By Debra Monroe
For ten years I was a single parent, not the first, last, nor only. Because I adopted, my ideas, my house, my character, and my income were assessed in advance by experts. I planned ahead for likely setbacks, and the adoption agency doublechecked. Preemptive problem-solving is a skill and a tic. On one hand, it’s planning, and planning helps. On the other, no one can anticipate all future bad luck or glaring miscalculations always so obvious after the fact. Still, as I waited for my baby I envisioned upcoming hurdles: my worrying and readying and rushes of elation as I’d clear them. I’ve daydreamed like this since I can remember, with hope or hubris or willed faith in my ability to spot looming pitfalls.
The elementary school principal later said: “No ex-husband, no grandma, no aunt, not even an uncle?” My extended family was geographically afar. I visited rarely and called often. Geographically afar worked: unfixable history and latent eruptions, even by phone. So I began as a mother who hoped to forestall all problems and then noticed my daughter was emerging into consciousness with the idea that, if push came to shove, no one else would love her, feed her, and save her. She asked often about her contingency plan.
She was sick when she was little, which I did foresee, that a child might have special needs. Hers were appointments with medical specialists in a city an hour away. But a problem I didn’t foresee was that I would get sick. One day she was wearing cozy pajamas and watching TV. I lay on the couch, wondering why nurses rushed me when I phoned to say I hadn’t recovered from surgery yet. My daughter said, “How will Aunt Cindy”— a friend in Florida, and we lived in Texas—“know to come on a plane and get me.”
I thought: some fantasy about going to Disneyworld?
“When you die,” she said. She’d arranged her expression to convey that she needed this information but knew I was overextended. I’d traveled to my mother’s funeral. The mother of a sitter had died a good death at home in the room near the room where my daughter napped and played. “I’m not dying,” I said, ignoring my post-op malaise.
Caregivers had a finite interest in her. They worried about their own children, their own mothers. None were terrible, though one seventeen-year-old had bulimia. I could tell by the candy wrappers and the state of the bathroom. I wondered whether to tell her mother, whom I’d first met when the mother was a childcare worker at a Methodist Church program called Mother’s Day Out, which I’d used for daycare when my daughter was two. You left your child there—Tuesdays, Thursdays, nine to three, steep fines if you’re late for pickup—to relax or shop. The childcare worker who turned out to be the sitter’s mother told me she knew by my clothes I was going to work at the university in the college town a half-hour away. I couldn’t use daycares there. My hours were erratic, midday classes Tuesdays and Thursdays, also a Thursday night class requiring a second arrangement.
“The church board is strict,” she said. “Be discreet.”
I nodded and tried to seem on the verge of shopping.
This was another problem I’d failed to foresee. I owned a small house near a visually appealing village with a low cost of living, but it had just one daycare center that everyone described as dodgy, in a pole barn between the dancehall and auto body shop. Social workers must have assumed I’d devise childcare. I did. Here are maxims I lived by:
- Impatience is a virtue. It helps you get chores done quickly.
- Worry is precaution.
- If you predict bad outcomes, you’ll have spare solutions stockpiled.
- Wait, wait. We’re almost at the palace. It’s not midnight. Something good will happen. (This began as an ironic aside but, after long repetition, turned sincere.)
When at last my daughter was enrolled in all-day kindergarten, I needed just one sitter one night a week for night class. I said this when I ran across the Mother’s Day Out childcare worker, who first told me I should put my daughter in Saturday morning ballet classes in the city an hour away, expensive yet excellent classes she’d heard. Surely I wasn’t working on Saturday mornings? Then she said I should hire her daughter who had a car.
I hired the daughter and discovered the bulimia. My habit of misgiving tumbled onto a new question: was it my place to tell the sitter’s mother about the bulimia? Telling the mother might be wrong, thankless. This was an etiquette question, I realized. Etiquette is about conveying difficult facts kindly. Next I had to fire the sitter for not picking up my daughter—leaving my daughter’s small, dear self at the top of a hill where the school bus dropped her. One of my neighbors other neighbors called Crabby Old Man, but never to his face, drove her back to school where the principal called me at work, and I rushed out of a seminar in which I let students keep their cell phones on, a new gadget then, because I couldn’t object to theirs if, alert to predicaments, I kept mine on.
After I found a new sitter, I found myself oddly missing the previous nonurgent question of whether I should tell the sitter’s mother her daughter wasn’t okay. Next I pondered why I’d found the question mildly intriguing. I’d rolled it over in my mind as I drove to and from work, as I vacuumed and folded laundry, as I’d answered my daughter’s questions about who made the sky and were animals people, as I’d helped her with her kindergarten homework, easy, fun, the two of us pasting feathers onto a drawing of a turkey for Thanksgiving or reading aloud a list of seasonal words as I quelled panic about how supervising her homework would get harder in years ahead, taking up more focus.
I probably never would have found the spare courage to tell the sitter’s mother about her daughter’s eating disorder, which was concerning. A red flag about the sitter’s well-being. A red flag about the sitter’s fitness. Something to keep an eye on. But not a firing offense, not yet, I must have decided, coming home from teaching at ten p.m. to empty the wastebaskets and clean the bathroom. Problem-solving in a pros-versus-cons way had turned reflexive. Thinking about someone else’s problem, hard for them but easier for me, had felt like a pastime. Mother’s Day Out had the right idea—I needed to relax. But any new pastime had to overlap with time I’d spend with my child. Maybe gardening?
The next sitter picked up my daughter right at the school, along with the sitter’s daughter who was the same age, and at ten p.m. I’d drive to this sitter’s, heading north off my route home, otherwise western, then south again home, twenty extra miles but just one night a week. This sitter was affectionate, big-hearted, with a dry sense of humor, but she’d just begun taking an antidepressant, the first rough weeks of adjusting to a drug. When I knocked on the door to pick up my daughter, this sitter was disturbingly hard to wake.
Don’t worry about keeping my sitters straight. Think of them as members of a fractious Greek chorus, contradicting each other while letting spill with advice derived from their circumstances, different from mine. But I had to prize them as individuals since I needed them to prize my daughter. I didn’t treat them as interchangeable as they interchanged.
I slept lightly and woke often, and my dreams were as busy as action movies. I’d be driving home but couldn’t decipher the infinitely branching roads just beyond the windshield. Or I was in an unfamiliar city, wide expressways crisscrossing before me like lines in an M.C. Escher lithograph. In one dream, my car wouldn’t start. So I stole a motorcycle, kickstarted it, and sped off, one hand steadying the baby draped over the gas tank. I woke, relieved to find myself in bed, my child asleep, nowhere I had to be for two hours.
Linear time was my roadmap. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday (different due to night class), Friday again. Saturday and Sunday unstructured but full of to-dos. Weekdays, seven a.m., eight, nine, ten . . . Starting at four p.m. on weekdays except Thursdays: meet the school bus, fix a snack, see to homework, chat happily, fix dinner. We ate. She bathed. For TV, she liked physical comedy, extravagant pratfalls. I’d be in the next room, washing dishes, and hear her helpless with laughter, chortling. On weeknights, America’s Funniest Home Videos. Saturday, British comedies like Fawlty Towers.
I now see that, despite daily progress—the clock mapping my day, the calendar mapping my week and, zooming out for a disorienting minute, my month—I’d get stuck. Any intersection with a forking set of options, with more than one way forward, possibly two, three, or four, all potentially the right or wrong way, unsettled me. Friendly landmarks looked strange. I mean those talisman-like assurances of routine like the yellow school bus coming on time in the afternoon, the alarm clock’s reliable beep every morning, Arthur switching to PBS News Hour my cue for dinner prep. When new factors forced me to change my navigation, these talisman-like markers marked a now-obsolete route.
When my daughter had asked how Aunt Cindy would know to come and get her, I wondered if not feeling well was psychosomatic, as the surgeon’s nurses on the phone implied. They had responsibilities too, long lists of patient calls to return. They’d say “everyone has pain,” and I’d say “three weeks later and I have a fever,” and they’d say “but not a high fever,” also “so make an appointment.” I had made an appointment ten days earlier, which required the afterschool sitter a second time that week, and I’d used one of my at-home days when I should have graded papers to drive into the city to the surgeon’s.
If my daughter rode the bus in the afternoon I had forty more minutes to work; if I drove her to school in the morning I had forty more minutes to sleep. I drove her to school the next morning and, infused with caffeine, social reserve not yet operational, I spoke to someone else as if to myself. After delivering my daughter into the classroom, I walked to the parking lot beside a father I knew from village gatherings, our kids in slippery herds around us in Halloween costumes or bib tags for field day, clamoring about cupcakes, hot dogs. Most dads avoided me, single by choice. Mothers were curious. One said, “I have friends who are single mothers and they don’t endanger their kids, but they’re so busy they forget to turn on the old mental camcorder. They miss the fun.”
As the pleasant dad and I unlocked our cars, I said, “I had a surgery almost a month ago and don’t feel better.” He got a look on his face like a good husband would get. I eventually had a good husband so that’s how I know. But he wasn’t my husband. We’d chatted as he dropped off and picked up kids because his job was nearby and his wife’s wasn’t. I was wearing a sweatsuit. It was a cold day, so I’d thrown on my warmest coat, fake-fur, knee-length. Paired with stylish but understated clothes, with my hair washed and makeup applied, it could be an interesting fashion statement. He looked at my face, my wild eyes. My hair was wild too. I know because a few seconds later I got in my car and flipped down the visor mirror. “Maybe talk to a doctor,” he said, backing away.
I drove to the village doctor’s.
I said to the receptionist, “The doctor referred me to have a surgery three weeks ago, and I never got well.” She told me to sit down as other patients arrived. Then a nurse took me to a room and returned with the doctor who said he’d do a field test since lab test results wouldn’t come back in time. He’d place a finger on each side of my cervix, deep to the lateral fornix with pressure towards the anterior abdomen, while using his other hand to apply external pressure to the pubic bones in the center of the pelvis while watching for the chandelier sign, as textbooks call it, wherein if the patient has a post-op infection she shrieks and reaches for an imaginary chandelier, he said, as I shrieked while reaching.
The nurse drew blood for a white blood cell count, which the doctor completed in his tiny onsite lab. He wrote a prescription for a broad-spectrum antibiotic. He said: “I know you’re a single parent. Make childcare arrangements.” He explained I’d come back for another test in the morning. If the count stayed the same or went up, he’d check me into a hospital in the city or college town. “If this infection is resistant, time is not on our side.”
I called the big-hearted, sardonic sitter and asked, if need be, she could watch my daughter. I called the sitter I’d used a few years before, JoAnn, whose mother had died a good death, for a second layer of my daughter’s safety net. Or third; I was first. JoAnn hadn’t worked since her mother died but said to give her number to the other sitter in case the other sitter had a conflict. My next white blood cell count was lower. But, the nurse said, if over the weekend I had vertigo, a spike in fever, changes in vision, I’d go to ER. On Sunday my daughter and I stood in line picking up breakfast tacos, and we saw this nurse again. She put her wrist on my forehead. “No fever. I figured. You look almost peppy.”
Related Feature: One Question: Debra Monroe
Debra Monroe is the author of two story collections, The Source of Trouble and A Wild, Cold State; two novels, Newfangled and Shambles; two memoirs, On the Outskirts of Normal and My Unsentimental Education; and a new essay collection, It Takes a Worried Woman.
She is also the editor of the anthology Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in many venues, including Longreads, The Southern Review, The New York Times, The American Scholar, and have been cited as Notable in Best American Essays.