“Dad left?” he said.
“He told me he’d already hugged you inside,” I said, tossing the linens and instruments into the trunk. “Where’s your suitcase?”
“I’m not done packing.”
“Of course you’re not.” Parenting teenage boys has taught me much of what I know about patience and surrender.
A little over an hour later, after much sorting through piles of clothes and the squeezing together of zipper teeth until they yielded to our weight and grunts, we were finally on the road.
My son took control of the music. He put on Kanye’s new album, Yeezus. It was loud and discordant: the antithesis of my Fleetwood Mac feelings. The words Fuck whatever y’all been hearing. Fuck what, fuck whatever y’all been wearing erupted from the car’s speakers, but then the lyrics turned to Black dick and hoes, and I bristled.
“Seriously?” I said. “Black dick and hoes?” I felt like my parents must have felt when I blasted Prince in the family station wagon on the day we drove to my first year of college. Which felt like three weeks ago, not three decades. My father had packed and repacked the car several times, squeezing in my typewriter between milk crates full of record albums until he was satisfied with the placement of each object. Or maybe it was a way for him to prolong the transitional moment. While he was sad that I was leaving home, as he’d told me countless times, he was also giddily excited to drive me to my next stage of life.
Now I was bristling not only at Kanye’s lyrics but also over the fact that my son would have no memories of his father dropping him off at college. “Does he have to use the word hoe?” I snapped, seeking a substitute outlet for my anger.
“Mom, please. Open your mind to new music. Stop judging a song by its lyrics. You can turn it off when I fall asleep,” he said, balling his sweatshirt into a pillow. But the back seat was too stuffed for him to fully recline in his chair.
A few minutes after that—before we’d even crossed the bridge to leave the island of Manhattan—the kid, who’d stayed up all night doing whatever it is eighteen-year-old boys on the verge of flying the coop do on their final hours at home when they’re supposed to be packing instead, collapsed over his knees, dead asleep for most of what would end up being a fourteen-hour drive.
I turned off Kanye at the next red light and searched for “Landslide”: Time makes you bolder and children get older, indeed, I thought, allowing each successive version of the song to play one after the other. First Fleetwood Mac then the Dixie Chicks*2 then The Smashing Pumpkins then onto lesser-known bands. Give me all the “Landslide” you got, Spotify. Because fuck whatever y’all been hearing.
The next morning, eating breakfast in the hotel with all of the other freshmen and their parents, we are the only ones sitting at a table for two. Everyone else is seated in groups of three—mother, father, child, or in one case mother, mother, and child—whether in booths or at four-tops. The families around us all seem joyous, carefree, engaging in gentle ribbing and inside family jokes born of eighteen years of cohabitation and history.
It isn’t until we arrive at my son’s dorm that I will meet another single mother: his roommate’s. Though at this point I can’t tell her I’m a day-old member of her club, since my son doesn’t know this yet, I’m dying to ask her a thousand questions right now, beginning with the most obvious: “How do you manage the loneliness?”
She seems strong, resilient, a hearty cauldron of midwestern values dressed in practical, can-do flannel and mom jeans. As I watch her lift a small fridge up onto a wooden platform above our sons’ beds, I say, “Wait, let me help you,” and she gracefully accepts my aid, even though she clearly doesn’t need it. If she’s at all sad about being on her own, after moving her only son into this dorm room, she hides it well. The four of us decide to have lunch together, which immediately answers my unasked question about how to survive the solitude—you bond with other single parents—before heading back to the dorm, unpacking more stuff, and saying goodbye.
The sharp ache in my chest, after exchanging my final I love you’s with my eldest, now mixes with the dull ache on the outside curve of my left breast until all I am is pain and the desire to expel it. But I can’t collapse yet. No. First I have to drop off the rental car and fly home to New York, surrounded by other humans, then head immediately to pick up my little one at my friends the Sylvesters’ house. With four kids of their own in three different schools, they already had the infrastructure in place to get mine back and forth to his new school in Inwood plus the kindness and grace to have offered. Then I have to meet my daughter back at home, where she’s been staying alone, and make dinner for her and her brother while pretending everything’s fine. I can’t cry that night alone in my bed, either, because the kids share a bedroom next to mine. I can’t lose it on the packed subway to my son’s school the next morning or on the more crowded return trip home.
By the time I walk in the front door of my home after school drop-off, minus a marriage and my firstborn, both my sorrow itself and its desire for outlet have been building up for so many days, I don’t even make it halfway up the stairs before I collapse with a plaintive, animal-like wail.
It’s guttural. It’s loud. I’m worried the neighbors will hear it through our shared wall, but it’s all my body can do for now, this geyser of grief, so I just let it erupt, snot gushing, as the sharp angles of the wooden stairs dig into my rib cage, arms, the sensitive lump on my breast. I finally drag myself into my tiny writing studio, where I collapse onto the rug and cry some more. The pain flattens me. I’m unable to stand up. The desire to chuck it all and hop on a plane to anywhere feels overwhelming. But I cannot eat, pray, love my way out of this marriage, nor do I have the means to run away even if I didn’t have two children still living at home and relying on me for shelter, succor, shoes. The baby hasn’t even learned to tie his laces yet. Thank god for Velcro.
And, ew, what is that smell? I sniff the area rug: a 3' x 5' gift to myself during a literary festival in Vermont, where I’d been invited to speak after my first novel was published. Ugh. The dog must have peed on it again, because the stench is so overwhelming, it finally forces me to peel myself off the floor, roll up the rug, blow my nose, and take a seat at my desk.
Okay. I have to work. Now.
With tears still falling, I open up the file of the novel I’ve been writing for nearly a year to try to make sense of it. It’s about an extramarital affair. The relationship has been saving my protagonists from their troubled marriages in different ways (him from ennui, her from abuse), but I can’t figure out the ending. Yes, it’s too-obvious wish fulfillment in the form of fiction—my way of coping, while writing it, with the end of my own marriage—but where these two end up has me completely stumped.
If they end up together, their kids and ex-spouses will hate them, plus he will eventually grow bored again and leave her, the same way he left his wife. If they end up staying in their marriages, he will mature past his inability to fully commit to real love, but she’ll remain in a dysfunctional situation that will leave her more suicidal than she was at the beginning of the novel. And I refuse to throw her under the bus, either literally or figuratively. She has to live, to leave her husband, to work through her issues alone, to forge a new path as a single mother, but how?
The me writing these words today knows exactly how, if not several perfectly acceptable versions thereof, but back then I couldn’t see a clear path for either myself or my protagonists. I have—in every way possible—lost track of the narrative: my characters’, my own, their kids’, my kids’. “What the fuck happens next?” I say out loud, starting to cry again.
I toss the sixty-thousand-word file into the trash. It had been a struggle to write from the start: never a good sign, plus I know in my heart it’s not good, I don’t know how to make it better, and I need money now, not when I turn it in a year from now, maybe longer.
I consider writing a YA novel. A few publishers have reached out over the years to offer an advance for one, if I can figure out a good premise and submit a proposal. J.K. Rowling wrote and sold Harry Potter after she was suddenly thrust into the role of single mother. Now she’s the multimillionaire author of the most successful children’s series of all time. Sitting there at my desk, I suddenly come up with a story I’d like to explore: a first kiss, during a summer vacation on the Delaware shore, between a thirteen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy and the repercussions that follow. I was a rabid Judy Blume fan growing up. Her books dealt with previously taboo topics and feelings not only near and dear to my utterly confused teen heart, but no one else back then was talking about them.
Plus I had plenty of raw material from which to draw: That summer at sleepaway camp, on the bus back from Kings Dominion in 1979, when the much older boy I had a crush on took my prepubescent, thirteen-year-old hand and stuck it down his pants. “I think he peed on me!” I cried to my friend Nancy, who shook her head at my naïveté and helped me rid my shaking hand of semen. Or that night in seventh grade, when everyone else paired off in Adam Glickfield’s basement and started to make out on the couches and floor, and that red-haired boy and I were—literally—the last two standing. “So, I guess you and I should…” he said. Should what? I wondered. How did everyone else know what to do?
“Sure,” I shrugged. We lay down. He shoved his finger up my vagina, answering my question.
Yes! I think. That’s what I’ll do: the first kiss book. I’ll put together a proposal, hand it in, get started right away. It will be both fun and exorcistic to write, and I’ll get paid immediately instead of having to wait until the book’s finished.
But, oh, right. Duh. Judy Blume was married during her most prolific years—albeit unhappily, on the verge of divorce—to a lawyer, whose job presumably provided health insurance. Rowling had Great Britain’s cradle-to-grave welfare state, which provided public assistance, however minuscule, and their excellent, taxpayer-funded National Health Service. Ambulance rides, emergency room visits, mammograms, cancer care, long-term hospital stays: all paid for by the NHS, no matter your income.
I have an American passport and a breast lump. A bad combination when you earn your living as a writer.
Other authors I know rely on family or spousal support to keep writing without worrying about maintaining their health insurance. Or they deal with the issue by becoming college professors, a position for which I tried getting hired multiple times as well, but I kept getting told that, without a master’s, I was unemployable in academia, never mind my published books and frequent visiting lectures at universities across the U.S. I also don’t have the time or financial runway to get one. Some authors I know join the WGA—the Writers Guild of America—by writing film and television scripts on the side. If you earn approximately $35,000 a year (in 2013) so doing, you become eligible for excellent, low-cost WGA health insurance, but you can’t join the WGA until you get assigned a script by a legitimate WGA signatory, and a legitimate WGA signatory will not assign a script to a writer who’s not in the guild: a catch-22 that many writers get around by working their way up the ranks of the male-dominated TV writers’ rooms in Los Angeles straight out of college, first as interns then as writers’ assistants. But try to get your foot in that health-insurance-providing door as a middle-aged woman, I’ve been told, and they will laugh-track you right out of Hollywood.
I open a new file on my computer and create a list of immediate and pressing concerns:
I need a corporate job with health insurance, stat. In anticipation of my separation, I’d already been searching for months, with a couple of positions asking me back for multiple rounds of interviews, but I’d yet to get an offer. I’d recently been interviewing for a position at Facebook I was fairly confident would be mine, since the company’s COO had recruited me, plus it had a photojournalism angle. Moreover, I’d been one of the last two candidates in consideration; the other candidate was a younger man with less experience and fewer qualifications; and Lean In, the COO’s wildly popular new tome, had just been published a few months prior. But after several more rounds of interviews with one young male employee after another, all of which I thought I’d nailed, I lost out to the dude. Not surprising, considering that, statistically speaking, men like to hire other men. And they are particularly biased against older women.
I need to rent out my son’s bedroom to make up for the 43 percent rise in my rent, from $3,500 a month to nearly $5,000, at the exact moment I’m suddenly in charge of paying for all of it. New buyers, a large real estate conglomerate, have recently purchased the Harlem brownstone I call home from my landlords. The new owner’s goal is to force us and our downstairs neighbors out with crushing but somehow legal rent hikes, so they can do a much more substantial renovation and then rent it out for more money.
I need to transform my 6' x 8' office—my beloved and rare proverbial room of one’s own, in which I wrote and edited my last two books—into a bedroom for an au pair, if a single bed and dresser will even fit in it, so I can get a job outside the home without worrying about my salary being eaten up by babysitting overtime. And I need to find an au pair without paying exorbitant rates to an agency to procure one. Childcare math, when you crunch the numbers, doesn’t actually add up, particularly when the children are not yet in school. During those first years, you need a minimum of fifty hours of babysitting a week to work a forty-hour week, which includes an hour of commuting on either end of the day. If you pay your babysitter $20 an hour—the current minimum going rate in urban centers like mine—that comes out to $1,000 a week before you even pay employer taxes and your sitter’s benefits. That’s $52,000 a year, out of pocket, of which you’re allowed to declare 35 percent of only $3,000 a year on your taxes, which is less than the cost of most summer camp programs, which are not an optional indulgence for many families but rather a necessity for working parents. Which means you have to earn a low six figures just to break even. Daycare costs less but is much less flexible if you’re a single parent with a job that requires working late or travel, as many white-collar jobs these days do. An au pair is a good solution, since they’re seeking housing and experience in a foreign country as well as a little spending money, but you need an adequate spare bedroom, which is its own added expense, plus there’s the au pair agency fee, I hear, which I’ve yet to look into.
I need to send out an email to a choice group of friends, to tell them I’ve separated from my husband, but please don’t tell my kids, and by the way, if you hear of any available jobs or men, please let me know.
I need to start looking for new, cheaper digs for when my lease is up in nine months.
I need to move.
I need to find the money to move.
I need to figure out how to get a low-cost mammogram, if that even exists near me, and I need to pray this lump is nothing, because I won’t be able to afford it if it’s something.
I need to pay off the mid-five figures in credit card debt that has been placed in my name, only half of which I’d previously known about.
I need to find a way to extricate myself from risk of further credit card debt being placed in my name by getting divorced, but how do I do that without paying a divorce lawyer a $30,000 retainer to get the ball rolling?
I need $30,000 to get divorced. Minimum, as I understand it. Many friends and acquaintances of mine going through divorce, particularly if their cases had to go to trial, were suddenly on the hook for multiple times that amount. One friend of mine was paying her divorce lawyer $700 an hour. $700 an hour!
And oh, shit, I think, opening up my calendar and seeing a work event to which I’d said yes before knowing it would take place on my first weekend as a solo parent:
I need to find someone to watch my seven-year
-old this coming Saturday from 7:30 a.m. until 3 p.m., while my older daughter takes the SAT, so I can speak on a 9 a.m. panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival, an hour away.
I check my bank statement. Paying a babysitter to watch him, if I can even find one willing to show up that early on a Saturday morning, will eat up a good chunk of my current reserves.
The book festival, as absurd as this sounds in retrospect, is the minor task, once I write it down, that breaks me: the too-much thing, the I-can’t-do-this thing, the I-give-up thing. I’m suddenly struggling to breathe. I clutch my chest, in full-on panic attack. Yes, I needed to extricate myself from my marriage, and I’m relieved that the first step has been taken, but I’m just now realizing the implications: I’m on my own. Completely. No more, “It’s your turn to throw out the trash.” No more, “If you run his bath, I’ll do the dishes.” No more, “I have to fly to Houston this Thursday to give a lecture, I’ll be back Friday,” which means no more speaking fees to tide me over between books, right at the moment when magazines, my other source of income, are entering their death spiral. No more spending my days as a writer, after fifteen years of both defining myself and earning a decent living thus. No more sex. Wait, seriously, no more sex? Yes. No more sex. Because how can I justify spending $20 an hour in babysitting to meet a man who might not even show up, and even if he does, and our fleshes actually hit it off, then what? A quickie at his place before rushing home to relieve the sitter and walk the dog? My other separated and divorced friends plan their dates during their evenings and weekends off, when their exes have their kids and pets. I won’t have nights off. Or the money to pay a lawyer to fight for child support. Or any family nearby with whom to drop him off when weekend work situations arise. Never mind any situation I haven’t even considered that might arise.
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