for the mommies. I saw it from a distance, but we passed it all by, existing in our solitary bubble, because that was what worked.
I’d stopped with the yearly well checks at the pediatrician’s too, because they were too difficult, and Dylan had managed only two mornings of preschool, with me sitting next to him the whole time, talking to him quietly, before I realized that wasn’t going to work, either.
Marco had left us when Dylan was three, making do with sporadic visits that tapered off to basically nothing within a year, and Dylan and I didn’t go out at all, except for the library and the park, the occasional necessary shopping, and basically it sometimes felt as if, to the rest of the world, we had simply ceased to exist.
Which was why it was a surprise when DCF called eighteen months ago, because I hadn’t registered Dylan for kindergarten. Those two mornings at preschool had left enough of a footprint for them to check up on us, presumably since we were already written up in their notes somewhere.
I was annoyed, and afraid, and frankly totally fed up. I mean, you read about these cases of kids being killed by their parents, locked in cupboards or chained to a table, covered in cigarette burns and bruises, and somehow DCF leaves them alone but comes after me, when anyone can see I am trying my best. They come after me, and instead of actually helping me, they just pretend to, tsk-tsking under their breath while they smile and ask their questions.
That was the first time I met Susan and her kindly smile. She came to my door and she looked so compassionate and I felt so alone in that moment that I let my guard down. She made me a cup of tea while I sat at my kitchen table and sobbed. I hadn’t meant to; I hadn’t even realized I needed to. I thought, for the most part, that I was fine. Dylan and I both were.
But she asked me how I was doing in a way that made me think she cared about my answer, and then she murmured soothing things about how hard it had to be, and somehow it all came spilling out. Marco leaving. Trying to work from home because childcare simply wasn’t an option. Dylan’s needs—mainly his need for me, the way he always clung, the way he worried about everything, the fears he had that knit us together as if we were fused at the bone. And while I couldn’t have imagined it any other way and I’m not even sure I would have even wanted it any other way, sometimes, only once in a while, it felt too hard.
“It just never ends,” I remember saying, trying to hiccup back my sobs. “There’s never any break.”
Susan asked gentle questions about support, and I had to confess I didn’t have any. My mother lives in New Hampshire with her second husband, who runs some kind of organic farm shop, and has no time for me, never mind Dylan. My father still lives in the house I grew up in, in Bloomfield, but isn’t interested and never will be. Friends? I lost them a long time ago, what ones I had. Work colleagues? I make cheap jewelry and sell it on Shopify, squeezing in my hours when Dylan is occupied or asleep. I don’t have any work colleagues.
“What about neighbors?” Susan asked with her oh-so-sympathetic smile. I live in a duplex that has been divided into three apartments; Dylan and I are on the ground floor. I told Susan about Angela, the well-meaning elderly lady upstairs who has Alzheimer’s. She’s invited us in once or twice over the years, but her apartment is full of fussy little knickknacks and I don’t want Dylan to break anything by accident.
My neighbor on the top floor is a man who drinks a lot of beer, judging from the recycling bin full of cans on our shared drive, and plays a lot of violent video games, judging from the noise that filters down through the ceiling. I don’t know what else he does, if anything.
So, I explained to Susan, there was basically no one, and I know most everyone has trouble understanding that, how absolutely alone you can be when there are people all around you, when most normal people have parents and siblings, relatives and friends, a whole spiderweb of support that has been completely and utterly beyond me.