down jacket that other girls dared me to steal from the roller rink.
I have chased what was lost, and I have chased what I thought would keep us from becoming the kind of people who lose those things. I have paid with my own ability to zoom out and see the whole of the puzzle for what it is.
The other day we were in the sunroom. It was Saturday, so I’d promised myself that I would not touch a work device until the weekend was over. Then my phone began to buzz at the same frenetic rhythm at which the radio dispatches tornado warnings. A colleague insisted I’d filled out some form incorrectly, and that it needed fixing “ASAP.” I did not pause to consider what ASAP might have meant—like the next time I was working, for instance, or Monday morning. Or never. Because who cares?
I dug for my laptop from beneath piles of markers and construction paper and board games. You asked me what I was doing, and I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t ignore the email, that maybe I was addicted to the work, or maybe I was addicted to being afraid of what might happen without it. That maybe addiction and fear are parts of the same machine that keep us tied to one assembly line or another. Grading papers or editing magazines.
I lied and said: “I just have to check something.” So when you gave up on me in favor of the backyard, I sighed not only with exhaustion but relief.
“I need shoes,” you announced, by which I knew you meant that you wanted me to get them for you. So I got up. I hurried to the laundry room, where I grabbed the first two matching shoes I saw, the pink slides I bought you for swim lessons, which you had already given up trying to wear because they wouldn’t stay on your feet.
Consumed with the ticking of the second hand, I returned to the sunroom with the shoes, and you let me know immediately I’d made a miscalculation, grabbing both and launching them over my head, toppling Chinese takeout on the arm of the couch, sending sweet and sour sauce splattering across the couch cushions, and I leapt to my feet, screaming, “Look what you’ve done! This is why we don’t throw things! Look at this mess!” A mess I’d caused. The mess of the house and the mess of a Saturday and the mess of all the years that landed us here, where I could no longer prioritize what deserved my attention or time.
“Look at me!” I yelled, and as I lowered my face to meet your gaze, our foreheads collided, sending you toppling backwards. Your cry turned into a wail, and it was then I realized the sliding glass door had been left open, all the screaming and yelling streaming out into the backyard, where our dog was barking and the neighbor dogs were barking and the neighbor humans were trying to enjoy a summer night.
In that opening, you bolted. You ran out the door to collect yourself barefoot on the flagstones, your eyes trained on the gathering in the neighbors’ yard, as if you could will yourself into a different life altogether.
“Imagine a cup of water falling off a table and breaking into pieces on the floor,” writes Hawking. “If you take a film of this, you can easily tell whether it is being run forward or backward. If you run [the film] backward you will see the pieces suddenly gather themselves together off the floor and jump back to form a whole cup on the table. You can tell that the film is being run backward because this kind of behavior is never observed in ordinary life.”
A single mother who works her way out of poverty into the upper-middle-class without some sort of miraculous intervention—a lottery win or an impeccable talent or massive heap of support—is not observed in ordinary life either.
The story I’ve told myself is that I can have everything I want if I’m willing to work for it. And maybe I can if I am willing to give up other things: my time, my attention, my sense of self. But the truth is we are all one fateful blow away from catastrophe—humanmade or otherwise.
The last time I visited GG in her nursing home, she was listening to the Price Is Right at the highest possible volume while I plunked rapidly at my laptop keyboard. She turned to me, suddenly, as if after ninety-eight years on earth she had thought to ask: “Why can’t we all be together?”
Your Grandma Kathryn was in the final years of her career. Your Aunt Jen was three hours north in a storefront real estate brokerage adding other people’s vacation houses to the MLS. Your Grandpa Chuck was doing whatever it is Grandpa Chuck does when he’s not poking around our garage or toolshed in search of things to fix—shopping mostly, for things he doesn’t need: new kinds of yogurt, impeccably white sneakers. It had been more than a decade since he’d seen GG, and I don’t know the reason exactly, except that I think it had something to do with the shame of having gone from being the kind of man who could once hand his mother the keys to a double-wide trailer to becoming the kind of man who strung together part-time jobs while his wife went to work, went to night classes, went to find a lawyer to ask him to leave.
When I answered her, I knew I wasn’t telling the exact truth of it.
“Grandma,” I said, “we have to work,” but as the words left my mouth I could also see the entire alternative timeline in which we might have worked together instead of worked apart, that I was lying to the woman I had most wanted to be like as she lamented the one thing she missed most. The people who had learned what it means to work from her.
And so it was that morning when I found myself sidestepping our collected detritus on my way to yet again fire up the coffeepot and the laptop, to give too much of myself to businesspeople I’ll never meet, to give too little of myself to students who deserve so much more from me than I’ve been able to give, I did a thing I hadn’t done in decades.
i’m sorry, I typed, one letter after another chasing that blinking line that might go on forever.
please find someone else to take over for me, I told one job, then another.
I hit send.
I watched the words disappear into the big magic nothing of the Internet, as if my exhaustion was some kind of failure.
I sat staring out the picture window at the unmowed grass.
I waited for someone to say, “Why?” or “Thank you” or “Can you please just give us a few days?”
But no one answered.
What comes next?
How does one undo what’s been done over decades? Lifetimes?
Maybe I’ve never known.
***
Photograph by Ashkan Forouzani
