No politics today ...
A Mother’s Love (Just one day without crying)
by Barry Friedman
The mother sat with the principal and the teacher.
“He hates it here.”
“We know.”
They were talking about the mother’s son, the son whose father, her ex-husband, died on the Wednesday over Winter Break, the day before New Year’s. On the following Monday, the son went back to school. Routine seemed like a good idea. Routine was a good idea. The misbehavior, if you want to call it that--and you probably shouldn’t--would manifest itself in the mornings in the school oval, when he refused to leave the car. He was having a panic attack, and 8-year-olds shouldn’t have panic attacks. Eight-year-olds flop, hyperventilate, succumb to the cacophony. The mother, her own anxiety, she would say, was through the roof, would sit, scared, frozen. She would not, could not send him to school on those days, so she’d take off from work, bring him home. He’d pick up his DS or iPad, take his position on the sofa--lying on his head with his feet on the window--and if you didn't know, you wouldn’t know this 8-year-old had a dead father. You’d hear him laugh and mock figures inside the game who refused to jump or defend when he told them to.
It seemed … normal.
The boy called his class evil.
“Mommy, they say ‘tick tock, tick tock,’ when I’m around.”
“Why?” she’d ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you erase the board when the teacher’s back is turned?”
“I don’t know.”
There were more panic attacks, followed by more calm. More missed days of school, more missed days of work.
There were--and are--child psychiatrists and therapists. They help, they don’t help.
The mother, who never really wanted to be one, never thought she was equipped to be one, was now a single mother, a single mother of an 8-year-old, a single mother of an 8-year-old who would hit himself in the head with an open palm during math, a single mother of an 8-year-old on Fluoxetine.
And yet was also a single mother, a saleswoman, who went to grand openings of businesses and brought the big scissors for the ribbon cutting ceremonies and tried to smile.
This is not a woman trying to balance life and work. This is not a woman who wants it all. This is a woman who doesn't want any of it. This is a woman who wants to go one day without crying.
But this is a woman who loves her son--that she knows, even though she knows it won't be enough.
The principal cried, the teacher cried, the mother cried. There would be a party to say goodbye to the boy. He wasn’t being thrown out, but he was out.
The mother did not feel heroic when she quit her job; she did not feel noble when she decided to homeschool; she did not sleep through the night.
She gets up in the morning, this woman now unemployed and living, along with the son she calls The Great, on $1450 per month in social security survivor’s benefits, and calls for him to come downstairs.
She tells him to get ready for school … even if that school is presently covered in unopened mail and unfolded laundry.
Her love doesn’t have to conquer all. It just has to get her to the dining room table.