If my life had a theme song, it would undoubtedly be Whitesnake’s ‘Here I Go Again’. Born an only child, raised to be independent, that song has gotten me through every downward spiral and heartbreak my life has taken. It doesn’t matter how hopeless the situation may seem, I simply play that song and my confidence in myself is restored. It’s a reminder I don’t need anything or anyone to validate me.
Not a job.
Not a man.
Nothing.
However, something tells me if I were to turn on the stereo and blast the beginning chords of the song, it wouldn’t help much. Slamming the door behind me, I watch as my sixteen-year-old son, Tommy, throws his jacket on the floor and stalks toward the staircase. The times have changed since I was a young girl hanging out the sunroof of her car, blasting a song in front of her ex-boyfriend’s house. It’s not my best friends who ride the turbulent waves of life with me. Now it’s my children.
“Get back here,” I order, balling my fists at my sides. This parenting gig didn’t come with a handbook and most of the time I feel like I’m doing a shit job. Especially after we embarked on a new journey, one that didn’t include their father. Like I’m sure many will say; being a single mother was never part of my plan. I’m willing to bet it wasn’t God’s plan either. I mean really, no one could possibly think putting me in charge of three humans was a good idea. In fact, I’ll also wager there is someone out there somewhere who is keeping score and taking bets of all my fuck ups as a parent.
Twenty to one says it’s my mother-in-law.
“Leave me alone,” Tommy snaps, and though his back is facing me I know he’s rolling his eyes. A pastime of his if you will. Adolescence is a bitch and I pray to the gods of puberty I will have mastered all the woes that it brings by the time Jenna starts going through the changes.
“Fat chance, kid,” I retort, crossing my arms. “I’m your mother, it’s my job to ask questions.”
“You're fired,” he sneers, causing me to flinch.
That one hurt.
The powers that be really stacked the odds against me after puberty hit. There used to be a time when dance parties fixed everything for me and my boy. A time when I still had some sort of control over him. Now, he’s angry most of the time and I can’t help but feel like it’s all my fault.
At nineteen, I met the man of my dreams and life as I knew it changed completely. I fell fast, and I fell hard for him. Louie was older, more experienced, and I was completely dazzled by his charms. While all my friends were obsessing over guys their age who didn’t take them anywhere, I was wearing a new dress every weekend and being introduced to things like oysters and helicopter rides over the New York Skyline. Long weekend getaways to Atlantic City, shopping sprees with no limit and nights spent wrestling between the sheets.
We were crazy in love and inseparable. Considering I was a girl who enjoyed her friends and considered them family, I hurt a lot of people by spending every waking moment with Louie. The job I loved didn’t seem so important anymore and my friends, well, they just didn’t understand. Living through the Sex and the City era, my girlfriends and I all wanted to find our very own ‘Big’, and while they were still roaming the streets of New York hoping to find theirs, I had already found mine. At least that’s what I told myself to ease my conscience.
The lavish dates and the age difference wasn’t the only similarity we shared with my parents. Louie, like my father, had been married before. However, while my father and his ex-wife divorced amicably, Louie and his had not. I couldn’t understand why someone would let him go but I was eternally grateful his marriage had ended. Her loss became my gain, and in turn I truly believed I was Louie’s angel, the girl sent to him to restore his faith in love. Six months into our relationship he gave me a beautiful Tiffany engagement ring and asked me to be his wife. There was no hesitation in my response and no doubt in my heart. I loved Louie more than anything and I couldn’t wait to be Mrs. Milano.
I was happier than I ever imagined, yet I was skeptical. I couldn’t understand why God chose me out of all my friends to be the one who got her happily ever after. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. While I had hoped to one day have a family of my own, I never expected to be the first of my friends to get married, and I sure as hell never expected to be the first one to become a mother.
The ink wasn’t even dry on our marriage certificate before I became pregnant with our first child. For most, pregnancy is a beautiful time in someone’s life. It’s the time when a couple anxiously prepares to meet the greatest love of all. My pregnancy started off that way, both Louie and I were beyond thrilled to become parents, but nine months proved to be a long time and things started to slip for us.
I lost my job a month before our wedding and on top of acclimating to life as a wife and a mother I had to learn to depend on him. I never had to ask anyone for anything. I was fourteen when I got my first job and while everyone thought I was spoiled because I was all my parents had, I never asked them for a cent. They were hard working people and they raised their daughter to be the same way. So, asking my husband for money to buy diapers was an issue for me. Control shifted, and we were no longer equal partners.
Louie was hardly home at night and being pregnant I felt all sorts of insecure. At first, he blamed my hormones but after our Tommy was born, nothing changed. He was still out all hours of the night, leaving me to care for our infant son by myself and used work as his excuse. All of which would have been fine if Louie wasn’t a self-employed laborer who had his own concrete business. I hardly believed he was off giving estimates on patios at two in the morning but whenever I brought it up, we’d fight.
I’m not talking about the kind of fights that you brush off and move on from. I’m talking wars. I’m talking slinging mud back and forth at one another, threatening to leave and never return. I’m talking about the type of fights that last for a week and even after you’ve apologized the cruelty of the words you used on one another continues to resonate with you.
Fights that leave you bitter and questioning why you ever married in the first place.
I realized then, motherhood changed me. It put things into perspective for me and I no longer was the girl doting on Louie’s every word, dropping everyone and everything to be by his side. It took being someone’s mother to realize he was just a man. My son came first and I think Louie resented that after a while. He married me expecting me to be the passive girl who loved him unconditionally. The girl who put him on a pedestal, not the girl who couldn't care less if he came home or if he called.
Still, unwilling to believe our marriage was doomed, I told myself we were threading through a rough patch. After all, doesn’t everyone say the first year of marriage is the hardest? So maybe they were off. Maybe it was more like the first three years of marriage are the hardest. I forced myself to remember the beginning and that crazy love that made me believe we were soul mates.
A year later I became pregnant with Jenna and my husband swore things would be different this time. For the most part, I had a happy pregnancy and Louie was there by my side through it all. Juggling two children was a lot for us but we found our footing. He was more hands on with our daughter than he was with our son and I thought we were in the clear.
Sure, we fought here and there, but it was nothing like those first few years. We were like every other middle-class couple, working hard to make it work. We had a modest house, kids who never wanted for anything and there was room for us to grow.
And grow we did.
Five years later, we welcomed another little girl into our hearts. Lexi may have been a surprise, but she completed our family. If I thought having two kids was a lot, three was crazy. Everyone seemed to have something scheduled at the same time and I was pulled in three different directions. I barely had any time for myself and Louie was no help. He had averted back to his old ways and started disappearing at night again.
That’s when I learned he had a gambling problem; all those late nights I thought he was playing me he was actually playing high stakes poker. It took me ten years and for us to be on balls of our ass to figure it out. Louie promised to get help, and I was forced to go back to work to help make ends meet. In truth, I thought his admission of guilt would save our marriage. Not only was he finally seeing the error of his ways, but working and finding that independent woman inside of me again, it evened the playing field of our marriage. However, that wasn’t something Louie particularly cared for.
Having a wife who worked made him feel inadequate so he started verbally abusing me. To make himself feel like more of a man he had to chip away at my self-confidence. He needed me to be dependent on him so that he felt secure, something I never realized before. I tried to ignore it at first, not wanting to fight in front of the kids but he made it impossible. Every fight became worse than the last and those early years when I thought our marriage was at its worst became the glory years.
My son began to hang on his father’s every word and I feared he’d wind up believing his father’s actions were acceptable, that he one day would grow into a man and treat a woman like that. Knowing I wasn’t setting much of an example for my daughters, I feared the impression our marriage was leaving on them as well. I was conflicted between my vows and my silent oath as a mother, but the choice became clear once Louie became physical with me.
In seventeen years he had never laid a finger on me until six months ago when he pushed me up against a wall in front of our children and tried to choke me. My son had to peel him off me and I knew then our marriage was over.
Now here I am in the woods, bouncing from one broken-down rental to another, looking to set a good example and make a new beginning for me and my kids.
A fresh start.
I’m thirty-six years old, starting over with three kids. Kids who resent my choices and fight me tooth and nail over everything. If I ever needed a reminder of the girl I used to be, the fiercely independent girl who never excepted defeat, it’s now.
“Tommy,” I call as he starts to stomp up the stairs. “Get your ass back down here.”
“Jesus Christ, Ma. Why is Tommy allowed to curse and not me?” My youngest interrupts.
“I didn’t curse,” Tommy argues, grinding his teeth as he snarls at his little sister. “Mind your business, Lexi.”
“You don’t have to be a jerk,” Jenna mutters, wrapping an arm around her sister’s shoulders defensively. “I’m glad that dude yelled at you.”
“Shut up, Jenna!”
“Wait a minute,” I shout, stepping between them so they don’t kill each other. “That guy next door yelled at you?”
“Jenna doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he hisses.
“Sure I do,” she argues, pushing Lexi out of the way. “I followed you outside and watched you go into his garage.”
“Is that true?” I ask, diverting my attention back to my boy.
“So what if it is?” he shrieks, throwing his hands up in the air. “Did you ever think that maybe, just maybe, I wanted to be myself for a minute? Since we left the city you’ve been suffocating me. You’re always breathing down my back, ordering me to do shit or asking a million and one questions. So yeah, I went next door, and I sat on the old grump’s bike for a minute and for a minute I pretended I wasn’t me, that I was just a normal sixteen-year-old boy and not a kid that’s moved three times in six months and has two sisters who annoy the shit out of him every damn day.”
Trying my hardest not to cry, I stare at my son and will myself not to make this about me and my feelings. I try to ignore the fresh wounds of his words and find a way to comfort him because that’s what moms do. They ease their children’s pain and ignore their own.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I had no idea you felt that way.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he laughs sarcastically. “You’re too busy pretending our life isn’t that bad, looking for a silver lining that doesn’t exist,” he adds, pointing to the door.
“That’s not true, Tommy.”
“Right, I’m sorry, this must be one of the lost episodes of Lifestyles of The Rich and Famous,” he says as he waves his hand around the house.
I should’ve known this was coming the moment we pulled up to the house and it was nothing like it appeared online. Like my son just pointed out, I ignored the overwhelming sense of disappointment in my gut and tried to find the good in a bad situation. I watched my children frown as they stared out the window, at the overgrown grass and warped wooden porch that wrapped around the house. I plastered on a smile and told them it just need a paint job and someone to nail the shutters back in place. I lied to them like I lied when we pulled up to the last two houses and promised them we’d make it a home. After all, a house is just a house. It’s not a home until you make it one, until your family fills it and every wall holds another cherished memory.
“That’s enough,” I order. “Now, I get you’re upset but you don’t get to talk to me like this. I’ve told you time and time again not to judge a book by its cover, Tommy. It might not be what you’re used to, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make it a home.” I cringe as I say those final words. I’m just as tired of saying them as they probably are tired of hearing them. Leaving the city behind and moving upstate is proving to be harder than I figured. Every rental is worse than the last and the repairs are sucking me dry. Never mind the strain it’s putting on my kids.
Turning to my daughters, I force a weak smile and pray I haven’t lost them too.
“Right, girls?” I question hopefully.
“Mommy, it’s a jungle out there.” Lexi frowns, pointing to the front door.
“It’s just grass, baby. Once we’re settled in, we’ll trim it down,” I tell her, turning my attention to my middle child. “Jenna?”
“I don’t understand why we couldn’t stay in the old house,” she says sadly as she casts her gaze downward at the floor. She says the same thing every time I pull up to another rundown house and ask her to call it home. And each time she asks, I bite down on my lip and contemplate how to answer. Telling her that her father is a bastard who let our house fall into foreclosure isn’t an option and so I say nothing.
“Mom couldn’t afford to keep the house in the city,” Tommy answers for me. “It’s cheaper to live in the middle of nowhere than to live in Staten Island,” he adds.
Flinching at the truth, I look back at my son who raises an eyebrow daring me to disagree. At times, he is so much like his father it scares me.
“While that’s true, that isn’t the only reason, Tommy.”
“Right,” he agrees, rolling his eyes. “Your job is here too. How could I forget?”
After my ex-husband basically blackballed me from working anywhere in Staten Island, my options for work were limited. An old friend of mine offered me a job out here waiting tables at her father-in-law’s pub and I jumped at the chance. I told myself it was only temporary but I still haven’t looked for anything else. When the bills pile too high, I shove the kids in the car and move them to the next disaster.
“You have a problem with that, blame your father,” I snap.
As soon as the words leave my lips, I regret them. When I filed for divorce, I swore to myself I wouldn’t talk ill of Louie to our children. As bitter as I may be, he is still their father, and he loves them as much as I do. While I won’t make excuses for him, I won’t tarnish their image of him. Should the day come where they look at him differently it will be because Louie made the wrong choices, not me.
“Look, this is where life has taken us so we can either make the best of it or we can sit here and feel sorry for ourselves,” I say exasperatedly, turning back to my son’s snarling face. “I’m sorry if you feel I’ve been hard on you. I know change is hard and I don’t want to make any of this harder on you.”
I glance back at my girls.
“I don’t want to make it harder for any of you,” I amend. “We just need to find our footing and I promise it’ll get better. One day we’re going to look back on these days, on all the moving and the grass that’s two feet tall and we’re going to laugh. We’ll even laugh about tonight.”
I need to believe those words as much as I need them to. I think there comes a time in everyone’s life when they pause and reflect. Sadly, we don’t always like what we see. The truth hurts, and it’s up to us to change it. Anyone can fake a smile and pretend like their world hasn’t been ripped from under them, but it takes a stronger person to fix what is broken in their life.
I want to be the stronger person not the fake ass bitch who lies to her kids and pretends she’s happy when she’s not.
“It’s going to be okay, Mommy,” Lexi reassures as she runs toward me and wraps her arms around my legs.
God, that breaks my heart to hear.
Bending down, I wrap my arms around her tiny frame and place a kiss to the top of her head. A second later another pair of arms wraps around me and I press my lips to Jenna’s cheek. My arms are full yet they’re empty and it causes me to lift my eyes back to my son.
When did he become taller than me?
When did he stop being the little boy who asked me to tie his shoes?
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he whispers as he shoves his hands into his pockets.
“Me too, baby, me too,” I whisper as I extend my arm out. “Come here,” I urge, watching as he hesitates. “What? Is it not cool to hug your mom?”
His lips quirk slightly before he removes his hands from his pockets and steps closer. Then he wraps his arms around me and kisses the top of my head.
I may be broken, my life might not be ideal, but my arms are full and that’s more than most people have.
I squeeze my babies and sigh heavily.
“It’s been a long day. Why don’t we call it a night and start fresh tomorrow?”
“What about the boxes?” Tommy asks.
“We can haul that shit inside tomorrow…I mean stuff, we can unpack all our stuff tomorrow.”
“Mom,” Jenna scolds.
“You said shit,” Lexi giggles.
“Shit, don’t say that,” I groan.
Did I mention I have a filthy mouth? It’s really not becoming and like everything else, I’m working on it. I swear one of these days I’ll quit smoking and stop cursing like a sailor. I’ll be the lady my mother raised and the Parent Teacher Association will beg me to be the president of their club.
One of these days it’s going to happen.
Just maybe not today.
Or tomorrow.
“She’s said worse,” Tommy adds with a wink.
Wondering if he’s referring to me or my five-year-old, I blow out an exasperated breath and watch the three of them stomp toward the stairs. I cross my arms under my chest and lean against the wall as they bicker over who will get what room. I should probably intervene, maybe even draw straws or some shit but I don’t. By the time they reach the landing they’ve figured it out for themselves and without any bloodshed.
That’s a win in my book.
A small victory, but nonetheless a victory.