I could embrace it or fight it.
• • •
Of course, no one can get through this whole widow mess without some moments of extreme self-doubt. Daily. Hourly. And most of my moments of self-doubt are usually centered around my kids. ’Cause let’s face it, I could default on my mortgage and have bad credit. But if I default on child-rearing, that’s pretty hard to recover from.
Single parenting is not for the faint of heart. And although you’ll hear many people say that there are a lot of “single parents” out there, there aren’t. There are a lot of divorced parents out there, but there is a big difference. And let me assure you, I truly don’t think that one is worse than the other.
That’s like trying to compare whether it’s more painful to have a boil on your rear end or the bottom of your foot. I can understand how painful it must be for divorced parents to send their kids off for a weekend with someone they dislike so much they can barely swallow the fact that that person has partial custody of their Tupperware, much less their kids.
But for the widowed single parent, the most single a “single parent” can get, it’s pretty damn hard to do it all at once and all alone.
This didn’t take me long to figure out. I was in the mode of trying to prove to myself and the kids that we could do this. That I could take on single parenting and that Widowed Parents Magazine would eventually feature me on their inaugural cover, after all three kids had been accepted into Harvard on full scholarships, majoring in physics, with a minor in world peace.
And in my quest to become Single Mom of the Year, I think I went a little too far trying to prove that I could do this…and ended up doing things that I wouldn’t have done even if Brad had been here to complain to after they became epic failures.
A few months after Brad died, when the kids were six, four, and two, I was having my usual midmorning conversation with my mother and telling her our plans for the day.
“I’m going to take the kids out to lunch and a movie,” I said.
“Are you sure you have this covered?” she asked me doubtfully over the phone. “That sounds like a lot to handle all on your own.”
“Of course!” I said confidently. “If I have any problems, I’ll just pack them all up and go home. It’s no big deal. We have to get out there at some point, right?”
“Still…” she said. “Why don’t I just meet you for the movie? I don’t have anything going on today anyway.”
“Okay. Whatever you want to do,” I replied, slightly annoyed at her for doubting my parenting skills.
Doubts that were, as it turns out, completely well-founded.
We met my mom at the front of the theater, and after we’d bought our tickets, we all went up to the concession counter.
“Now, we just had lunch at Red Robin,” I told the kids. “So let’s just get one package of licorice to split. You guys have already had plenty of junk for today.”
The girls nodded in agreement. But three-year-old Michael, who must have had a near-death experience with licorice in a former life, decided that this was completely unacceptable.
“I don’t want licorice!” he screamed at me in front of the concession counter. “I hate licorice! I want M&M’s!”
Now, I’d had my issues with Michael as a toddler. His constant unexplainable meltdowns were the reason we left many a restaurant with Styrofoam containers and red faces (until it got the point where I told Brad, “I’m not taking that kid out in public anymore. It’s just not worth the money, and we might get sued the next time he beans someone in the back of the head with his pacifier”).
But Michael’s maniacal tendencies as a toddler had given way to the mellowest little boy you’d ever want to meet. Sweet-natured and quiet, he could sit contently with a stack of blocks for hours and you wouldn’t hear a peep from him. Until all of that “mellow” would build up for a few weeks and he’d get mad about something completely out of the blue.
And then there was no turning back.
When my son would get pissed, he was pissed. And he wasn’t like most kids who forget what they’re mad about after a while and then go back out and play. He could scream his head off for half an hour, and when you asked him why, he could tell you every detail of how he was wronged.
That takes some focus and fierce determination in the grudge department, my friend.
“You take the girls into the theater,” I said to my mom over Michael’s wails. “I’m taking him for a time-out in the car, and when he calms down, we’ll meet you in there.”
She nodded and trotted off in the direction of the movie with the girls, picking up a booster seat for Sarah on her way into the theater. And I put myself into Super Mommy mode, picking up my kicking son and marching purposefully out the doors of the theater as all of the teenage employees watched in quiet horror.
I’m pretty sure they all took a vow of celibacy that day.
I stuck him in the car, shut the door, and stood outside with my back to him, determined not to give his bad behavior the audience it was looking for. As I leaned against my shaking, screaming minivan, I smiled and waved at the mystified people who were passing by. I truly thought that this would only go on for a few minutes and then I would open the door, have a nice, calm talk with him, and he would immediately realize that this was no way for a future general to behave. We would then share a hug, hold hands, and skip into the theater.
Imagine my surprise when I popped open the sliding door to the minivan, only to find out that in his licorice-hating frenzy, he’d stripped off all of his clothes. Except his socks.
So there I was, in the parking lot of the theater with my screaming, naked four-year-old, looking around wildly, expecting to see video cameras on every street lamp recording this lapse in my parenting. I was absolutely terrified that we would end up on some homemade YouTube video that resembled an after-school special on how not to parent your four-year-old.
I called my mom from my cell phone in the car as I headed home with a red-eyed, glaring Michael and said the words that no daughter ever wants to say to her mom.
“You were right.”
What was I thinking? I can’t do this on my own! If I can’t even get my kid through an animated movie, how in the hell am I going to get him through his teenage years?
I put him in his room where he could continue his fit in comfort, and where I felt like I could safely walk away. I went downstairs and sat on the back porch to breathe in some fresh air and just…take a moment. And when I sat down on my patio chair, I realized something about Michael and his tantrums that I’d never thought of before.
I was jealous.
I could hear the sounds of an emotional train barreling through his room. And instead of wanting to run away from it, I stared up at his window in wonder and muttered, “Damn. That’s a good one.”
He was mad, and he didn’t care who heard it. I could almost feel the head rush he must have had as he yelled with all of his might. And I thought, “How lucky is he that he can go up to his room, completely let loose, and kick the shit out of anything that isn’t moving out of his way?”
I started daydreaming about doing it myself. Going into my room and screaming and crying until my head started pounding and I collapsed on my bed, completely spent. Slamming the door a million times if I felt like it. Swiping the contents of my desk into a heaping pile of junk on the floor and then stomping on it with all of my might. Who cares if the windows are open? Who cares if the whole neighborhood hears? Who cares if it makes someone feel uncomfortable?
Who the hell cares?
Many people talk about how resilient children are. And I think that’s true. But that could be because we give them the emotional freedom to feel however they need to. The way they express their emotions when they’re young is completely unshaped by the expectations of others and is, therefore, completely honest. But eventually, tho
se tantrums at the store are met with a time-out. Crying, kicking, and screaming result in privileges taken away. Getting so mad they just want to hit something (or someone) is completely unacceptable.
By the time our kids are teenagers, they’ve already started to understand that having a nervous breakdown in public is “just not cool.” And then if they experience a loss, we try and try to get them to express themselves when all the years before that, we basically said, “That’s not okay.” We’ve confused them by telling them all their lives that they need to keep their emotions in check, and then suddenly we start telling them that it’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to cry. It’s okay to break down. When we’ve been telling them for years that it’s not.
Once we hit adulthood, society’s tolerance for emotional outbursts is nonexistent. I mean, how many times have you screamed and cried in the middle of the grocery store? I’m guessing zero. And how many times have you wanted to? Probably too many to count.
I thought about that Volcano Room at the first group counseling I brought Haley and Michael to, where the kids could throw, punch, kick, and pummel anything they could get their hands on.
And where were the adults? In “discussion” rooms calmly talking about various topics related to grieving. What happens to our tantrums? What happens to our anger, our rage, our overwhelming grief about our situation?
It gets replaced with a smile, a nod, and an “I’m fine. How are you?”
And, not that the kids don’t need an outlet to express themselves, but who do you think is really in need of a Volcano Room?
You can’t see me right now, but I’m raising my hand.
I wanted to walk into a padded room and throw the grocery list, the bills, the back-to-school forms, the insurance paperwork, just chuck ’em at a wall over and over until the paper was crumpled and soft. I wanted to scream until my throat was raw. I wanted to kick at those padded walls until my legs were sore. I wanted to pull an Office Space and take a baseball bat to every appliance in my house that had the nerve not to work properly.
And sometimes I want to take my emotions out on an innocent teddy bear.
• • •
It’s kind of funny to me now that that day at the movie theater was really the first time I started worrying about raising the kids alone. I didn’t worry about it right after Brad died…I guess it was just too much to think about all at once. If I can be completely honest, one of the first things I thought was, “Who’s going to stay up all night with the kids when they’re throwing up now?”
I don’t know why, but it was an unspoken rule that if one of the kids had a stomach bug, Brad would spend the night sleeping next to their bed. I never asked him to do it; he just took over. I got the colds, fevers, scraped knees, and bumped heads. He got splinters the size of small tree branches and the bucket next to the bed. This should give you an idea of what a stand-up guy he was. Or it’s possible he remembered our college days when I had a weak stomach and the sight of someone paying the price after too much tequila sent me into sympathy vomiting and he thought he’d just be better off taking care of one little kid and not throwing me into the mix.
So, when he died one of my first thoughts was, “Oh crap. I have vomit duty for the rest of my life. I’m really going to miss that guy.”
I think that’s the brain’s way of coping. You can’t immediately think of getting all three kids through school without major incident, off to college, married, and having grandchildren he’ll never see. You’d go nuts if you really thought about all of that in the beginning. You’re better off pondering something stupid like, “Who’s going to settle the kids’ argument about Dairy Queen vs. Baskin-Robbins now?”
I also didn’t realize at the beginning how hard it was to lose that person in your life who you could point to at any given moment and say “That’s your child” when one of the kids does something bad. Because now it’s all on me. I’ll never forget sitting in the car with Sarah when she was about two-and-a-half years old and I quietly heard her say from her little car seat in the back…
“You’re a butt.”
Then, “You’re a butt crack.”
And finally, “You’re a butt-crack sandwich.”
To this day I can’t remember what I did to incur her wrath, but it must have been a doozy. I mentally flipped back and forth between putting her in time-out and praising her for her creativity. And I missed having someone I could point to and say, “You taught her that, didn’t you? You called someone a butt-crack sandwich during Monday Night Football and she picked it up! What were you thinking?”
Because if she didn’t pick it up from him, that left me as the next logical culprit.
No one likes to have their parenting skills questioned, but when you’re widowed, people seem to think it’s their right—no, their duty—to point out what you’re doing wrong. It’s rather nerve-racking knowing that your kids and you are being scrutinized so thoroughly. Every time I accidentally sent one of my kids to school with their pants on backwards I thought I might as well be walking around with a sign taped to my back that said, “I just lost my husband, and studies show that childhood wardrobe malfunctions are a side effect.”
Because I was worried about the long-term effects of Brad’s death on my kids, too. I didn’t need the public at large to point out that this could have a major impact on the rest of their lives.
I’ll never forget the night I was watching a 20/20 special on some murders that had happened in Texas. The murderer turned out to be a teenage girl who, the show’s host made sure to point out, had lost her father when she was a young child. This threw me into a panic because surely a two-year-old who calls her mother a “butt-crack sandwich” could have the makings of a teenage homicidal maniac.
As if worrying about the fact that I didn’t have dental insurance wasn’t enough, I suddenly felt like I needed to start checking my preschooler for concealed weapons.
And where was my backup? Gone. Even though Brad was physically out of town a lot of the time when he was alive, I knew that he had my back. That if I called him to complain about how Michael had made gigantic spit wads out of toilet paper and water from the commode and covered the powder room with them, he would commiserate with me from 1,500 miles away and read his son the riot act over the phone. That if one of the kids came down with some virus the doctors couldn’t explain, he would be on the first plane home. And that if, for some reason, I had someone question my parenting skills in public, he would be the first to say, “What a bitch.”
Which brings me to what I now refer to as “the Costco Incident.”
I had taken Haley and Sarah to Costco one afternoon right before Christmas, killing time before we had to pick Michael up from preschool. In hindsight, I will say that this was not one of the smartest moves I’d ever made. Let’s face it: I was nuts with grief, I had one of the most depressing holidays looming before me, and I found myself fighting a crowd that was buying large quantities of soup and zip ties. I’d had no sleep and was exhausted from trying to keep everything normal so that my family felt like everything was okay…when what I really wanted to do was stick my head in a punch bowl of eggnog and quietly end my misery.
That year, my Christmas “joy” was compounded by the fact that I was in a stabilizing boot up to my knee from pulling my Achilles tendon a few weeks earlier. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to use one of those things, but the most annoying thing about them is that it’s hard to find another pair of shoes that are the same height. Otherwise, you walk sideways like you’re in an ongoing V8 commercial.
This was not helping my Christmas spirit.
After a few minutes of shopping, two-year-old Sarah decided to take off running in the freezer section of the store. And I hobbled behind her as fast as my crippled ass could go and managed to grab her by the hood of her coat (before she could get away and accidentally purchase a gross of oranges and a se
t of new tires). And then I picked her up and strapped her in the seat of the grocery cart.
I know. Lock me up, right?
As I walked through the store, Sarah started screaming at the top of her lungs, “I wanna walk! I wanna walk! Let me out!”
I tried everything I could think of to get her to stop…other than taking her out of the cart, which I believe would have sent the message, “The louder you yell, the quicker you’ll get your way. Congratulations!”
I asked her politely to stop.
I ignored her and kept walking through the store.
I tried explaining to her why this was happening.
All the while, Haley was walking next to me, looking worriedly at my face, which I’m sure had turned bright purple by then.
Now, as a parent, you know that when one of your kids behaves that way in public…well…it’s a little unnerving. You know that everyone is staring at you, and you’re hoping that most people are thinking, “Wow. That woman is really sticking to her guns. That’s a great mom. I bet by learning this valuable lesson so early in life, that child will grow up to be the leader of the free world.”
In reality they’re thinking, “Let her go first in line and get her the hell out of here as quickly as possible.”
I finally made my way up to the checkout area, and I was waiting as calmly as possible while Sarah, never the quitter, kept screaming and screaming. Suddenly this woman walked up to me and quietly said, “Do you realize you’re abusing your daughter?”
At this point I was so flustered that all I could think was, “Did I hit her or something and I don’t even remember? Has it come to this? That I’ve taken out my grief on my child in the middle of a warehouse store?” Completely rattled, I turned to the woman and gave her the most sophisticated response I could come up with.
“Uh…what?”
The woman looked at me and said, “Why don’t you just let her walk? I am a mother of four, and I can tell you this is unacceptable.”
Confessions of a Mediocre Widow Page 19