Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,93
the other’s. There were countless times I told Mia she had to walk, because my arms were tired and I couldn’t hold her anymore.
During the first snow day, I tried to hush my inner voices of guilt and shame that wondered if Mia would have had a better life with someone else, if my decision to bring her into the world was the wrong one. I put my chin in my hand and watched her carefully paint another smiling face. We both wore sweatshirts and two pairs of socks. The air smelled like frost.
My heart ached for my daughter more than it usually did in those months as I watched her struggle through transitions between her dad’s house and mine. The Sundays I drove the three-hour round trip to pick up Mia had become an afternoon of jaw-clenching stress and terror for us both. For most of the previous year, when I picked Mia up on those afternoons, she’d sleep most of the way home, exhausted from a weekend of her dad parading her around his friends to show what a good father he was. Other times she’d cry for Jamie, which tore and stabbed me with anger at the same time. I had never regretted my decision to stay in Washington as much as I did on those afternoons. Poverty was like a stagnant pond of mud that pulled at our feet and refused to let go.
On the recent Sunday before the storm, Mia screamed at me the whole way home, for the entire ninety-minute drive from the ferry terminal to our apartment. I could never know what had happened, what he’d said to her to make her so angry. That afternoon, she yelled in almost the same primal, animalistic voice she’d used after her surgery.
“I hate you!” she repeated, kicking her feet. “I want to kill you! I want you dead!” Her dad took advantage of every possible moment to manipulate her into thinking that I kept her from him, telling her how sad he was that she wasn’t at his house. If he really wanted her to be with him more, he would have tried. He would have, at least, made sure she had her own room. But she didn’t know that. He just liked Mia wanting that. He liked seeing her cry for him. When she was only a year old, she’d return to me inconsolable, and I’d hold her for hours, her body stiff with rage and agony, a mess of hot tears and screams until it wore her voice and energy down. It was all I could do to hold her in my arms, wishing safety for her more than anyone else.
The afternoon of the storm, stuck in our own snow globe, I was content to drink tea and coffee and watch my daughter hum songs to herself as she dipped her paintbrush into a new color. Mia was too young to verbalize her feelings of loss, confusion, sadness, longing, or anger, but knowing this didn’t soften the afternoons when she would rage instead. My instinct was always to hold her, but she’d kick and scream even louder now. Sometimes I screamed back. I’m sure, through the thin walls of that apartment, my neighbors grew concerned. In those moments, I didn’t know what to do. I had no resources, no parents to call, no parenting coach or therapist or even a group of moms I’d connected with. I’d asked my child to be resilient and cope through a life of being tossed around from one caregiver to the next, and she screamed from underneath that weight. How would a stay-at-home mom, whose child had tantrums for normal things, understand my daughter’s anger?
Not that I hadn’t tried to connect with people. That fall, Mia’s day care had a parents’ night or some kind of potluck, and I stuck around long enough to socialize. Most of the children Mia’s age who attended preschool had parents, as in plural. They flocked around Grandma Judy, soaking up her jovial nature. Mia had been running in and out with a group of kids, leaving me to stand on my own, and I heard a couple of women next to me complaining about their husbands. I couldn’t help but turn my head to look at them, and they couldn’t help but notice I’d heard.
“It’s so hard on your own!” one said to me, the one who’d been listening to her friend complain. I nodded, forcing the sides of my mouth