life.
Forgotten and discarded, that pisses me off
present
I’m watching Kai clutching my cell phone in his hand holding it to his ear. The grip he has on it is fueled by the anxious hope that she’ll answer this time.
He’s standing on the landing outside our front door on the W…E mat. I can see him through the window from my seat on the couch, and I can hear the silence of an unanswered call through the open window.
When the voicemail prompt directs him to leave a message, his shoulders collapse in defeat and my heart twists. His voice is shaky when he speaks. “Hey. It’s Kai. Just checking in. Again. Looks like you’re busy…or whatever. Again. Bye.” And though I heard the muted sadness in his voice, I doubt she will.
It’s been two weeks since she’s talked to her kids. She’s on her honeymoon in the south of France with him. She texted exactly fourteen days ago to inform me they’d just eloped and were on their way to Europe for three weeks. She said she’d check in with the kids every couple of days. I begged her not to make a promise she couldn’t keep.
She hasn’t called once.
Kai calls her instead.
He leaves messages when she doesn’t answer.
Meanwhile, I bite my tongue. What I want to do is call her and say, “You’re a selfish bitch and a horrible mother.” Instead, I text her, The kids miss you and would love to talk to you. Or, when I want to scream into the phone, “You’ve ruined my fucking life!” I take a deep breath and text, Please call your kids tonight. They need to hear your voice.
My kids are beginning to feel forgotten. Discarded.
That pisses me off.
Kai steps back inside and hands me my phone. “Thanks, Dad. I’m going down to shoot some hoops.”
There’s a basketball hoop attached to the side of the apartment building. I nod, but all I want to do is scream. For all of us.
Damn her.
“Want some company?” I ask. I know he doesn’t. He’s the type of kid that needs to be alone to process his feelings. We’ll talk about it this afternoon.
He shakes his head and tries to put on a brave face. “No. I’m just working on free throws.”
Scotch is for geriatric men
present
Miranda’s back from her honeymoon, apparently ready to make an attempt at parenting in person.
I’m sitting in my car watching her drive away with my kids.
I don’t think of them as our kids anymore.
I think of them as mine.
I feed them.
I shelter them.
I talk to them.
And most importantly, I love them. Every minute of every day.
She left.
She hasn’t been around to do anything for them, least of all love them.
Her feeble attempt at connecting over the phone has been pathetic.
I try not to dwell on it because then I demonize her.
More than I already have.
It exhausts me and chips away at the goodness that I used to think cocooned my heart. The dark ugliness of hate peeks through the recesses and blots out the light of decency. I wonder how long it will be before I transform completely into my hate.
I’m fighting it for my kids.
But it’s a conniving bastard that doesn’t fight fair; it fights dirty, a knife in the back of hope.
I shake my head to clear it and take a few deep breaths. She’s here for twenty-four hours with my kids. It’s eight in the morning on a Saturday. I’ll pick them up in this coffee shop parking lot tomorrow morning at eight o’clock so she can make her 10:00 AM flight.
I don’t know what to do with myself. I haven’t gone twenty-four hours without a child in over eleven years. For a moment, I consider just sitting here in my car until they return in the morning.
But I crank the engine and drive back to my apartment.
As I climb the stairs, the panic starts to set in. It’s similar to the initial feeling you get when you realize you’ve lost something important. The gripping, instantaneous fear associated with not only loss, but an incompleteness. As the panic rises and builds it becomes shockingly apparent how much of my identity is tied to my kids. I am my kids’ dad. I am their caretaker. Everything else that used to make Seamus McIntyre, Seamus McIntyre, is gone. I am a parent. I don’t know how to do anything else. I don’t know how to be anything else. My chest hurts. The pain is alarming. Piercing. Am I having a heart