Leaving

Deciding to leave a marriage is never easy, especially when you have children. This is the first chapter from a memoir, Mothering From Two Blocks, and Three Avenues Away.

Ten years ago I moved out of the house I shared with my husband and two children.  My relationship with him had been unraveling for a few years and he would not go, so I did. 

Photo by Kev Kombs on Unsplash

Here’s some of the backstory:  

In the mid 2000s we decided to open our marriage, an arrangement with a series of agreements. When those agreements were not honored, we struggled. I stopped participating when it just became too much for me to wrap my head around the feelings I was having about this decision. I focused on completing my graduate school studies and training in new career. He focused on his extracurriculars.

Graduate school is a mountain when you climb it with two children on your back, a marriage wrestling like a raccoon trapped in the bottom of your backpack, and a shift in the wind that will make your duties as a daughter, a niece and a cousin expand and contract. I kept climbing.

The summer after the first year of graduate school I took an apprenticeship with then Brooklyn Independent Television. I loved working with the senior producer prepping guests, learning to manage the in studio cameras and shadowing/supporting reporters. Eventually I was invited to pitch and submit my own segments for the stations, then 12 shows. I’d also be granted a fellowship to contribute articles for Women’s eNews.

Somehow with this new type of work, I able to do what I loved and still keep focused on my children, growing into themselves, but not yet away from me as mom. The internet and social media hadn’t grabbed everyones attention just yet.

My children have a 9 year gap, two different fathers, from two different marriages. They were two very different kids not just because of their genders, but their ages, interests and relationship with me. I learned how to raise two children according to who they were, very much like I worked with students in the classroom. One size doesn’t fit all.

I was taking my son to a new soccer program in Williamsburg. He was always a quiet, rather shy kid who loved books. When we took the subway to school together, I handed him the Daily News and he began reading the sports section, especially, Mike Lupica’s column, and eventually, his books. Sports kept him engaged with other kids after school, and on the weekends. He was becoming really good in his position as defender and sometimes goal keeper. It was thrilling watching him grow more confident in his abilities and being cheered on by his teammates. When we weren’t attending a game, we enjoyed trips to the movies, sometimes the whole family, but that summer more often just the two of us. The films How to Train your Dragon and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series will always be sentimental touchstones for me.

My daughter was enjoying her summer before senior year. She was getting excited about going to college, hanging out more with her cousins, and a new girls empowerment program with monthly retreats in upstate New York. When she wasn’t doing that, she was inviting me along to shop for t-shirts, nail polish or lip gloss in H&M or Forever 21, notoriously adding these accessories to her Catholic school uniform.

One of the advantages to a career in education was the week day schedule. Working in media as a freelancer, often meant an unpredictable schedule. I had an opportunity to work BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn, a summer concert series in Prospect Park. My schedule was in two parts: Saturday from 12 pm to 2 pm to and then 6 PM to midnight. My husband and son were away that weekend to visit family in Boston. My daughter and her cousin were supposed to attend a girls retreat. Her cousin arrived late and they missed the bus. I was not leaving two 17-year-old girls home alone, so I decided to bring them along. The event was something that none of us had ever been to. That night Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon was being shown with a live orchestra sound track accompaniment. I could do my job of protecting the space around the cameras for filming the event, and give the girls assigned seats at the front where I could keep an eye on them.

The crowd gathered that night was mixed, rather eclectic. Folks who’d seen those Bruce Lee films were there for the nostalgia. Others digging the idea of a live sound track played by an orchestra. Other folks were there probably didn’t give a rats ass about the event, but the fact that it was free. If you’ve ever been to any concert, free or otherwise, you know what generally happens. People smoke weed. The air gets thick with it. The later it gets, the thicker the clouds. After the film was an intermission followed by a few live bands. I hadn’t really thought about the weed smoking or that this was mostly an adult crowd, when the girls asked me if they could walk around. It wasn’t as thick in the seated area right in front of the stage, but in the other areas, where people sat on blankets people and had picnics, who knew. I’d never been the type of parent who guarded my kids every move in the mid 2000s. I grew up in the late 70s and 80s. Free range kids wasn’t even a word or a worry, at least not from the people who raised me. It wasn’t until I became a teenager when kids faces started to appear on milk cartons, and eerie message “It’s 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?” public service announcement. The era just before Eton Patz and the Atlanta child murders.

In less than an hour after granting permission, my daughter came back to tell me she couldn’t find her cousin. “Of course you can’t,” I said. Why would two 17-year-old girls, your daughter and your second cousin who called you respectfully, Aunt________ do what you told them to do?

I could not panic, I was still on duty. And still being on duty kept me calm for a bit. I did go looking for them, but that made me more anxious. This is before I committed to a cell phone or gave either of my kids one. My younger cousin didn’t grow up in New York City. But I gave her lots of opportunities to visit because she and my daughter were the same age. We come from a family where cousins are friends. When I grew up cousin were really the only friends our family was comfortable with.

Eventually my daughter returned with her cousin, found in the company of some boy, she was talking to. I was upset. I went through all the scenarios of what could have happened with her. Especially the idea, that I’d have to be the one to report to her parents and our family, that something happened when she was with me. I’d go from responsible aunt to the one who lead one of the children straight to hell or worse. It was a wonder that I still invited cousins to stay after several earlier mishaps with cousin-siblings.

When the performances were over and it was time to go home, they still had lots of energy. We walked home from Prospect Park to our neighborhood of Bushwick & Bedford Stuyvesant. We stopped for fries and soda at McDonalds, then bottled water at a deli. The two of them laughing, screaming and sometimes running ahead of me the whole way home. It didn’t take much to get teens to believe they were having fun in the days before social media. Running in the streets of Brooklyn past midnight was the entertainment.

I was mothering but “wifing” was a struggle. The extracurriculars continued, but the real problem was my own confusion of loving him, being in an intimate relationship with him, while he justified his relationship with not one, but two other women.

I spent that summer having 4th of July without him. A few friends had come over and we sat on our roof with my son, eating apple pie and watching fireworks in the distance. Labor Day came and went. Our kids began their school year. My son in 5th grade, his last year of elementary school, and my daughter her last year of high school. The marriage dragged on.

That fall a favorite aunt was hospitalized for a broken leg. My mother and I began to visit her weekly in the nursing home where she convalesced. My mother asked if I could maintain visits to this aunt, when she could not. On Mondays I began to drop my son off at school in Harlem, and head to Penn Station for the long ride out to Long Branch, New Jersey. I’d spend the day there. I’d have lunch with my aunt, sit with her during the bingo sessions, listen to her stories and laugh at her jokes. I’d watch television while she slept. I’d help the nursing staff with her care, bathing and dressing.

My freelance work began to pick up. It kept me up late nights editing and submitting projects. I was conflicted and busy but determined fulfill a career goal I longed for. We also had a dog, a Vizsla, that my husband begged to take in, and then ceased to take care of. The dog was often under my desk, whining for attention. He would push his nose against my hands to stop my fingers from tapping the keyboard.

Around this same time both of my parents were experiencing some health concerns not yet revealed. They were in their mid 60s, living in the bi-level house on a cul-de-sac in South Jersey where they raised us kids. They were still working, enjoying family gatherings with their grandchildren, and looking forward to retirement soon. They were going to lots of appointments, having blood work done, my father experiencing so much pain one night he ended up in the emergency room.

While I had moved out of our open marriage arrangement to keep my focus on what I knew-a husband I still wanted to be with, without the distraction of other people, our children, my parents-my husband continued with his other relationships. He insisted on not only seeing these women, but bringing their problems in their relationship home to me. I didn’t want to be involved in these relationships and that included hearing about them. It was this part that I could not take. It was also, the constant splitting of time between them and me. It was him comforting me the day of my beloved aunt’s funeral, in which he left our bed to go to the other woman’s bed. It was him the day of my father’s funeral being more concerned about what time we would be leaving before the ceremony had even begun.

It was him coming to the hospital to bring our children to visit their grandmother, after a very dangerous time in her care to share with me that the best way to fix what was wrong with our marriage was to give me the freedom to be with other men.

My aunt was dead, my father was dead, my mother had been revived by a medical team charging into her room to revive her with a crash cart a few days before, and my husband thought I just needed to sleep with other men.

Our open arrangement was not public knowledge. A few of our closet friends admitted they didn’t understand what we were doing or why, but still saw our relationship as viable. However the unfolding drama was like an HBO series with an unprecedented finale; the kind that leaves the audience scratching their heads as some obscure 80’s rock anthem plays and the screen fades to black. 

Maybe you’ve known a married couple or even long time partners and been witness to how friends and even family members begin breaking into various factions when the relationship dissolves. In my case, I had team members gathering into camps. Camp-Shock-and-Awe were composed of those who weren’t necessarily in one camp or the other, but were surprised to learn there was trouble to begin with.

Camp-Old-Skool thought I should make my husband move out.

Camp-Keep-it-Moving-Girl, ordered the U-Haul, carried my stuff  down two flights of stairs, loaded it into the van and stepped on the gas.   

There wasn’t much to unload. I had books, a book shelf, clothes, linen, and a drop leaf dining table; a table my parents purchased for me when I moved into my Harlem apartment, after the first marriage failed in the early 90s.

My friend-in-laws, originally his when we met, mine when I left, stayed near that first weekend. They took me out for breakfast and dinner. They bought me drinks. Another ordered movie tickets and made sure it was something funny and brought me back home.  Some sat shiva, in twos and threes covering mirrors and offering condolences.  Others started their visits like a slow New Orleans funeral dirge, and ended with mojito libations poured into the soil of the newly buried marriage.  I felt deeply cared for, cocooned in their concern. My friends were the emotional safety net I didn’t know I needed.

And then came Monday morning.  

On a typical morning, I was up at 5:35 AM, brushing my teeth, washing my face, and putting on lip balm. By 5:45, the turkey bacon’s crackling on tin foil in the oven.  By 6:10, my then 12-year-old son and I are seated for breakfast. Me sipping coffee, with a slice of banana bread and yogurt, and him, using a slice of bacon to scoop oatmeal before catching the stern look on my face. At 6:30, I take my last sip of coffee and he heads for the shower.  

I pack lunch, putting his peanut butter sandwiches into recycled plastic baggies, granola bars, SunChips, an apple and two juice boxes. By 7:12, I’m inspecting his face and hair, and then I ask the question that causes him to roll his eyes: “Did you brush your teeth?” We walk down the stairs to the front door where I give him a hug, wish him a good day and remind him not to lose his phone. I stand just inside the doorway watching him, my eyes willing the cars racing to the corner to slow down, and allow him to cross safely. I watch until I see him cross, turn briefly to wave goodbye, and disappear past the corner deli.   

Back upstairs it’s 7:45 and I check in on his 19-year-old sister, getting out of bed with just enough time humanely possible to dress and pull huge afro hair into a puff on top of her head.  She grabs her quota of 3 slices of turkey bacon waiting on a plate in the kitchen. Yelling “Thanks mom, see you later,” I hear her run down the stairs and out the door, texting all the way to a local community college.

On the first morning preparing for work from my new apartment, the quiet is stunning. Not even the white noise of Morning Edition or the half-n-half in my coffee, can soothe me. Not the beautiful sunlight beginning to stream in from the living-room windows that looked out onto a patio surrounded by hydrangeas and other flowered beauty. Not the family of kittens perched on the gray bench, taking turns batting one another with their paws. I watch them snuggling beside a larger cat that I could only imagine was their mother. I missed my kittens. 

I turned away from the window and myself, taking a last sip of coffee and put my red mug with the broken handle into the sink. The handles been cracked for a month now, shattered in a major battle with my husband, the one that sent me packing. 

I had to get to work. I had a no excuses approach to teaching students enrolled in the Pre-GED  class I taught at the library. I was not about to let a thing like, a crumpled marriage, be the reason I didn’t show up for a class of young people already accustomed to adults flaking out on them consistently. 

I put on something I thought would make me feel good, a favorite skirt and sandals in the warm spring air, and headed for the bus stop. 

I walked through my new block of Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn four blocks and two avenues away from our family home.  I passed a mural. It featured a black hip hop rocker spinning in his Adidas sneakers and Kango hat, a gray and bearded white man with a fist clutching bags dollars signs spray painted gold, and a subway suspended in the air flying past the empire state building. A hand written sign on the window  promised pannis, coffee and smoothies. A skinny white guy up on a ladder held a painting palette and dabbed at the wall. I wondered if he were the owner of this next too-hip- to-be-square shop, in the middle of abandoned Howard Ave. 

At the corner Howard Avenue where Saratoga Park takes center stage between Macon and Ralph Avenue, I wondered if I’d see our Vizsla on the end of a leash, dragging my husband behind him. It was quiet. Only a group of men who would eventually become my new cheering squad everyday to work, swept leaves or hosed down the sidewalks.

At the bus stop I imagined my son having passed this way an hour ago, hat pulled dangerously low over his eyes and hands stuffed in khaki pockets with an air of unaffected cool of Junior High. I wondered if I’d see my daughter or more likely, if she’d notice me, while rushing by with the cell phone glued to the side of her head, brokering her next deal with a club owner for a college party.

On the bus, I didn’t write or read or listen to music. I stared out the window, paying special attention to when the bus passed my block to glimpse our three family brick house.  

When I got to work, that morning, I was greeted by the safety officer. I gave a brief hello and hurried to the second floor, anxious for the quiet of my office before anyone else arrived. I could feel all of my sadness and fear aching to pour out of me, but I had no time to bear it.

The safety offer had come upstairs. I was not too surprised to see him there, he was a very kind person and we’d been friendly.

“Are you ok? You don’t seem like your usual bubbly self,” he said, in his heavily Barbadian accent.

“Yeah. I just had a very rough weekend,” I said pretending to be busy at my desk to clock in, touching papers, the usual bullshit you do when you don’t want the touch of concern from someone else to touch your heart and the feelings percolate.

I’d have to wait all day to process the decision I’d made.