to pick up Ryan from afterschool care and then home again. In the summer semester, I wasn’t working and it was all much simpler—just long days spent with Jessica and the boys that were as gratifying to me as the experience seemed to be for her.
For Jessica, even attending the community college as a regular part-time student with a basic course plan was a triumph. It was even more of a boost when she realized that she was one of the few students consistently doing the work outside of class in a room full of dour recent high school graduates. The teachers liked her for this, she said, and respected her for being a mom. It was probably the first time in her life she had felt like a role model. I wanted her to bask in it, and I was thrilled when she would talk about the book they were analyzing or phone me simply to ask about a verb form. The mini-essays she wrote and printed out on a rickety dot matrix printer were all connected to her life and opinions—another thing she rarely had been invited to express, other than personal gripes about people.
The biggest triumph of all came a few weeks into her second, restarted semester after difficult surgery had made it impossible to complete the first. This was in the summer, when she was made class note taker for her math course, an honor that also paid $10 a day. But it seemed that even small victories flew from her grasp, like the enchanted golden Snitch of Harry Potter’s Quidditch that was driven to escape: only a few weeks into this new position, she realized that the whiteboard markers in the poorly ventilated amphitheater were triggering the migraines that so crippled her that she left class in tears daily.
For me, the lowest point also came during that summer session. I’d had an idyllic, if consuming, schedule, when I’d drive Monday through Thursday to pick up Jessica for class in the morning, and we’d bring the boys along. I reveled in the triumph of getting them away from the TV and into safety for even a few brief hours. We’d drop Jessica off, then spend the time hitting balls on crumbling tennis courts with giant rackets—Ryan’s favorite activity—or we’d attend the library story hour or play miniature golf or hang out at the county rec center—all the fun, really normal, low-key summer things I wanted them to get to do. I loved the time with them, loved the morning breezes and the sunshine reflecting off the deep green, towering trees.
The night before, I’d spend an hour making beautiful lunches for us, with little tubs of mandarin oranges and quesadillas for Michael; sandwiches with pickles and hot peppers for Ryan, who craved eye-tearing heat and sensation; sensible, adult whole wheat sandwiches for Jessica and me; and uncrushable, portion-controlled pods of Pringles. I’d pack it all into an insulated backpack, chilled with ice packs and sweating frozen juice boxes wrapped up in grocery bags to keep them from waterlogging everything. Once Jessica finished her two classes, we’d have lunch at the new, raw wood picnic tables the community college had just put up behind the main building on the austere campus.
The picnic area looked out onto forested slopes and over a dark blue reservoir, the peaceful view softened by the summer haze. The boys would eat briefly, then run around after each other in the short grass, shrieking at bees and climbing onto the tabletops and benches to jump back off them again. I cringed at the marks their shoes left on the unfinished wood—I imagined the picnic tables were a construction class project that had yet to be stained and sealed. There behind the building we couldn’t see people coming and going from their cars in the parking lot—really couldn’t see anybody. As busy as I would have thought a community college might be in summer, most of that activity must have happened in the evenings, because it seemed quite empty and serene.
No matter where we’d been before arriving on campus, or how many times I’d prompted the boys to use the restroom before we got there, Ryan would always have to go into the college building to use the men’s room. Michael was still young enough that I could whisk him in and out of the ladies’ room, which was near the back entrance, and we rarely encountered anyone in there. But Ryan was old enough to use the men’s and absolutely refused to do otherwise; I suspected he just liked going into the novel, air-conditioned building and all the way down the long, cool central hallway. As much as I wanted to stay out of the building, I itched to at least accompany him inside and stand outside the restroom door, to make sure no stranger danger could reach him, but Jessica would say, “Oh, no, he’s fine.”
Other than taking something off a bulletin board or trying to put pennies into a vending machine, there was little trouble he could have gotten into, and quite possibly, he didn’t cause any. Nonetheless, I would cringe and hold my breath, literally clamping my teeth on my tongue, when Ryan would once again clank through the smoked glass doorway and go down the hall and out of sight. Sometimes I couldn’t restrain myself and would anxiously ask Jessica if she wanted to go in after him; I knew she was annoyed by the nervously corrective tone that so often colored my voice, but if he had been gone a little while, sometimes she would.
Why I was the one suffering nerves, I don’t know—as was so often true, I should have taken the advice I’d heard many times on videos from the Love and Logic Institute, which DSS used in training both foster and birth families, when they say to parents, “Now, who has the units of concern?” What they mean is that parents should not carry the worry for kids’ actions when the kids should shoulder that worry. But in this case, at Ryan’s age, it was not the kid’s so much as the mother’s burden to carry. So I would lie awake at night, mourning the hours of lost sleep because I knew I’d have to be up at six in order to get Jessica to her nine o’clock class, and last in my rosary chain of worries would be the one about Ryan going into the community college building to use the bathroom. So much for the Serenity Prayer—by this point, I’d completely lost any wisdom to know the difference.
All was good between Jessica and me so long as I offered no advice, which would be the case with any mother-friend, really. So Ryan’s men’s room trips were definitely not my burden to carry, yet I felt absolutely mortified one day, a few weeks into the summer session, when Jessica met us at our usual wooden table where I was unpacking our picnic and snatching after the blowing paper towel napkins.
Jessica was white faced and narrow eyed. “My kids can’t be in there anymore,” she said. “I can’t bring them here at all. They can’t be anywhere on the grounds.” We had been told to leave.
She was furious and confused; I felt like I’d been slapped. And I was baffled. What in the world could either of the kids have done that was so bad? Wasn’t this a community college? A no-frills one, to be sure, but wasn’t it for parents trying to better their lives, among others? Wasn’t Jessica practically a poster child for her generation’s struggles and here fighting to walk a good path? “I knew Ryan shouldn’t have gone in the building,” I blurted, even as I tried to muffle my words.
But really, whatever had happened, it was one of those rare times, I realize, when both Jessica and I were angry, and we were actually both angry at, and hurt by, the same thing. By that point, she was probably used to authorities issuing orders without explanation, but all these years later, I still wonder about the reason.
Then, at night, I fumed for all of them. How many more worlds would Jessica be told her family didn’t belong in?
INDEPENDENCE DAY
Why did I continue to help? I didn’t have to do those things for and with Jessica to keep seeing Michael—that was always entirely clear to me. All I really had to do was not betray Jessica and Benny to any authorities—a much more difficult challenge. I didn’t have to help get the power restored or take Jessica on special outings with us. All that was my choosing. If I couldn’t have my first prize of Michael free and clear, then, like Benny, I wanted us to be a family. And I wanted Jessica to break free of everything that had held her back—to be free to have some fulfillment in life. Everyone else in the family was busily wishing she would break free of Benny, but I accepted that this was a lost cause—she’d seemed tantalizingly close to doing that at times, but I just wanted her to have the chance to live more fully. To read, to have real work, to be.
Helping
