The Mighty Queens of Freeville

by Amy Dickinson

  Rachel and I packed a rental car with the luggage Emily and I had brought from London. On our way out of town, we stopped at Mom’s house and she gave me and Emily a hug. “I love it when the trees are in leaf,” I said to her.

  “Yes, and now you are leafing, too,” my mother replied. Then she said, “See you in ten minutes at Toads?”

  Sure.

  The whole family was there, crowded around our usual table. I told them we’d be back constantly. It was only a seven-hour drive.

  Rachel moved us into our little apartment in Washington on a hot day at the beginning of a summer that turned out to be full of stifling days. She took a look around our rental, pointed out all of its great qualities, and, just before she left, declared the rest of our life ready to begin.

  I wasn’t so sure.

  Emily was two years old, I was thirty-two and I felt that my life was leftover, tattered, and grimy, just like the furniture that crowded us in our too-small place. Still I dug into boxes that had followed me to New York and then London but that hadn’t been opened since I packed my possessions after college. I pulled out my old rotary telephone. It had a jangly, exhausted ring, but it still worked. I found an old answering machine. It had been packed away just after our honeymoon—before my new husband and I moved to En gland. I played the five-year-old messages on the tape. Sitting on the floor, surrounded by boxes, I listened to a string of messages congratulating us on our marriage and wishing us a safe and happy honeymoon trip.

  I set up Emily’s bedroom in the little side room that was supposed to be the apartment’s den. Four floors up, it had a wall of windows that faced a heavily wooded gully that ran beside our building. The view, all green and leafy, made you feel as though you were sitting in a tree house. We settled into a routine. Friends from college who had stayed in DC rallied around us in a loose group. One of them who had a son Emily’s age told me about a swimming pool where you could join for a small fee.

  All through that hot and steamy summer, the pool was our daily destination. I would pack lunches and books and head out in the morning, before it got too hot. Emily splashed with the other toddlers in the small round kiddy pool, and I would sit thigh to thigh with the other mothers, dangling our legs in the warm water.

  I was trying to find a way to reenter the world. Because thinking about my own experience exhausted me, I spent much of my time at the pool listening to suburban moms complain about their husbands. The thrust of their issues seemed to be that they could not get their husbands to do what they wanted them to do. And when their husbands did something that they wanted them to do, they did it badly.

  Single parenthood is hard, but it’s simple too.

  You just do everything yourself.

  Doing everything yourself has a way of relaxing a person’s standards. The kinds of things that drove me crazy during my marriage—my husband’s passive incompetence or indifference when it came to certain childrearing chores—didn’t seem quite so devastating when I was at fault. Under-cooking the macaroni, skipping a nap, not changing a diaper on time, or falling asleep during a bedtime story didn’t seem like such a crime when I committed it.

  As a person headed out of marriage, I started viewing these unions differently. When it comes to raising children, I wonder how well the average marriage really works. Along with a second pair of hands that couples get when they’re married, they also get two styles, speeds, and sets of values. I missed many things about my husband, but I didn’t miss the tremendous effort of trying to get him to connect.

  When my husband left, he told me that he was tired of disappointing me, and I understood perfectly, because I hated the feeling of being disappointed by him. I started to feel the tiniest kernel of relief that he would no longer be my problem.

  In the absence of other relationships, I felt my connection to my own child deepen. Surrounded by other two-parent families, I saw how singular our particular thread was.

  I’m certain that all mothers feel an intense and intimate attachment to their children, but what the parenting books never tell you is how knowing your own child is a process that happens over time. In the first two years of her life, my feelings about my daughter had been entangled with how I felt about her father and what was happening to our family. Now it was just the two of us, and we were learning to read each other.

  The kiddy pool was our universe writ very small. I watched Emily try to navigate her world as I tried to navigate mine. The toddlers crashed around, bumping, grabbing, laughing, crying, swallowing, and spitting pool water, pushing one another and retreating to their mothers when their plastic diaper covers leaked and their Pampers filled with water and threatened to explode.

  Mothers interceded frequently, forcing their children to share their water toys and asking them to please say “please.”

  I don’t like to share and I’m often amazed that we insist that our children do it. Being nice is one thing. It’s important to be kind, respectful, and polite. But why should a child give up something that belongs to her, just because someone else wants to take it? Still a toddler, Emily had already given up a lot. Too much, I thought. I whispered to her, “If something is yours, then it belongs to you. You don’t have to share it unless you want to.” She stood her ground, maintaining a death grip on what ever object she was currently attached to, her feet firmly planted. The other toddlers learned to accommodate this quirk.

  It has been my particular fate to raise a child whose temperament is almost the polar opposite of mine. The things that I hold on the surface—every waking thought, word, and emotion—seemed submerged in my little girl. She was quiet and wary. Intense.

  When she spoke, she used complete sentences, and her slight English accent and precise articulations often caught me by surprise.

  Once, just before our move to the States when I was strolling her through our neighborhood in London, a passerby stopped to admire her as she was lying in her pram. “Oh, what a lovely baby. How old is she?” the woman asked me.

  Emily glanced up. Her eyes looked like black buttons.

  “I’m eighteen months old,” she said.

  The woman looked alarmed.

  “I know,” I said. “Honestly, it’s a little scary.”

  But even the most articulate toddlers can’t describe their feelings. Young children cannot ask for what they need the most. They can only try to get it. My daughter and I alternated between clinging to each other and trying to escape each other. When she could no longer stand the sight of me, Emily would retreat to her little tree house bedroom. I would find her lining up her toys in neat rows on her bed, talking to them and ordering them around. She conjured a friend named “Charlie,” who kept her company before and after naptime. She invented destinations that she and Charlie would visit.

  Without me.

  When you’re a single parent, you’re often lonely, yet seldom alone. There is no backup and no spontaneous escape from parenthood—even for a minute. I had a friend who was a stay-at-home mom who told me that when she got overwhelmed, she would lie in wait for her husband to return from work. The minute he crossed the threshold, she would hand him the baby and go out to a bar, where she would sit and smoke cigarettes and watch basketball on the bar’s TV for a couple of hours until she felt better. No single parent has that luxury. Any escape from the kids is the result of intense planning and/or significant expenditure. It is mothering without a net.

  I learned to pace myself. I broke down the day into its parts: eating, playing, swimming, resting, reading. I didn’t think past noon, and then once noon came, I didn’t think past four. When Emily took her afternoon nap during the hottest part of the day, I would train a fan on her and lie down on my bed and stare at the trees outside the window.

  In the evenings, I would count the minutes before bedtime, after which I would sit on the couch, talk to my mother on the phone, moon about my failed marriage, and stare at the television before stumbling off to bed. Many nights, I would wake with a start at
around 4 A.M.. Lying alone in my bed I would watch the gnarly shadows from the trees dance on my ceiling while I replayed the drama and romance of my daughter’s birth.

  I became alarmed during my pregnancy when I tried to interest my husband in my impending motherhood, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it. I tried to get him to tell me how he felt about becoming a father, but he wouldn’t talk about that, either. His one concession to looming fatherhood was to buy a jokey book by Bill Cosby that he kept on the nightstand but didn’t read. He helped to put the crib together, painted and furnished the baby’s room, and obsessed over names, but he didn’t attend prenatal classes with me and seemed most comfortable viewing our family as Cary Grant might in an old movie—beautifully dressed and from an ironic distance.

  The message I got was that in our little family, parenthood was happening to me, but not necessarily to him.

  Late in my pregnancy, I panicked. I could see the little hairline fractures that would later become the fissures leading to our broken home. I confronted him and told him that I was scared about the birth. I said I worried that he wouldn’t be there for me when it came time for the baby to be born. “I’m a deadline guy,” he reassured me. “You’ll see—I’ll be fine.”

  The night I went into labor my husband and I sped through Knightsbridge in a taxi on the way to the hospital. He held my hand and said, “Just think—the next time we see this place, we’ll have our baby with us.”

  He was right about being a deadline guy. During our daughter’s birth, he read to me and whispered to me. When they were administering the epidural he said, “Just think of your favorite place. Pretend that you are rocking in a chair on your mother’s porch in Freeville.” But that was the last time I remember feeling truly connected to him. After that the rest of our marriage seemed like a long good-bye.

  Being a parent, it turns out, isn’t about deadlines. It’s about the space in between.

  In my own bed at the start of my new life, awakened by anxiety, I passed the time waiting to fall back asleep by worrying about bill paying and job hunting and the prospect of going on dates. I wondered if it was my peculiar fate to always be a part of a broken family and wondered how deeply it would wound my daughter not to have a father regularly in her life.

  Parents describe the world to their growing children. We are the ones who show and tell them what life is like. Babies scan their mother’s faces for signs of distress. They’ll cry when they see it.

  I decided that I wanted to be happy. I knew I would feel better if I found a way to make a life for us, and I knew that I would do it on my own.

  Parenting is not a process of control but of surrender. I learned this during the dreamy months of our first summer. My best efforts to build a model family had failed. I led a guy to fatherhood, but I couldn’t make him stay.

  We are not our best intentions. We are what we do. My husband taught me that.

  Now I had to build something out of what was left. Emily and I were two dots, connected by a thread. I decided that what ever strange shape or structure our family assumed—it would never feel broken.

  THREE

  Ex Marks the Spot

  Separating in a Time of Togetherness

  OUR NEW HOME in Washington was an apartment in a landmark 1930 art deco building made of pale yellow bricks, situated right next to the National Zoo. The building had once been the grand home of cabinet members and congressmen. Now it was faded, dated, and housed a substantial population of very elderly people, most of whom had lived there for decades. Like many in Washington, the residents of the Kennedy-Warren marked time by presidential administrations; when asked how long they had lived in the building, they would say, “I’ve been here since Truman,” or “We came here during Nixon/Ford.”

  Many afternoons after coming home from nursery school, Emily would pack her toy stroller with her favorite doll and we would stroll from our apartment to the lobby to get the mail. The spacious lobby was the main gathering place for our elderly neighbors, who would bring their canes and walkers and sit in overstuffed chairs lining the once elegant reception room. They would then spend the bulk of the afternoon yelling across the lobby at one another and harassing Charles, the uniformed doorman who worked the afternoon shift. Our neighbors liked to help Charles do his job. “Delivery!” they’d shout at the first sign of the UPS truck pulling into the circular driveway. “Thank you! I didn’t see that gigantic brown truck pull up!” Charles would shout back, then he’d push his cap back on his head, roll his eyes, and walk outside to greet the driver.

  Whenever Emily and I entered the lobby, she had to run the gauntlet created by these people, who would shout out greetings and questions as if she were at a White House press conference attended by the grandchild-deprived cast of Cocoon.

  “What’s your dolly’s name, Emily?”

  “Going to the zoo today?”

  “Let me see your pretty dress!”

  “Where’s your daddy, honey?”

  It amazed me how often people would ask my young daughter where her absent father was. Children coming to our home for playdates would check out our apartment with its girly furniture, notice immediately that it was devoid of a male presence and ask, “Where’s your daddy?” Their mothers were equally curious. On the playground they would point a retrieved sippy cup toward Emily. “Where’s her father?” they would stage-whisper.

  Where I might have been tempted to reply to children by filling in the story with wordy explanations about how sometimes mommies and daddies just grow apart and it’s no one’s fault, Emily would always deliver an elegantly simple answer:

  He’s in Moscow.

  I was astonished that this answer was enough. Even when kids didn’t know what “Moscow” was, they never inquired further. Emily didn’t know what Moscow was, either, though she had once been there—during a two-week springtime tour when she was a baby. Adults were less easily satisfied. “Does she see him?” they’d ask. I’d reply, “Oh yes. Now and then. Well, not that often. It’s a long way away, but she sees him a little.”

  Sometimes at night Emily and I would take her light-up globe off of the shelf and I would trace her finger from Washington, DC, across the Atlantic Ocean, skimming over Ireland, pausing at our former home in En gland, and zigzagging through Europe before finally hovering over Russia. “There it is. Moscow. That’s where your daddy is!”

  Ex marks the spot.

  In the second year of our daughter’s life and the last year of our marriage my husband, a television journalist, became Johnny Assignment. Johnny Assignment was the guy they called upon when there was work to be done in Afghanistan. He packed his bag for Islamabad, Brussels, and Prague. He spent Thanksgiving on assignment in Armenia and didn’t return home until mid-December. He had only been home for two hours from that particular trip when the office called. He was out enjoying his posttrip ritual—buying a newspaper and People magazine—and by the time he came back the company car and driver were waiting for him, idling on the street outside our London flat. He switched suitcases and was gone again. He returned at the end of January.

  Sometimes we joined him on the road. As democracy and capitalism swept across Eastern Europe, I found myself holding Emily on my lap on airplanes crowded with entrepreneurs who were rushing into Hungary or the Czech Republic with their briefcases stuffed with contracts and, I imagined, what ever currency was required to bribe local officials. (I carried a bag stuffed with Huggies.) I changed Emily’s diaper on the airport floor near the luggage carousel while waiting for our bags in Budapest. Later during that trip, she took her first steps. I took her to the puppet theater in Moscow, and she toddled through Red Square. But I wasn’t good at doing family life on the road. Feeding her while she sat strapped into her stroller instead of a high chair, putting her to bed in a portable crib in a hotel room while I watched CNN on mute and waited for him to come back—the limits and loneliness of it became too much. We stayed behind while he kept going.

&
nbsp; Occasionally I lost track of where in the world he was, so I took to imagining Johnny Assignment wearing a variety of traditional costumes and hats. When he would call at night, I’d close my eyes and envision him wearing lederhosen with kneesocks and clogs, a peasant blouse, and a green felt Robin Hood hat. I pictured him wearing a caftan, a dishdasha, a Nehru jacket, a fez, and a fedora. I saw him in one of those Soviet-style winter hats made of rabbit fur, like the one I remember seeing Leonid Brezhnev wearing on TV. When he came home from a trip with a photo of himself sporting one of those very same hats and standing next to a donkey in the high desert of Afghanistan, I realized that I had already conjured that exact picture—including the donkey. “Ha! But who’s that jackass with the donkey?” I asked him.

  When our marriage ended, he headed east toward Russia while we went west toward Freeville. Just before moving day, he told me that he had accepted a long-term assignment in Moscow. I couldn’t figure out why he was moving such a great distance when we were also changing continents, but I assumed that he chose Russia because the Moon, Mars, and A Galaxy Far Far Away were already booked. We would be, quite literally, on opposite ends of the Earth.

  In the two years since Emily and I had moved to Washington, our lives were starting to fill in. I was finding work during school hours as a freelance researcher, and friendship had begun to eddy into the deepest parts of my loneliness. I had also stopped crying. Only Emily’s baby pictures or the sight of an old couple holding hands on Connecticut Avenue could make me tear up.

  In two years of separation Emily had seen her father a handful of times. She knew who he was—we had some photos of him around the apartment and she saw him do reports on television from time to time—and I tried to talk about him freely, though not too frequently. I didn’t want to turn him into some sort of mythical daddy creature who Emily could think about but rarely see.