The Everyday Gay is flattered that Deb Lewis offered to share her story about the trials of becoming a parent. Nothing is more inspirational than discovering the child you love changed you more than you thought you’d change them.
I said up front, before Mollie was even born, that I wasn’t parent material. Were it not for love, I’d be a recluse living in a nest of pages, talking to characters — the only people I can make vanish when they get annoying.
Love, though, has other plans.
When Mollie was born, I figured she was a goner. No prenatal care, bombarded with crystal meth in utero. Six weeks early and septic (meaning, bacteria in her bloodstream). Five pounds — lost ounces with each day.
I thought, “Better luck in the next life.”
But she lived.
#
My wife, Gail, and I take Mollie’s older half-sibs, Gail’s daughter’s kids — Gail’s blonde, sun-kissed, blue-eyed grandkids — each summer, from school’s-out to the first fall bell. Give them a break from their psycho divorcing parents. Each June we coerce Ms. Worried-Eyes Morgan into being a kid again, wrangle Leah’s manipulative streak — middle-kid-itis just made her nuts, and teach Lukie how to talk all over again. And not to hit. Which takes longer each year until it’s August before he shows self-restraint — take ’em back, it starts over.
#
Then Mollie was born to Gail’s daughter in the cool, darkening season of 2002. Instantly diagnosed failure-to-thrive. The mother’s milk dried up on top of Mollie being sick. We discovered that while “Mother” crashed in 20-hour post-crank comas, while Morgan and Leah were at school, four-year-old Luke pulled bottled formula from the fridge to feed his baby sister.
Each time we looked in, I refused to hold this baby, not wanting to get attached.
#
Summer 2003. Morgan’s eleven, Leah’s nine, Luke’s four. Mollie’s six months. I pick up the older kids at May’s end. While Morgan finishes packing her brother, their ma stumbles through with sleep-squashed eyes looking for a bottle for Mollie. She fishes one from under the sofa, opens it, sniffs it, makes a face, dumps it in the kitchen sink, rinses it once or twice, then pours in some Yoo-hoo knock-off and feeds that to Mollie.
I don’t say anything, because Mollie’s staying put. We set the big kids up with day camp in the Park District, so I can teach summer classes, but the Park District won’t take babies. When my gig ends, I’ll return for Mollie, and I don’t want the kids’ ma to give us a royal rash about whether the kids can visit at all. She’s threatened it before.
#
When my professor gig ends in July, I bring Mollie to join us.
Sad baby. I had to wake her during feedings or she wouldn’t eat. She never got chubby, but looked stronger, had a little better color — pale porcelain instead of bluish translucence.
She howled at bath times — I don’t think she’d ever had a bath before. I showed her how to smack the water. “Splash, splash, splash,” I’d say. Sad little eyes watching me. In steps we got there, her tiny hand smacking the water. She got to like bathing.
Summers end, though. I had to return the kids for their dose of the Hoosier public school system. Mollie’d go home too. I didn’t feel good about taking the big kids back, but at least they were a unit — I knew they’d watch out for each other.
Once, long before Mollie, after not being able to raise the mother on the phone, Gail and I busted springs for Terre Haute. The parents’ separation had turned nasty. Midnight, we arrived at the weedy yard, the disintegrating trailer. The mother was out. In her stead, some man, mid-thirties with limp black hair, and a punk boy of no resemblance.
The man held the screen door latch. Didn’t want to let us in.
Gail put hands on hips, glasses blazing in the dark. “I’m the children’s grandmother. I want to see the kids. Try and stop me; I’ll call the goddamn fuzz.”
The screen door drifted open.
Gail boogied down the hall, to the kids’ room — they slept together like hamsters. She tripped over a bedroll in the doorway. Morgan, it turned out, wrapped up like a tamale. She was nine. Leah was asleep under the bed with Lukie. While Gail squatted between laundry piles lining the hall, I scanned the junked living room. She asked, “Morgan, honey, why are you sleeping in the door?”
Morgan usually wakes hard but not this night. “I’m protecting them.”
“What do you mean, honey?”
Morgan couldn’t say.
“Wake up, sweetie,” Gail said, “Get your brother and sister. You’re coming to our motel — you can swim tomorrow!”
“We don’t have swimsuits.”
“We’ll go to Wal-mart and get some,” Gail said. Every time we went down, the kids needed something; we’d go to Wally World, get them clothes, write their names on the tags so their mother couldn’t return it all for drug money.
#
When I dropped the kids off at the end of Summer 2003, it didn’t feel right. Gail wasn’t with me, had to work.
I am legally nothing to these kids. I didn’t want to leave them, Mollie least of all. I’d been reluctant to care, and my hardened stance — the automatic consignment to death — became a realistic fear. As I left Terre Haute, I pulled over and called Gail at work, sobbing into the phone: “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. It’s not right, leaving that baby there. It’s not right….”
#
Two weeks later, we get this phone call. The mother’s going to jail for manufacture and possession of crystal meth. The older kids are with their dad. No one knows who’s Mollie’s father, so we’ve got twelve hours to fetch the baby or she’s going into state foster care. Like that’s a choice.
We book across the state line, meet at a motel. I ain’t blood; I got no voice. While Gail and kin iron the devilish details, I care for the baby.
Mollie’s nine months old and can’t roll herself over. Her blue eyes are too sad for a baby’s face. Her head sits like a pumpkin on body of sticks. I peel her from the filthy car seat — where she’s apparently stored twenty hours a day — to change her, but her little bottom is caked with feces, broken and bloody from her waist to her knees.
I want to kill the bitch in the next room with my bare hands, but run a bath instead.
Our summer bath-time games are completely lost to fear; Mollie shrieks in the water.
“Heeey,” I coax, patting the water. “Look, Mollie — splash!”
Eventually we’ll rescue bath time from terror — again — so that the bathtub becomes a favorite place. Right now, though, her eyes watch my hands. She won’t meet my gaze. You ever encounter a baby who won’t look anyone in the face? There’s nothing creepier, nothing sadder. I feel both disowned and accused. When we’re done, the water drains black.
The scent of Desetin tickles at an edge of memory that predates words. I slather it on thick to unknot my chest as much as to soothe her angry skin.
And damn it, I don’t want this! This kid needs us, needs me. I’m not fucking parent material. I don’t have patience for anyone — anything — that interferes with my absorption in stories, my reading, my writing.
Son-of-a-bitch, though, this kid needs us.
#
So the mother lands in jail.
We’re not overly thrilled that the big kids are with their dad, but at least he’ll feed them, clean them, and make sure they get to school each day. They don’t visit in summer anymore — in fact, we almost never get to see or even speak with them, but at least they’re physically safe.
#
Mollie’s eight now. Gail’s her legal guardian, biological grandmother, and her Mimi.
Me? I fill in the gaps. What’s the word for me? I’m like a dyke father or something.
Gail’s mother? Even the postman calls her Nana; Gail’s Mimi to the kids. There’s room for creative license, but we don’t know what to have Mollie call me. For a while, she calls me “Mama” — feels like committing fraud every time I answer to it. She calls me “Da” and I think she’s trying to say, “Deb” but then it’s “Dada.” That made me strut. She changes to “Mama Deb” then “Mimi Deb” and I tell Gail I’ll just answer to whatever she calls me. Out of the mouths of babes, and all that. Eventually, she settles on “my Mimi and my Deb.”
#
Those aren’t her first words though. Moll didn’t start with “mama” and “dada.”
We were driving down Lake Shore Drive during the winter splendors, when tiny lights brave the darkness so we can, too. Gail and I kept pointing them out. “Look, Mollie, look at the pretty lights.”
They fascinated her. It was that spark of curiosity that made me think she’d be all right, that she wasn’t, and would never again be, a goner.
This night we were tired, not saying much. And there in the quiet, she says it. It comes out “Lies. Lies. Peet-it lies.” Her first words are “lights, pretty lights.” A couple weeks after that came “thank you.”
Beauty and gratitude. Not a bad start
(Another version of this story has appeared in Gertrude and Cellstories.net. Learn more about Deb Lewis at her website: deblewis.com)
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