Single Mothers Need A Little Vacation

The Story of the Single Mom Who is Still Holding On, off the top of her head because it is simply cathartic:

At some point you get so numb that you don’t know what you’re doing anymore.  You find no more energy than it takes to play 2-Suit Spider Solitaire, 4-Suits not even remotely within your mental ability these days.  Concentration is impossible.  The mind wanders forlornly off toward the edge of the abyss which contains at its depths the souls of single-moms who couldn’t make it and lost their children to the system.  They failed. 

Failure is only a fraction of an inch away now.  You look over the edge and linger there, floating against the invisible curtain that keeps you from falling.  “Is it God?”  you wonder, “who keeps me from going over? Because it can’t be myself.  I have no strength left.  No will.  No hope.”  Beaten down, beaten down.  Battle after battle, one does not end before the next begins.  $110,000 to date in legal fees (on credit cards) just to keep your children.  The scornful looks from the attorneys, even your own.  The cheating and manipulating that goes on behind the scenes – there is absolutely no justice system.  The one with the most money wins.   He rapes your child, Child Protective Services interviews you.  “If it happens again, we’ll recommend foster care.”  He walks away laughing – psychotic resonance.   I cry for my child. 

The constant static in the ears, fog before the eyes, tingle under the scull bone, hunger below the stomach, nausea, dread.  Yes, it is dread.  What will tomorrow bring?  Will I awake from this nightmare?  When I do awake, will I still be alive?  Or will I awake in the arms of The Father, leaving my children back on earth with this monster.  No!  I must live…for them.  Just live for them.

I ask myself, “Why do you sit at the computer and play, when there is so much more to be done?  When you need to feed your children?  When you need to feed yourself?  When you haven’t bathed in over a week, nor have you bathed your children in – what, a month?”  You console yourself in the fact that they’ve been swimming in a chlorinated pool recently, so they’re clean.  Then you go back to stacking queens on kings, jacks on queens, tens on jacks, nines on tens, eights on nines, sevens on eights, sixes on sevens, fives on sixes, fours on fives, threes on fours, twos on threes, aces on twos, and sometimes the fireworks happen on the screen and you are given a reward.  You’ve won.  You’ve won something, if not much.  But, you’ve won, and it is worth a few seconds of hope.

“I’ve accomplished something today!”  you cheer.  And you know that if you can win at Solataire, then you can get dressed today.  You might even brush your teeth or hair.  And tomorrow you might put on make-up.  And the next day you might be able to pick up the phone and call an old friend.  And old friend who wonders why she hasn’t heard from you and calls you “snob” behind your back because you’ve blown her off.  She won’t call you because you’re undoubetly stuck-up these days.  But little does she know that you just can’t face her.  You’re too sad now.  You’d just depress her.  And if you met her for coffee at your favorite hang-out of days past, you’d only embarrass her because there is no way to hide the new wrinkles, nothing works to rid your eyes of the red lines, and you’ve aged 20 years in 3.  You won’t call her this week, nor the next, nor the next.  And you won’t call others.  And soon, they won’t call you and you’ll eventually have absolutely no support at all.

While you’re dwelling on your friend who hasn’t called, one of the children asks for food.  The other informs you that he has no more clean underwear.  You put a load in the wash, realize you’re out of laundry detergent, use dish soap instead, and return to your game.  It goes on like this for weeks, then months.  Even though you know that you must do something to earn a living before the IRA you cashed in early runs out, and before you’ve sold everything worth anything.  You must do something for work, but that something must allow for childcare.

A job offer comes.  It is $22.00 / hour, 35 hours per week, no benefits.  Better than nothing.  Or is it?  Daycare will be $20.00 / hour for the two children, 45 hours per week with commute time to and from work.  So you call everyone you know trying to find less expensive daycare.  Your mother won’t come to stay to help you from across the country because she’s retired now (and just a little bit senile) and enjoying her tea parties and bingo at the Lutheran Church.  You’ve no other relative to ask.  The neighbor kids are too busy.  You don’t qualify for low-income child care because you haven’t lost everything yet.  Human Services tells you to call back after the house has gone back to the bank.  You call every other single mom you can think of.  Maybe you can tag-team the childcare effort so both of you can work?  But no, they’ve got a relative to help out with their kids, but that relative won’t help with kids they don’t know.  Or they’ve already lost their homes so public assistance is meeting their child care needs.

“Just let the house go back to the bank,”  says one of my single-mom friends.  “I did it, and I’m so much happier now.  I get food stamps.  I can go to the food bank.  I get help with everything.  Just let the house go.  Do it… for your kids.”

I go on an otherwise gloriously sunny Sunday afternoon to pick up my children after visitation with their father from his new residence.  He and his girlfriend live in a new home that he built in a ski area – 80 miles from his children.  Then she moved in.  They both ski, and her family actually owns the resort.  The Hummer and Expedition are parked in the driveway, because the two car garage is only big enough for the Subaru and Land Rover.  “The kids have just gotten out of the pool and will be a few minutes getting dried off,”  the girlfriend tells you, “You can wait on the porch if you want.”

You will never be invited in to see the granite counter tops, the Viking range, the Bosch dishwasher, the Sub-Zero refrigerator, the furniture from Roche Bobois - all of those many things that your 11-year-old daughter told you about, “Why can’t we get a swimming pool like daddy has?”  And after you’ve been asked the question a-hundred and fifty nine million times, you’ll finally scream back an answer – “Because we have to eat!”

There is absolutely no idea in their father’s mind that possibly he is greedy, selfish, and has done wrong not only to you, but also to the children through his well thought out and determined efforts to hide every cent from attorneys and investigators and to set himself, and his never-been-a-mother-herself girlfriend, up in luxury knowing full well that you cannot even work to take care of your kids – his kids.  But his obligation in the matter, as he recognizes it to be, is to entertain the children two weekends a month and one week at Christmas and one week during summer break, and to send a check for the lowest possible amount  permissible under State law for child support.  And even then, the check doesn’t always arrive, at least not on time.  He knows that it will take the District Attorney’s office at least 6 months to catch up with him, and then he’ll just get a slap on the hand.

You can’t count on him, but your kids love him and want to be with him and think he is the most wonderful and generous person in the world because he takes them to Disneyland and buys them anything they ask for – things to be kept at “daddy’s fun house.”  And that is what he calls his home on the ski slopes. 

You (I am) are a spiritual and loving person and can wish no one ill.   So on those rare times when you get really angry with him when the check doesn’t come and you have to sell your grandmother’s antique sewing machine to pay the mortgage, and you yell, “I hate the bastard!”, you have to feel the guilt, punish yourself, ask forgiveness for your sin, ask God to take away the hatred.  Ask God to bless him – “God, please bless my children’s father, take away his pain.”  3 minutes later you log on to Craig’s List and advertise your father’s first office chair which was given to him upon his college graduation in 1947 by his proud father.  It could bring in enough for groceries this month.  Then you try to “get off your duff,” as someone who doesn’t know anything about you has suggested, and find a job that you can do at home while you care for your children, while you wait for the house to sell.   And you know everything will be o'k.