Six months I've put off writing for another day. I'm too busy. The kids are making me busier. My life is crazy. I need to sleep. Work has gotten in the way. Life happened. So much has changed I think we've come full circle in six months and one week.
Why exactly did I answer that phone long those many months ago? Actually I didn't. Not that it matters much now. I had the handsome husband answer that phone because the damn thing would not stop ringing. Did I know who it was? Oh yeah. My bad. When we met T a year or so ago I shied away. Kind of. She isn't my kind of person. She lies. She's manipulative. Other than motherhood we have nothing in common. I'm not sure we even have that considering I actually wanted my child, took great care to have her healthy and happy. My child is cherished, probably a bit spoiled and very much the center of my world. Her approach to motherhood has been accidental, drug induced, rage filled and booze fueled.
So she got cozy with the husband and worked him. Not in a romantic way - that would almost have been easier to combat. She had his sympathy. She tugged at his heart. Because he has a huge heart and he's a sucker for a woman in distress, especially if she has children. And oh does she ever. That little voice in the back of my head that said run... run fast and run far from this disaster in the making before it has the ability to overtake you. I listened. I however, failed to communicate that gut wrenching, anxious, dreadful feeling to the handsome husband and dammit I know why. Because we are so blessed and we have so much and to be selfish just isn't in me. And I could not tell the sweetest and most honest man who ever lived that I wanted him to walk away from those three people in need. I feared he would think less of me. I know he would.
The spring passed last year and it turned hot. I watched from a far as the children played outside, miserable and filthy, with nothing really to play with on the hard scrabble ground. I watched as they tried to keep cool with a hose, turning the ground into this sort of reddish clay that clung to their skin and muddied their already dirty clothes. Some days T was there, other days not so much. I heard the tales of foraging dumpsters for food, collecting cigarette butts from the ground for a nicotine fix, and I shook my head in disgust and dismay. And then came the days that physically she was there tottering around on unsteady feet and mentally her brain cells were clogged with the drugs that stole her from reality.
I softened a bit over the weeks. Asked the children in for a break from the heat. Into the cool and sometimes dark cave that is our living room, complete with all the trappings of the semi middle class. How foreign it must have been to have computers, big screen tvs, video games and toys at their disposal, abet borrowed ones. I've learned that as they've gone from house to house, crashing on the couch of whomever might allow it, or whomever had the drugs their mother craved, most of their lives were left behind. Pets, clothes, toys, personal possessions were not treated with the respect most of us give our "stuff."
We had dinner together a few times, always just the girls and their mother would stop in for a brief bit. Just long enough to eat, never long enough to face the questions of how she was going to get them to a better place, a better life. Never so long that one of us might make mention of her altered mental state.
And oh the tales we weave when first we set out to deceive. The dread over the looming release date of the ex who had tried to kill them. The despair over having lost a storage unit with all of their things. The missing money. The untrustworthy brother. The wailing and gnashing of teeth over lost jobs, lost family, friends and finally of lost hope. The unwavering belief that every crappy thing that's come to stand in the way of their success as a family is always someone else's fault. True? As I've come to know these last six months and I've repeated over and over until it has become my mantra. I'll believe it when I see it.
The week I started working nights the last phone call from T came. Come visit. Bring food. Let's bbq. Typical, but we did mostly because we wanted to check on the girls. They were stuck in some two-bit non nondescript motel along the highway... waiting she said... never sure what for. Begging for money to be able to stay there each night, picking up an odd job or two when she needed a fix. Such a life for a teenager and a baby. As the night ended, I grew more wary of her stories, her crap and her flair for the dramatic. It just never quite adds up to the truth. We brought home a dog from that visit. T insisted that she found it but could not keep it. Actually she found it for the husband because he'd mentioned some day wanting one and she knew I did not. Yet another attempt to fracture our happy family because if her's wasn't happy no one else should be either. One notion I've overcome resenting ever time I look at the dog. Maggie grows on you, with her cute little black face and semi sad eyes, but seriously dammit... it should have been our decision in our own time to become doggie parents.
Poof... they were gone. A brief text at Christmas from a number I didn't recognize and that was it. I wondered what happened to them once in a while. As we blew out the birthday candles and M turned 5, I thought about little A's 3rd birthday approaching and wondered if there would be presents and a cake, though I knew better. When the wind kicked up in December and I pulled my jacket a little tighter around my neck I said a prayer that T had sense enough to find jackets for the girls. On New Year's Eve as we arrested drunk after drunk after senseless drunk driver I prayed they were safe somewhere... after all it was big A's 15th birthday and a time for celebrating double, though I doubt they did.
January 2011 was a cold one indeed. I took to wearing a jacket daily. Seemed strange to have all this cold and nasty weather. I grew up with this and moved to get away from it. I had forgotten how bitterly cold it could be when there was no humidity. The kind of cold that made it hurt to breathe. The kind of cold that kept you running... from work to the car, from the car to the house and everywhere in between. The kind of cold that kept your head down and your gaze averted lest the wind whip you in the face and the sand scratch your eyeballs.
Time passed... there I ago again with that infernal notion of time. The phone call ended with that plaintiff refrain, "are you willing?" And there was no other answer than "bring them to me." It became a whisper in the wind, trailing off towards the end, "bring them to me." An idea so strange and so bold, so foreign to be asked to raise another woman's children because the powers that be finally got a clue and decided that she could not. I wept that night on the way to work, thinking that the baby with the bright blond curls and the stunning blue eyes that I had fallen in love with last summer, might finally be safe. Even if it was only for a little while.
How little did I know what time had in store for me. How little did I know how much I could give, how much I could love and how much I could learn in seven short months.
"Can you teach me about tomorrow and all the pain and sorry, running free... 'cuz tomorrow's just another day and I don't believe in time."
