In the past nine years, Indie and I have talked about him only twice. He moves silently through the rooms of our minds, banging against the furniture, knocking on the door, calling in the middle of the night like a phone ringing in a distant room. Actually, we didn’t that day in court-the moment when the elevator doors closed behind him-that was the last time I saw him. So while we didn’t have to go to court to get divorced, we did have to establish a custodial agreement. I try to be honest, yet fair, recalling the counseling the State of Colorado required-a parent should never speak in negative terms of the other parent. The child bases her identity on who she comes from, so belittling or demeaning the other parent belittles the child. When Indie asks why he left, it feels the way Hemingway described good writing, that the seven-eighths beneath the surface is what truly moves the narrative. I tore it in half and dropped the pieces into the trash can beside my desk.
In that same box, he sent me a check for three hundred and fifty dollars. I keep the letter and the book in a box for her, along with the dress she was wearing the last time he saw her, a plaid, quilt-patterned sundress, size six months. He had sent her a book and a letter. It was the first, and, so far, the only contact he made with us. When Indie turned two, I went to my third-floor office at school and found a box leaning against my locked door. I wonder if the rest stops in this area have cellular service in north central Oklahoma, phone calls often drop behind the barren, intermittently burned landscape. I settle into to my seat, take a sip of my latté, and turn up the volume. I am making the curve near the trees, so I am close to the I-35 junction.Īll the single mothers I have known have been single in self only, but not in parenthood there are weekends, alternating holidays, weeks in the summer. Even I have documents that refer to me, the custodial parent, and him, the noncustodial one, documents with our names, our Social Security numbers. I grip the steering wheel and glance at my cell phone in the cup holder. I keep my eyes out for a rest stop.Ībandonment: if there’s a box that single mothers check to identify their status, that’s the one I’d check, but Neal Conan’s mention of it is the first time I’ve ever heard it publicly acknowledged. Email us, You can also join the conversation on our website. How do people treat you? Tell us your story. So we want to hear from single mothers today. But when seven in ten believe this is bad for society, it makes you wonder. Others find themselves without a partner through divorce or abandonment. Some women choose to raise children by themselves. Of course, there is a wide array of single mothers. The nuclear family in the house across the street is still there, but different kinds of families live on the block, too: unmarried parents, gay parents, people who choose not to have children at all and, of course, single parents.Ī new Pew Research poll asked Americans about these trends and found almost 70 percent believe that single women raising children on their own is bad for society. It’s Tuesday, the day before Indie’s ninth birthday, and as I pass the city limits of Stillwater on my way to Oklahoma City, I switch from the Sinatra station, the one playing “I’ll Be Seeing You,” to the seventies station, the one playing Marshall Tucker Band’s “Heard It in a Love Song.” I’m gonna be leavin’ at the break of dawn. I rarely listen to the song now, though sometimes when Indie is in the car, I’ll let it play, even sing along, assume the next time she asks me why he left, I can say, “You know that song, the one about the guy who never had a damn thing but what he had, he had to leave it behind?” She’ll know the song. So many times, when she’s singing along to Ambrosia or Bread, Jackson Browne, especially America, in the car, I ask her how she knows all the words to those long-ago songs, and she always has the same answer, “You sing all the time.” He used to tell me that, too.
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