Fellows

I was at the grocery store recently in search of coconut flour to fuel my short-lived commitment to the “paleo” lifestyle.  I rounded the corner of the baking aisle, and right by the mill-ground grains were two women in their fifties.  I could tell that they were having a weighty conversation and that theirs had been a chance meeting, for each had her own cart, and the carts faced each other, steel mesh bumper cars suspended mid-ride.  Recognizing one another, the women had probably blurted out startled hello!s and meaningless lines of explanation—“I was just looking for cinnamon.”  And then the dark-haired woman had asked the blond woman, “How are you?” or “How’s ______?”  And the blond woman had started talking.  By the time I got there, the blond woman was tearful, and both were fixed to the spot, blocking the wall of cake mix with their bodies and their carts and one woman’s pain and the other woman’s sympathy.

It’s not easy to find coconut flour, particularly at Safeway.  I had to stand there a few minutes, right next to the women, as I scanned the names on the yellow-and-red bags: almond flour, rice flour, masa, grits. I was aware that the women were aware that I was too close to them.  But what could they do?  They were having a private moment of confession and absolution in a public place.  And what could I do?  I had the competing desires not to intrude and to offer my sympathy and support to a woman I had never met.  I went with the more socially acceptable of the two options:  I blocked out what the women were saying, invited the labels of Bob’s Red Mill to absorb my attention, and then walked away.  If I did not hear their words during the 60 seconds in which our lives intersected, I noted their postures and tones of voice, and I saw their faces.  The blond woman was exasperated, tired, worried, sad; she was dealing—probably still is dealing—with some heavy stuff.  The other woman was an acquaintance, surely not a friend, for a friend would not have had to rely upon an update in Aisle 7 but would have known what was going on.  Scratch that: what if the woman with the burden had lost touch with her friends because of whatever she’s been going through, and when she happened upon one of them at the grocery store she was so relieved that she just started talking, that she gave an honest response to a banal question?  Or maybe the question wasn’t banal at all but rather asked in earnest by a friend who had remained concerned even while pushed to the margins of the blond woman’s life: “How are you?” or “How are you?”

On New Year’s Eve I met a fellow mom, only I didn’t perceive that we were fellows.  She is of the stay-at-home variety; she has four children, and her husband works in international finance.  I am a working mom with one child, an estranged husband, and a live-in boyfriend.  We chatted, and I noted that she was pretty and that the gap in her children’s ages was odd—her daughter is in 8^th grade, and the younger three are 7, 6, and 3 years old.  I assumed the family was affluent, what with the financier husband and the mom not working and the decision to have so many kids.  I found her to be pleasant but figured that we have little more in common than our Kindergarteners’ shared teacher.  I stood in judgment of her, as we all do at times like these, to justify my life choices. And though I suppressed it at the time, I was jealous of this woman, for I projected onto her the elements of my life that I sometimes feel the absence of: a marriage that worked out, ample time to spend with my child, a younger, prettier face, financial stability.  After chatting for a few minutes, I moved on to another woman, this one a recent transplant from Portland who “processes” her own chickens and chose her family’s new home on the basis of its ability to sustain a suburban farm.  I judged her, too.

A month later I found myself cutting paper with the businessman’s wife.  We had both volunteered to help our kids’ teacher, and what this offer amounted to was a two-hour stint in the elementary-school workroom.  Here is what I learned: she has a name, and it’s not Mom.  Eight years ago, she was single and living by herself in Tacoma.  She was going to school to become a first-grade teacher, a job she eventually held for one year before she gave birth to her first child.  When she imagines herself as she used to be, her current life is unrecognizable to her: she wonders how she got here.  Her husband travels to Hong Kong for work.  He is gone for three weeks of every month.  When she tells him that things are hard, he asks her not to make him feel guilty.  After all, what can he do?  But, I say to her, and she agrees, she has to tell him things are hard.  Her oldest child, the improbable 8^th-grade daughter, is actually her sister’s child.  My fellow mom is raising her for reasons she did not explain to me.  Of the younger children, the oldest, in first grade, has Asperger Syndrome and, my workroom partner believes, some other systemic malady.  She hasn’t yet found the right doctor, the one who will engage seriously with the physical evidence she has compiled from watching her son.  A friend once told me, “No one knows your child as well as you do.” When my daughter was a baby, that wisdom empowered me to seek the medical attention that saved her life—literally, saved her life on one day in April 2007.  In the workroom at the elementary school, I passed along the advice.  And I listened to her.

Her son has rages.  Upon experiencing one, a healthcare professional once said to her, “Does schizophrenia run in your family?”  In the workroom, my friend the fellow mom said to me, “I didn’t know if I should be insulted by that question or not.”  I replied, “You should be insulted. What a stupid thing to say to a parent in a moment like that.”  I told her that once, a nutritionist, having measured my infant’s cranium with the same yellow tape we have all wrapped around our ribs and waists and hips before ordering from a catalog, offered the medical opinion that my infant might be hydrocephalic—have water on the brain.  This while my daughter and I were already interned at Children’s Hospital due to her esophageal atresia.  Look up hydrocephalus, and while you’re at it look up esophageal atresia.  I was terrified.  By a nutritionist with a measuring tape.  When my daughter’s surgeon visited later that evening, I ran the “diagnosis” by him.  He assured me that my daughter had simply inherited her father’s big head, and then he must have laid into the nutritionist, for the next day she came to our room to apologize and to say that she had spoken out of turn.  Damn straight, she had.  And so had the phlebotomist who fancied herself a psychiatrist when she set off a rage in a 7-year-old with Asperger’s.

My fellow mom told me that when she’s out with her children, strangers give her parenting advice.  Old men glare at her son as if to say, “This sharp look will get you in line, sonny” or “If he were my boy he wouldn’t be behaving like that.” She understands the impulse, but she resents it all the same, for these people have no idea.  They look at her and they see some version of what I saw on New Year’s Eve, but worse: they find her to come up lacking; they think they could do a better job than she’s doing.  And she knows this.  She told me what she wants to say to them: “I know that they say it takes a village to raise a child,” she begins, “but you’re not in my fucking village.”

That day in the workroom I connected with someone in a way that propriety prevented me from doing in Safeway.  The other mom did most of the talking—fully two hours’ worth—and I hope that she got some relief and some companionship out of our time together.  She’s holding a lot together.  And aren’t so many women?  I often overlook that fact and take too lightly my own ability and instinct to share the load.