Momfriends (26 page)

“Oh, hi,” I said.

“Hey, I saw you from my window. I was looking at the moon, too. It’s pretty amazing tonight.” I glanced up. For as long as I had been outside, I hadn’t noticed the full moon.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “How are you? Is the baby down?”

“Yeah, finally. I thought it was going to be one of those full-moon wild-man nights. You ever have those?”

“What do you mean?” Did Ruth know? I barely knew her.

“You know, where people get crazy because of the full moon. Do you believe in that stuff?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t think the moon has any affect on us whatsoever,” I snapped. Realizing, I tried to soften the blow the only way I know how. “That’s only my opinion.”

“You’re entitled to it,” Ruth said, trying to keep it light. She looked up at the moon and sighed. “Is everything ok?”

“Yes,” I said. What could I even say about it? On one hand, things were better than ok, the thoughts of Keith were making me feel alive. But then of course, everything else was pressing on me. But before I could stop myself, I was talking to her, trying to make sense of it, looking at the moon.

“I mean, I don’t know, I sometimes can’t believe this is all there is. It’s only you.”

“Only me? What do you mean?”

“Not you. Me. It’s only me. There are no more grades; there are no more awards; there are no more scholarships. I’m all the reward or punishment there is. Everything I worked for so long, my whole life it seems. Now there isn’t anyone to say that I’m doing a good or bad job. There is no one to punish me or give me a gold star. It’s just me.”

“I don’t get it. What do you want a grade on?” Ruth asked.

“I don’t know. Living. I thought life was made up of these black-and-white rules you were supposed to follow and if you didn’t follow, well, wow, you know, I don’t even think I ever thought about what happened when you didn’t follow. Only that it was bad. But now I realize, sure, maybe something bad happens when you’re a kid or a teen, but now I can do whatever I want. The world doesn’t stop. It’s just me. The only consequences are from me. Can I deal with me? Can I accept who I am? Can I reconcile what I do?”

“Can you? Who are you? What did you do?” Ruth asked, trying to joke.

I shook my head and looked at her. This poor woman. She wanted a little fresh air a way from her kid.

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter what I did or what I do. There are no consequences. And the part that really kills me is how close I stuck to the rules because I believed that there were rules, even though I didn’t know what they were. I feel like calling my mother to find out if she knows this. I don’t think she does.”

“Well, maybe she doesn’t if she made you believe these things.”

“No, she doesn’t. You’re right. I don’t think she does. God, it’s all been such a stupid ride I’ve been on. Everything planned and scheduled and mapped. Everything happening the way it was supposed, to be normal, to achieve, to excel. Go, go, go.”

I didn’t say anything for a little while. I don’t think Ruth knew what to say. It’s not that I expected her to have all the answers. I knew that I didn’t, and I wished someone did.

“Well, maybe it’s good you recognize this now, so you can stop the pattern with, you know,” she hesitated. “Your own kids.”

This is what was supposed to happen when women became moms. Somehow everything was supposed to relate back to your kids. But it wasn’t the kids I was thinking about it. It was me. It all seemed like time I had wasted, and I guess because of that they had suffered for who I was.

“But what’s the point of any of it? Why bother?”

“I’m not really sure what you mean. If you’re asking what the point is of achieving I’m not really sure. I don’t know who you are trying to prove anything to at this point. I guess I wonder why anyone would set the bar so high if it didn’t make her happy. Not everything has to be just so, something can give.”

Is this how all the grasshoppers felt? It was astonishing, but I guess for them it also must have been kind of liberating.

“But, hey, what do I know?” she asked, trying to make things light again. “I was always only a C or B student.”

“Really? Wow,” I looked at her. We lived in virtually the same apartment. Sure, she rented and I owned, but she was also younger than me. Our situations on paper were probably not that different. Her grades, which my mother would have considered poor, hadn’t really changed things that much. She hadn’t set the bar as high, but our lives hadn’t shaken out that differently, except maybe she was happier. She probably hadn’t just had an affair. I shook my head. “I guess what I meant was what is the point of following the rules?”

“What rules?” Ruth asked, still confused.

But it was a good question. I don’t even know where I got the idea.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I am saying. Maybe I do need to believe in this full-moon-making-people-do-crazy-things.” It could certainly explain a lot, and I needed explanations. If I kept on this topic, I was going to wind up telling Ruth what I had done, and I wasn’t sure I could do that yet. We weren’t friends, were we? We were only moms who happened to live next door to each other. I needed to find a safe common ground. I brought it back to the kids.

“So, is he sleeping any better yet?” I asked, nodding over towards her building.

“The night we went out I got a record six hours.”

“Good work, Abe. What nice timing.”

“I know, but of course I woke up in a panic.” I nodded. “But going out was fun. I would love to do it again sometime.”

“Yeah, we should. We will.”

“Maybe we won’t plan it; maybe it will just happen.”

I looked at her, confused, and realized that she was trying to help me break free.

“Maybe. That would be nice,” I said.

She nodded.

“But most likely we are going to have to plan it. And if we plan to make it spontaneous, I guess it’s still a plan.”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess it’s nice to imagine that we wouldn’t have to.”

“Well, I should go in and get some sleep. Who knows what the guy is going to do tonight?”

“Good luck,” I said. She stood up and looked back down at me.

“Are you sure you’re ok?”

I nodded. If I spoke, I was going to tell her and I really didn’t think I could explain myself. “Ok, then, goodnight.”

“Good night.”

I sat on my stoop for a while. I was trying not to think about rules or consequences or Keith’s hands on my body. I was just trying to be.

Chapter 14

Kirsten Does Some Investigating and (Re)discovering

David’s niece, Amanda, was babysitting so that I could get some photo work done. I had taken on three clients and, of course, spent too much time selecting the pictures that I liked instead of color correcting the ones I knew I needed to upload for the parents.

But instead of doing the work that I had already been commissioned for, I found myself searching “cross-dressing children” on one of the mom websites that Claudia had mentioned. There were a lot of opinions online. There was a school of parental thought that you had to let your kid be who he wanted to be—let boys wear girls clothes and they would either grow out of it or if they were “gender variant” (a term I learned on my research), they would continue to express it and it was important to not stifle those urges. And there was a whole other set of people who really enjoyed judging this group. They would start by calmly insisting that it was up parents to lay down the law, and if the child’s feelings got hurt or his wants were ignored, tough! And then, when the parents of the gender variants exhibited what I believed was a level of compassion toward their children, these judgmental parents would go on the attack and slam their parenting skills and make assumptions about everything from their political beliefs to their intelligence to their sexuality.

I never really went online to find out about parenting before. I had been winging it this whole time. If I had a question I consulted the giant Dr. Sear’s book my midwife had given me as a gift. But now I found this whole community of moms who needed other anonymous moms to vent to, support, or belittle. This is what Claudia had been talking about. This was how you managed to feel judged. I didn’t want to be affected by the words of some of the posts in these threads but I was. Some of them were so damning to the poor kids. There were the insinuations that the kid would never be normal, beaten and embarrassed from preschool through college.

It was worse than any playground.

I always insisted that it was ok by me, even preferable, if my kids were outsiders, but these harsh words made me remember how much it hurt to be the weird one. I couldn’t have sweet Sage feel those things. All the looks Sage got striding around in his girl clothes and his rhinestone shoes were starting to bother me. He was starting preschool in the fall, and he had already claimed he was wearing a dress and tights to school on the first day.

And lately, whenever I got a chance to talk to David—the few times he was around—he was critical of what was happening with Sage. If he came home and found Julissa’s too-small rhinestone sandals by the door, he harangued me about what Sage had worn or wanted to wear that day. It was becoming our only conversation. This whole thing was uncovering differences in who we were as parents that I never expected.

So I started hiding the rhinestone sandals. I had never, ever lied to him about anything in our relationship. We always talked about how the worse thing a parent could do is instill a “don’t tell daddy” mentality in their kids. While I wasn’t going that far, I was certainly omitting.

But then of course, I noticed that, when he didn’t have evidence about Sage’s fashion, we didn’t really have much else to talk about. He kept working late and leaving early. And I was so tired half the time when he crawled into bed that I maybe mumbled a hello.

I couldn’t remember the last time we had sex. And I also couldn’t shake the look that Claudia and Ruth gave me when I told them about what was going on with David. I knew what they suspected. I played dumb, but I knew. I couldn’t believe this would happen with David. We were so close. We were partners and best friends.

I started to type something else in the search box, but I decided to check on the kids in the living room. Amanda was refereeing a game of Candy Land between Sage and Jules while bouncing a babbling Naomi on her knees. As soon as Naomi saw me she started to cry.

“What’s this? You were doing great,” Amanda told Naomi.

“She sees me, she thinks boob,” I said. I liked Amanda. She was only seventeen but already had a back and arm covered in tattoos that she had designed in spite of her mother, David’s older sister’s, protests. She walked the outsider line in David’s family the way we did. And one time she saw one of my art projects and declared it “cool”.

“God, having a baby really sucks, huh?” She looked at the kids. “Sorry, stinks.”

“Sometimes,” I said, bending to take Naomi from her. “Don’t do it until you’re ready.”

“That isn’t going to be a problem,” she said smiling up at me. I noticed that Sage had her shoulder bag in his lap.

“You let him have that,” I said.

“Yeah, he really wanted it,” she said. “I’m letting them take turns holding it. Is that ok? There’s no contraband in there. Don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t worried,” I said. At least not about that. “If you have these guys under control, I’ll take her and keep working.”

“No problem. What time is Uncle David coming home?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I waited to see if she had any ideas about what was going on with David, but she went back to the game. I backed out of the room before the competition got heated.

“Hi, little lady,” I said to Naomi. She stretched her back and bounced a little. She was still so small and snuggly. Maybe because of her birth order she was the most agreeable or maybe I was simply too exhausted all the time to notice her demands. I started to nurse her and looked at the blinking cursor in the search box. It was mocking me, inviting me.

I sighed and then typed “cheating” in. What I got were what seemed like hundreds of threads from women whose husbands were cheating. Some didn’t know; some discovered them; some still had no proof. In a bizarre combo of the issues that were on my mind, one woman found her husband in bed with another man while he was dressed as a woman. Some divorced and some stayed. Almost everyone was bitter. It was so sad. I kept trying to find some major difference between these women and me. They were married—that was the main one—and in this case, marriage made them seem a little more secure.

But of course, because it was online and because it was anonymous, there were people who judged these women too. There were other people, women I guessed who called them stupid for not knowing and dumb for being so dependent on a man. It was easy to judge someone you couldn’t see. But a lot of these threads got heated, with women going back and forth about how it could happen to anyone. They blamed the victims for everything, from not keeping themselves up to not providing sex X number of times a week to not grooming their toenails. It was amazing!

One poster gave a checklist of all the ways to know your husband is cheating. Is he working late more? Are you not having sex? Do you no longer feel connected? I took a deep breath. All of these things were us. Has he changed the way he dresses or does he care more about his appearance? Ok, no, that wasn’t it. He was as grubby as ever working in a bread factory. Phew! We dodged that bullet. I must be safe. But then I thought about his beard.

My phone rang. It was him. It was as though he knew I was uncovering his secret. I glanced at the clock. It was a quarter of seven. He should have been home an hour ago. The kids were going to start going down to bed soon.

“Hey, babe,” he said. He sounded like he was in good spirits. Was he with her right now? Is that why he was so happy to be calling the old ball and chain? “How’s it going?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Is Amanda there?”

“Yeah.”

“Well that must be a help, huh?” It would have been nice if he were the help. I decided to cut to the chase.