hours after camp each day are more than enough, but I felt I had to accompany Mrs. McLaughlin to this party. I was concerned by how excited she had been all week. Her excitement was high-pitched like a child’s. She worked feverishly to finish the blanket for the baby, and each afternoon called her daughters to make sure they were coming to the shower. I think she’s become aware that there are a limited number of family gatherings left to her.
I wanted to be on hand today to keep her from overtiring herself. She argued with me at first. She said she wasn’t interested in paying me for a Saturday and that she didn’t want to show up at Kelly’s house with a nurse. She said she didn’t need the help. But I have found that the best way to deal with her is to not argue back, but to just go ahead and do what I need to do. That was why I forced my way into the bathroom with her upon her return from the hospital, so I could help her wash herself. That is how I get her, at least once in a while, to stop faking sleep. I talk to her softly and ask her questions about her children and her husband and her past until her eyes open and she responds.
And today, that is how I got here, on the front lawn of Kelly and Louis’s large house, looking for my neighbor’s car and my children’s faces. Tonight is my daughter’s first sleepover, so I asked Betty to stop here on the way to Jessie’s friend’s house. A few months ago I would have told Jessie there was no way she could go to the sleepover, and particularly not if I wasn’t home to help her pack and drive her there myself. But I am trying to be more open now. I am trying to let go of some of my need for control. I’m doing this not for myself—it is too painful for that—but for my children. Shortly after Mrs. McLaughlin told me about her dream of my brothers and sisters and the massive oak tree in our backyard, Eddie Jr. came home from camp and asked me if he could invite a boy he’d met over to play. It wasn’t the request that struck me, but the look on Eddie’s little face while he asked. He seemed afraid of me, and of what my response might be. I remember staring back at him in disbelief. Had I caused this? Had I said no every time my children wanted to leave our house or bring someone into it?
The truth was, I had, ever since my husband died.
I hadn’t been aware that I was limiting Jessie’s and Eddie’s lives by keeping them close to me. I just knew that I needed them in my sight. I needed to know where they were at all times. I needed to call their names and see their faces turn toward me. I chose not to go to the hospital staff picnic this year for the same reason. I did not want to lose my children in a cluster of six- and nine-year-olds in a potato-sack race. I did not want to sit on a blanket and compare notes with other mothers. I wanted my children with me inside the walls of the house my husband had renovated over the course of countless weekends. I wanted Jessie and Eddie Jr. seated at the kitchen table where their father had drunk his black coffee every morning. I wanted them tucked into their twin beds in the small, neat bedrooms across the hall from each other. I wanted to be able to hear them breathe from where I lay down the hall on my half of the big bed. If either of my children had a bad dream in the middle of the night, I was at their side in an instant.
But the look on my son’s face was a shock. It made me realize that I had gone too far. So now I am trying to do things differently. I am trying to make changes, and, as Jessie says, loosen up. But it is hard, and as I stand in the center of the lawn, my eyes on the road, I have to remind myself not to cry when my daughter bounds out of the car full of excitement because she gets to sleep across town from her mother and