Last night, even Tim, raised from the dead for the occasion, started after me.
“Kate, what the hell are you doing? After years of complaining three kids were too much work and how you longed to be free of childcare, you’re signing up to be a mother—of a baby—and in your health.”
Sipping my midnight tea, I was grateful he wasn’t there in the flesh to badger me. But absent though he was, Tim followed me from room to room and hovered over my bed, complaining all the while.
Round and round they all wailed, “It’s Brenda’s responsibility,” “You’re too old,” “What about being grandma to my two kids?”
Finally, I vaulted from bed and shouted, “What about Benjy? Four months old, left with neighbors, mother more worried about breaking into films than whether he’s been fed.”
Then startled to hear myself shouting at shadows, I yanked shut the bedroom window. Next thing my next door neighbor would start pounding on my door. I could only imagine her face when she heard the first of the late night yowls if Benjy moved in.
A birthday boy, that’s what I wanted Benjy to be. When I held him and saw his worried face, I just wanted to him to know he was loved unconditionally.
I know that my parents loved me in their way. My father never yelled at me, which was a positive, and on birthdays, my mother added his name to the card. But Dad never noticed what I did until I said I wanted to be a university professor. “No way,” he had said. “Sorry to say, you don’t have the brains for it.” When I settled for being a translator he said, “God knows why you want to learn a lot of foreign languages.” My mother just shrugged from behind his shoulder and smiled apologetically, her focus remaining on her first love.
I had never realized what I missed—as I imagine a sightless person cannot envision the color red—until at university I was in the play Our Town. I played Emily, a young woman who died in childbirth and, being unsettled in death, had the chance to come back to life for one day. She chose her twelfth birthday when she had lived at home with her parents and younger brother. When, as Emily, I came down the stairs, my actress-mother was miming making breakfast, and my brother was being a brother. As Emily, I had cried out, “Look at me, just for a moment, as if I were really here,” and then from the top of the stairs, Emily’s father called out, “Where’s my girl? Where’s my birthday girl?” and the stab of pain that I felt for a father who would call out with such joy was so sharp I almost buckled.
When I told Sally the story to demonstrate how I wanted Benjy to know that he was the world to someone, Sally responded, “We’ll all love him, Mom,” but Sally, herself a “birthday girl,” doesn’t understand.
When I first noticed how fragile Benjy looked, his tiny face pinched and worried, I tried to talk to Brenda about it.
“Oh Mother Kate,” Brenda had said, “They all look like that. They don’t know enough to worry.”
“He’ll learn soon enough,” I had thought.
When I confessed to Sally that I wondered what I should do about Benjy, she jerked to attention.
“What do you mean—do? You always said you weren’t going to be childcare service for your grandchildren and Benjy isn’t even a grandchild.”
“I know but yesterday she left him with that old guy across the hall.”
“So tell her to smarten up.”
“She says she has a chance to get a part and it could be her big break.”
“Ah well,” Sally said escaping to a happier scenario. “You’ll figure something out. I have to put the speed on or I’ll be late picking the kids up at daycare.”
Kisses and promises to take Emily to the puppet show, and I gathered my belongings and went out into the bright day. “Don’t get yourself in too deep,” Sally had called after me.
“Hardly,” I laughed, but the pale little ghost face was slipping in and out of my dreams, calling me.
It’s over thirty years since Chris was a baby, thirty-four since Sally was born, and it all seems like another country. When my first grandchild arrived, I could hardly remember how to change a diaper. I still shiver at the scheduling horror and fatigue of raising three kids, looking after the house for a husband who was often off on business, and managing my own job. I remember feeling like I was standing on quicksand. And now, at sixty-seven, I was thinking of stepping back in. I, who had bored everyone for weeks about how selfish I thought the Italian woman was who became a mother in her sixties.
Still, I had made a commitment and I had been over the to-do list and checked the house many times. It was to be a trial period, as agreed upon by Brenda and me, but I knew that if I took him today, whatever happened, I wouldn’t be able to hand him back.
When the phone rang, I saw it was Sally. Without lifting the receiver, I heard her final warning, “Don’t sign up for more than you can handle,” and it was well-intentioned but I couldn’t face her, I was already too uncertain.
Even then, I could have called Brenda and say I changed my mind. Benjy would never know and Sally would be over the moon. No, I would talk to Sally later and to Chris and even to Tim if he came by again.
As I drove up to the house, two minutes late, Brenda and her boyfriend, Rollie, were waiting by the open door for what Sally would have called the hand-off. I suspect Rollie just wanted to see that his son was really going before he committed to move back in with Brenda.
No comments yet.