Momfriends

by Ariella Papa

  My logic worked amazingly well, but somehow we were still twenty minutes late to preschool and not without another fight in the car, with Julissa telling Sage that he wasn’t a girl. He insisted he was a girl. It was the first time I had actually heard him say those words. I felt a knot rise up in my throat. I wanted to call David immediately, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to deal with how he was going to take it.

  But I didn’t have a chance to figure out what to do about it. Julissa, ever the stickler, argued that he was a boy, the only boy in fact in the car. This made him cry.

  “Isn’t he, Mama? Tell him. Isn’t he a boy?” I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Sage’s crumbling face. He could have been overwrought from the argument or anything, but I felt as if answering at that moment the answer that was true would have been devastating for him.

  “Julissa, honestly,” I yelled turning around in my seat. I rarely raised my voice to my children; it was another thing David and I tried not to do. Of course it made her cry and then just for the fuck of it, Naomi decided to join in again.

  So after finally finding a parking spot and wrangling everyone out of the car and into the preschool and accepting the looks of sympathy and support from my fellow parents and teachers, it was a back in the car and off to the BBG for a little revitalizing oxygen from the trees.

  “Maybe we can take the skirt off before we go to the park, Sage, honey,” I suggested when we found yet another hard to find parking spot.

  “No, I wanna wear skirt. I love skirt,” he said defiantly. “And this gardens, not park. You made a mistake.”

  “You’re right, sweetheart,” I said. It might have been easier to drive straight home, but I had my favorite telephoto lens and my camera and I was really feeling a need to be in nature and capturing some candid moments of my kids and maybe a stray bird or two. I only wanted to find some quiet and create.

  It was almost the end of June. The roses were out. There were a lot of things in bloom. The gardens were full of life. I had Naomi snuggled into her carrier and Sage was running around. Unlike the park, there were no bikers and only the occasional maintenance truck. I began to snap some pictures of him and paused to take a couple of the surroundings. I couldn’t focus the way I wanted because I was aware that everyone we passed was noticing his skirt and looked at him and then at me as if we were freaks. When I walked past people, I heard whispering. This was Brooklyn, not Middle America. What was the big deal?

  I wanted to not notice anyone else, but I couldn’t help it. The looks inhibited me from photographing him. Maybe I shouldn’t record this. And there I was inhibiting my art and myself before I even got started.

  These pictures I was taking were frauds. I wasn’t feeling it. In spite of the beautiful day, I was too wound up to capture it. I couldn’t let go. Lately, I kept thinking of myself as a ball of yarn that needed to unreel. But I couldn’t. What had happened to all my creativity? Maybe I didn’t deserve to keep my studio. I was uninspired. I was worried. If I couldn’t create, my mental health was in danger,

  “Do you want a snack, Sage?” I spread the blanket I had in my bag out on the grass. I set my camera down. Sage came running over. I wanted to keep him close so no one else would look at him.

  “Thank you, Mama,” he said, taking the pack of raisins from me. But before he opened the pack he threw his arms around me in an unsolicited hug. It was a long time since I got one of those. It was the best. As my children got older, they needed me less. They clung to me less as they started to negotiate their own identities. It was necessary part of growing up and I expected it. But it was bittersweet. I held on for as long as he let me.

  When he pulled away, I felt guilty for judging him. He had a right to be who he was. What a perfect little person he was as he danced around us. He was singing “Five Little Ducks” off key and unself-consciously. I rubbed Naomi’s back as she did tummy time, kicking her legs up and down, preparing to crawl soon. She would be her own person soon, too. And what would I have left? Probably not David.

  Breathe in, breathe out, I told myself. What worked in childbirth was not working to quiet my mind.

  This uneasy feeling had all started a few days earlier when I showed up to David’s parents house and almost walked past him in the hallway. He was clean shaven, having removed the beard that morning when he was forgetting that he said he was going to pick me up at Brookese.

  “Hey,” he said smiling as I walked by. I did a double take and I felt the entire room holding their breath, waiting to see my reactions. It was some sort of test for me, with everyone waiting to laugh at my shock and expense.

  “You shaved your face,” I said.

  “Yeah, what do you think?” he asked. And I looked him in the eye, knowing that he had to know what I thought. He knew me that well, didn’t he? He had to remember a night when we were first together in his dorm room. I remembered. I remembered collapsing next to him, trying like hell to catch my breath and feeling so crazy and naked that I covered my face with the pillow. But he pulled it away, looking at me, looking in my face, looking at my body, and seeing me as no one ever had, seeing the me I had always been so scared to show anyone.

  In those first early-morning moments, I reached and touched him, letting my hands wander on his body, letting him pull me back to him for more, but before I went with it, I grabbed his face, held on tight to his beard.

  “Never shave this. I love it,” I whispered. “You can shave it if you want to be rid of me.”

  “I guess I’m keeping it,” he said and pulled me down for a kiss.

  I took this as a promise.

  And then there he was in his parents’ house asking me what I thought. He was in on a joke with everyone else but me. There was a smile in the question. He didn’t remember. How could he forget?

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “It’s different,” I said, scooping Naomi out of his arms. “Where are the other kids?”

  I didn’t wait for him to answer. I moved on to find them, to avoid David. I found Julissa and her cousin Nora dressing Sage up as a girl baby. He loved the attention from these two older girls. And though I didn’t want to be one of those helicopter moms, I tried to hang out with them and redirect them so that Sage was dressed up as the farmer, albeit one with a feather boa.

  But that didn’t stop David’s father from saying to any one who walked by him, “Well, that’s quite an outfit they got Sage in this time.” As if any of it was what I wanted.

  And later when I heard David’s nephew Austin asking his mother what Aunt Kirsten thought of Uncle David’s surprise, I tried not to wince. I was getting through the day, paying my dues.

  In the car home, belly stuffed full of the carbs, I didn’t say much. I could barely look at David and his giant face. He was so face-y and, yes, he had a beautiful face, but I loved the beard. He kept scratching his face and worst of all, he wanted me to reminisce about my lost friend.

  “It’s so strange not to have those whiskers. I keep feeling like I’m missing something.” He looked over at me, but I didn’t say anything. “So you’re not that into it, huh?”

  “I was a fan of the beard, you know that,” I said, looking out the window.

  “But everyone needs a change once in a while.”

  He might as well have punched me in the stomach. He didn’t remember anything or he didn’t care. I looked at him, his newly smooth profile.

  “I guess so. It might have been nice not have the big reveal at your parents’, you know.”

  “This way I knew you wouldn’t kill me,” he said, glancing my way with a wry smile.

  I thought about my ride a few hours before with Claudia and the combination of surprise and pity that crossed her face when I told her that David and I weren’t married. Part of the whole reason that we hadn’t done it is because we thought it was too easy for people to fall into stupid gender roles. Just like that, you could find yourself the old ball and chain.

  But it wasn’t marriag
e that made you that way. Marriage really was only a piece of paper. What made you the old ball and chain or any of those other lame expressions was familiarity. It was taking someone else for granted. It was what was happening between David and me right now, no matter how much I thought I preemptively stopped it by not making our connection legal.

  Things would be so easy if I get to the place I suspected he was at. When he looked at me, I don’t think he felt the things I did. He had lost the passion. He used to have this way of looking at me, smiling down at me with his eyes and his mouth. In that gaze, I felt pretty and funny and perfect. But I didn’t get that anymore. How could he have forgotten us?

  When I saw him, without even meaning to, I immediately flashed to moments with him, touching him, my hands in beard, in his hair on his body. Sweating, loving, rolling. When I saw him I wanted him. And if wanting him was all, maybe I could have detached. But I loved him: I had a life with him. He was the father of my children. He was the keeper of all my secrets. That was the most fucked-up part. I had confided in Claudia, someone I barely knew, barely liked, about him. It was all so wrong.

  Now I so desperately wanted to be able to take this day at the Gardens for me to create, to be what I had always defined myself as, an artist. It had been long time since my camera was an appendage. It used to be with me everywhere. In my teens nothing happened to me that I didn’t document. Now my camera was the tool of my profession, a practical instrument to support myself. It had lost its passion, too.

  The garden smelled so good. On any other day, I would have been moved to create, to capture this world. Or if I couldn’t do that than I should have been able to live in this moment, enjoy my children, all of this life, but all I could do was sit on this blanket, watching Sage, fighting back tears for a past that only I was living in.

  I put my camera away. I resigned myself to the idea that I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to make any art today. I packed up my blanket and Naomi and decided to leave.

  There was a group of moms sitting on another blanket with iced coffee cups. Their kids, a little older than Sage, ran around them, making up games and rolling in the grass.

  “Can I play with them, Mama?” Sage asked me.

  “If they want to play, honey, of course you can,” I said. I decided to approach the moms with my usual spiel about my photography. If I wasn’t going to be creating art, I was going to have to sell it. That was the tradeoff I hoped would someday motivate me.

  I put on a little lip gloss. It was my armor. As I walked over toward them, Sage ran off to the group of kids. I told the moms a little about what I did and handed them my cards. They took my cards and half-listened to me. They didn’t owe me anything, but they certainly made me feel unwanted.

  “We’ll call you if we’re interested,” one of the moms said, dismissively.

  “I actually take really good photos,” said another, smiling at the others, pleased with herself.

  The third looked back down at her magazine and didn’t say anything. I had seen that look on subway passengers ignoring homeless panhandlers.

  “Well, thanks for your time. I hope to see you again,” I said. Ugh. I hated selling myself, especially to such an uninterested audience. I knew I was a good photographer; now it seemed I couldn’t even interest people in that. “Take care.”

  As I walked over to collect Sage, I noticed he wasn’t playing. He was standing in the middle of the group of kids. His lower lip was quivering.

  “You can’t play with us,” one of the little brats was saying. He seemed as though he would grow up to be a classic movie villain unless some frustrated mother didn’t ring his neck first. I bet he was the son of the magazine reader.

  “Let’s go, Sage,” I said. “We’ll stop at home before we pick up Jules.”

  “It that a boy or a girl?” one of the other ones asked. These kids were no more than six and I wanted to punch them. Instead I picked Sage up, balancing him on my hip with Naomi in the front carrier.

  Sage kept it together as I marched us down the path to the exit. His lip kept quivering and I struggled to balance him, Naomi and my bag of blankets and camera equipment. I kept kissing his face and whispering little things to him that I thought would make him laugh.

  As soon as I got him out of the gates, he let out such a sad howl. I’m not even sure that he knew what had happened, but my perfect little buddy was overwhelmed. I hugged him so hard, so he wouldn’t see that his mama had tears in her eyes too. It hurt my chest.

  He was no longer crying when I buckled him into the car seat, but his lip was still quivering. I kept checking in the rearview mirror when I got into the car and started the engine. My chest still felt heavy and tight. I couldn’t bring myself to drive away.

  I wished that I had someone to talk to about this. It should have been David, but I knew that if I called him, somehow he would make me feel like I was at fault.

  I thought of running back there and screaming at those mothers for bringing up such awful children that would make my little boy feel so bad. And then I remembered how they looked at me as I pandered my trade to them. Instead of making art, that is what I had focused on today, trying to snare unwilling clients and leaving my son in the company wolves.

  And then the words flashed though my mind the way they used to so many times when I walked the halls in high school, pulling me down into doubt and despair, but now not just me.

  You are a loser and so is your son.

  I didn’t want him to be the outcast I was. David was right; it was never easy. Being that outcast hadn’t made me a successful artist. It hadn’t made me much of anything. These feelings weren’t good. I recognized them; I didn’t want them. They could lead me down a dark path.

  I was scared to pull out of the parking spot. I couldn’t make my hands move the gear shift. I felt my forehead and my underarms start to sweat. My heart was beating fast.

  No, I was not going to let myself have a panic attack in front of my children. It had been eleven years since I had one. I. WAS. NOT. GOING. TO.

  Seventeen deep breaths later, I pulled out of the parking spot. I was driving cautiously but driving.

  “Bye-bye trees,” Sage shouted and I felt a lump in my throat. He wasn’t a loser. Those little Neanderthals hadn’t scarred him. Children are resilient, at least for a little while.

  Sometimes, maybe I needed perspective. Maybe I needed someone to talk to who was over five and not David. All of my old friends were no longer living in New York. There were moms at Julissa’s preschool, but I didn’t think I could confide in them and it wasn’t very professional of me to talk to my clients about it, not that I usually saw any of them more than once.

  I thought about Ruth. I hadn’t seen her since I brought over the potpie a couple of weeks ago. I got a thank-you card from her that said she had a great time in spite of my car trouble. It might be nice to stop by for a visit. I kept dropping in on her, but seeing her made me feel useful. There were no strings. If anything, it was a place to unreel. And besides, once again I only had an hour or so until I had to pick up Julissa.

  I got the same spot I had the last time, right in front. I was going to hold on to my keys the entire time.

  “Hey,” she said when she opened the door. She was dressed and showered. She even had lip gloss on. She hugged me, and I immediately was glad I came. “Hi, Sage

  “Hi,” Sage said and waved.

  “Sorry to pop over again,” I said. “But I was sort of in the neighborhood and I wanted to check in on you and the little man.”

  “Well, we are doing ok today. Come on in.” Her apartment looked bigger or maybe because it was cleaned up. Abe was in his swing in front of a colorful video.

  “It looks nice in here. You look nice, too.

  “Thanks,” she said. She rolled her eyes. “My mother-in-law was here yesterday, and I always feel I need to tidy up for her. This was the first week I actually got to it.”

  “How are things going?” I asked. Sage h
ad already crouched in front of Abe and was making him smile. Naomi started to fuss and I immediately put her on the boob.

  “Things are better, I guess. He still has these crazy crying spells. My boobs aren’t even enough. I think I am going to have to supplement. He still spends hours a day on me.”

  “Well, that is going to change soon, you know.”

  “I know all to well. I’ve started researching nannies. I have lined up all these interviews.”

  “Oh, are you going back to work?”

  “Yeah, my maternity leave is up in thirty-four days. I am so not ready,” she sighed. “You want a drink.”

  “You know, I have to get Jules in about an hour,” I said. “But maybe something small.

  “A glass of white wine.”

  She went into the kitchen to get the wine, but not before the furtive new-mom glance and adjustment of Abe. Sage looked up at the video Abe was watching and was hypnotized. He never really watched TV, except at his cousins’ house. I felt myself cringe a little. The remote was right next to me on the couch, and I decided to shut off the TV. I held my breath and hoped Abe wouldn’t be too upset. But it was Sage who stomped his feet in protest.

  “I wanna watch dat!”

  “Love, why don’t we try interacting instead of watching something passively. Look at Abe. He wants you to make him laugh like you were. You can do better than a stinky TV.”

  But Sage began to cry. This day would not get any better. Ruth came back in with two glasses of wine and handed one to me.

  “What’s the matter, buddy,” she asked Sage, sweetly. She looked at me, confused. “Did the TV go out?”

  “No, uh, I shut it. Sage doesn’t really watch TV.”

  “But I want to,” Sage screamed. I couldn’t stick to my ideals today, not if it meant dealing with a tantrum. Ruth looked up at me, waiting. If Sage cried than Abe was probably going to follow suit.

  “I’ll put it back on,” I said, softly. I looked at her and shrugged. “Choose your battles, right.”