After losing her job and her girlfriend, it's time for Annie Abraham to admit defeat and move back in with her parents. She has hardly been back to her tiny Montana hometown since the unforgettable summer before her senior year of college, when she...
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Ava can't go to daycare today. I knew that yesterday, I knew it the moment Kelsey told me she needed to be symptom-free for twenty-four hours without medication, and yet I forgot to make arrangements. Now I'm supposed to be at work in less than forty minutes because after staying up half the night with Ava, I slept in this morning and then spent almost half an hour cleaning her up and stripping her crib.
Fuck. I'm going to have to call my mom.
I love her, don't get me wrong, but in a complicated way. We don't have the kind of relationship I wish we had. We don't have what I have with my own kids: mutual love and trust and respect. I truly love my children unconditionally, but with my mom I've always felt like there are terms attached, some kind of rulebook I've never seen but I'm supposed to be following.
She's a tricky person. She hasn't had an easy time of it and I know she carries that with her, but I wish she wouldn't use her own trauma as a yardstick against which to measure everyone else's. I think she thinks that she had it harder than me because at least my ex-husband spends time with our kids, that she judges me for asking for help when she never did, even though she moved here of her own volition. Like she's dangling the offer of help in front of me and then mocking me when I ask for it.
My family is full of broken pieces. My parents divorced bitterly when I was seven and even now, thirty-three years later, they still gripe about each other. Dad stayed in Butte, where he and his brother were born and raised, and Mom took me up to Bigfork, putting two hundred miles between me and my father. Neither of my parents wanted to make the four hour drive every other weekend, so I didn't get to see my dad much when I was growing up.
My extended family loves a scandal. They dined out on my parents' divorce for a long time, until I took center stage when my marriage to Christian fell apart, my son the same age as I was when my parents called it quits. Then, a couple years ago, when everyone found out I was pregnant and the father wasn't in the picture, I reached new levels of family infamy. Thank god for Dad's brother, Hank, who took the mantle earlier this year when he had a midlife crisis and left his wife of thirty-five years. Now he's in Phoenix and apparently not talking to his kids, and his wife (whom I always liked better) is living in South Dakota and going to AA. It's like that side of my family imploded, all seven of them living in different states. I'd take my illegitimate child over whatever they're going through any day.
I don't want to have to call my mom.
She moved here ostensibly to give me a hand with my kids but I think it was more so she could fire shots at me from a closer distance, cutting little remarks about my parenting and my children and my job and my lifestyle.
If I'd had more of a backbone when I was seven, I would've fought to stay in Butte with my dad. At least then I could've got to know my cousins. All my life, I wanted a big family, but my mom's an only child and Dad's brother didn't have his first child until I was thirteen, by which point my childhood in Butte was a distant memory. I made it to my cousin Grayson's wedding three years ago with Otto and Hannah in tow and I felt like the elephant in the room. The divorced mom of two who barely knew her own family, the rest of my cousins in their teens and twenties, no children in sight. Hank's five kids are my only cousins, but his wife has a big family; my cousins have cousins of their own, their families hanging out every summer while I watched from the sidelines in envy.
