I was the one suffering nerves, I don’t know—as was so often true, I should have taken the advice I’d heard many times on videos from the Love and Logic Institute, which DSS used in training both foster and birth families, when they say to parents, “Now, who has the units of concern?” What they mean is that parents should not carry the worry for kids’ actions when the kids should shoulder that worry. But in this case, at Ryan’s age, it was not the kid’s so much as the mother’s burden to carry. So I would lie awake at night, mourning the hours of lost sleep because I knew I’d have to be up at six in order to get Jessica to her nine o’clock class, and last in my rosary chain of worries would be the one about Ryan going into the community college building to use the bathroom. So much for the Serenity Prayer—by this point, I’d completely lost any wisdom to know the difference.
All was good between Jessica and me so long as I offered no advice, which would be the case with any mother-friend, really. So Ryan’s men’s room trips were definitely not my burden to carry, yet I felt absolutely mortified one day, a few weeks into the summer session, when Jessica met us at our usual wooden table where I was unpacking our picnic and snatching after the blowing paper towel napkins.
Jessica was white faced and narrow eyed. “My kids can’t be in there anymore,” she said. “I can’t bring them here at all. They can’t be anywhere on the grounds.” We had been told to leave.
She was furious and confused; I felt like I’d been slapped. And I was baffled. What in the world could either of the kids have done that was so bad? Wasn’t this a community college? A no-frills one, to be sure, but wasn’t it for parents trying to better their lives, among others? Wasn’t Jessica practically a poster child for her generation’s struggles and here fighting to walk a good path? “I knew Ryan shouldn’t have gone in the building,” I blurted, even as I tried to muffle my words.
But really, whatever had happened, it was one of those rare times, I realize, when both Jessica and I were angry, and we were actually both angry at, and hurt by, the same thing. By that point, she was probably used to authorities issuing orders without explanation, but all these years later, I still wonder about the reason.
Then, at night, I fumed for all of them. How many more worlds would Jessica be told her family didn’t belong in?
INDEPENDENCE DAY
Why did I continue to help? I didn’t have to do those things for and with Jessica to keep seeing Michael—that was always entirely clear to me. All I really had to do was not betray Jessica and Benny to any authorities—a much more difficult challenge. I didn’t have to help get the power restored or take Jessica on special outings with us. All that was my choosing. If I couldn’t have my first prize of Michael free and clear, then, like Benny, I wanted us to be a family. And I wanted Jessica to break free of everything that had held her back—to be free to have some fulfillment in life. Everyone else in the family was busily wishing she would break free of Benny, but I accepted that this was a lost cause—she’d seemed tantalizingly close to doing that at times, but I just wanted her to have the chance to live more fully. To read, to have real work, to be.
Helping or “helping”? Now, I might see my efforts of those years as enabling, patronizing, naive—but at least it was in the direction of health and for the purpose of good. Yes, my own unproductive hours on the university tenure clock and unwritten pages went whizzing by, and if I’d invested even half the hours I spent on Jessica, much less the boys, on our marriage instead, who knows how much healthier and better a wife I would be. Nonetheless, I hoped that Jessica would acquire some momentum and agency, recover some long-stolen sense of what still could be. I didn’t think her life would change or that she would ever break into some Martina McBride chart buster and walk away from Benny, but Jessica surely deserved the simple experience of being in a place where adults read, write, and calculate—where she could be the adult mom in a small comp class of eighteen-year-olds who wants to be there and makes it worth the teacher’s time, as virtually all her instructors had told her she could be. Every week she would write her one-page compositions and have me check the spelling before typing them on her antiquated desktop computer—the most memorable for me was an argument paper against a proposed state lottery, based on her experience as a new mother whose husband would insist they end their pressure-washing workweek by driving to the state line and spending all their diaper and rent money on the lottery tickets he was convinced were one number from making them rich. Her husband was not bad at math, he’d told her, and he’d figured the odds.
JESSICA’S PARENTS, who often leaned on her for help, were the least supportive of all when it came to any post-GED education: I doubted this when she told me, until the day her father looked up from working on a car in the driveway and told her she was “gettin’ above your raising”—a phrase I’d only ever heard used as a joke. I didn’t think real people still said it. He said he couldn’t understand the words she used anymore. When she was in grade school, the teachers were still trying to make kids lose their Appalachian accents, and she’d had speech therapy galore. That seemed to have made no difference, luckily, but now six weeks of community college had her speaking to her family like a Hogwarts professor? I didn’t think so.
Jessica had a genuine hunger to learn and, like everyone, needed to be listened to by someone who cared about her opinions—yet the peremptory wishes of men quickly overrode her instincts. She would devour any book: her class reading of Into the Wild, an account of the fatal adventure of a young survivalist in Alaska; the boys’ hardcover library copies of Harry Potters, which she would finish in a night; the Lee Smith novels I passed along; Fried Green Tomatoes, The Color Purple, and The Glass Castle; and the cover-stripped romance novels she found in the dump’s Swap Shop shed. She often spoke of loving to read and told the boys how important it was, even though Ryan could go for weeks without a signature on his school reading log.
More puzzling was that when Michael was in primary school years later, long after Jessica’s community college dream had folded, she began doing his homework for him. He did have a lot of it, and he struggled with handwriting, so initially Jessica would take his dictation, writing down words or math numbers in big, looping, girl-cute printing, then have him trace over it in faltering pencil. This in itself was not always a bad thing, but she soon was literally doing the homework for him, not even with him, even when he wanted to do it on his own, he’d tell me; often the work he turned in contained mistakes he would not have made himself. He didn’t want to hurt his mother’s feelings, Michael said. The homework pages became almost a weird game of keep-away, with me trying to have him do it in my car or with me rather than taking it home. “Please tell Michael he has to do it himself,” I would beg his new and astonished teacher, whispering so Michael wouldn’t hear me and repeat it.
To this day, I am guilty of helping him with homework too much myself, always with the intention of keeping him on track once the afternoon spells of attention deficit and hyperactivity kick in full force; I prod him to do a better job, write in complete sentences, restate questions, show his work, find the evidence, and I simply try to get him to think. Or, as many parents of children with these problems may recognize, to keep him from spending all his energy on studying for the test he already took or writing a paragraph that addresses something entirely different from the narrowly prescribed topic—I was well aware that he would burn the house down before he’d redo it. So I don’t have much standing to admonish anyone for helping with homework, although I also know Michael would not do it if I didn’t at least try to corral him and keep him on track.
As frustrated as I was, and as hard as it became to get Michael to do the barrage of elementary homework, or even to hold a pencil instead of snapping it, I felt sure, I told the teacher, that his mom was just entirely bored and sad that she had never gotten to finish high school herself. I was sure, I said, that she found these small daily challenges as satisfying as others might find guessing Wheel of Fortune phrases or doing crossword puzzles. Jessica might have been pulled from high school by her parents and from community college by her boyfriend’s jealousy—but she could still do these simple assignments while feeling like a good parent who was helping her child get to a better life than she’d had. Even when Benny’s teenage son lived with them, she took copious notes from his math book on his behalf—notes that she longed to