I’m 38 years old, and my two kids and I have moved into my mother’s house.
No grown woman wants to live with her mother.
I have my dignity.
Then again, I never thought I’d get into my current financial situation.
My father joked, “You could fry eggs and piss at the same time.”
I’d made my last loan payment, and his salary was now enough to support us both.
I told myself I needed a break from corporate life.
I was yearning to be a writer.
Except once I had the time to write, I mostly frittered it away.
Yet even when I sold my first essay toThe New York Times, I felt like a dilettante.
After all, the little money I earned from writing barely covered my Visa bill.
I wrote the same way I shoppedat my leisure.
We had tearful rows that left us exhausted.
Afterward, I’d escape to my parents' house in New Jersey.
Going to the place where my father lay dying felt simpler than coping with my marriage.
It was the scent of striving.
My father owned a meatpacking plant in Brooklyn.
He liked to tell me that he worked in an icebox so I could go further in life.
I wanted to spend time with him.
Looking back, I see that I suffered from what I can only diagnose as “affluenza.”
I got massages because I felt anxious; I felt anxious because I lazed away my days getting massages.
I didn’t get a job because my husband earned a million a year.
Then my father died.
A year later, I got pregnant with my son.
A few years after that, I got pregnant again, this time with a girl.
I wasn’t naive.
He moved out two weeks later, in December 2009.
The timing of it all stunned me.
It was a dire situation, but the separation also brought some relief.
Keeping my marriage afloat had exhausted me.
Money, on the other hand, was a problem.
Every window framed the Statue of Liberty, yet I felt anything but free.
“My door is always open,” my mother said when I worried out loud about our situation.
The first time she offered, I thought it was sweet, but I was also irritated.
Surely my ex would land another high-paying gig and at least be able to provide monthly child support.
But as the weeks passed, he remained unemployed.
Move in with my widowed mother in Jersey?"
She was a swimmable distance, but I couldn’t get to her.
Like my own independence, she was close but seemingly out of reach.
The lease on the apartment was up in September, when our son would start kindergarten.
“I can sign him up for school in New Jersey,” my mother offered.
“Um,” I replied.
“Can you lend me some money instead?”
She explained that she couldn’t.
A friend passed down summer wardrobes for my children and a few things for me.
I wasn’t embarrassed to take them.
I cut out the babysitter and all extracurricular expenses.
My 5-year-old pointed at me, cracking up.
I stomped my foot and burst into tears.
Then I picked up the phone and dialed.
“Can we really move in with you?”
Six weeks later, a swarm of moving men in red shirts emptied my home on the river.
We left one day before Hurricane Irene bore down on the city.
I felt as if we’d escaped ruin.
“How are you holding up?”
“By letting go,” I told her.
I was starting with nothing, ready to rebuild my life from the bottom up.
Back in my old neighborhood, kids ride their bikes on the sidewalk, as I once did.
My son sleeps in my childhood bedroom.
“I dream where you dreamed,” he says when I tuck him in.
My daughter sleeps in what was once a large closet, now a nursery.
Red-and-orange shag carpeting runs not only wall to wall butupthe walls, to the ceiling.
I thought I was too proud to move in with my mother, but I had no choice.
Who cares if my friend thinks I’ve hit bottom?
What I’ve actually hit is RESET.
My son is now in a New Jersey kindergarten.
My daughter is in a preschool down the hall from him.
My ex sees them regularly, and he sends money when he can.
As for me, I’m practicing law from home and living on a tight budget.
I don’t have health insurance; I’ve even applied for food stamps.
I’m doing what I have to do, supporting my family.
And despite everything, I find time to write.
One night, I start dinner while my mother reads thePennysaverat the kitchen table.
Sometimes, it feels claustrophobic, cooking in my mother’s kitchen.
She folds up her reading glasses, takes her granddaughter from my arms and taps my hand.
“I’ll fry thewhat is this?
I nod and lean my temple into hers.
“Go for a run,” she tells me.
I attempt to run every day, a healthy vestige of my old life.
I run to escape the sadness of my divorce and my mother’s occasional nagging.
“Lift the handle on the toilet after you flush!”
(Clearly, the move has been an adjustment for her, too.)
I try not to look too far ahead, but I do set goals.
In two years, I want my own place.
In three I want to write a book.
I’ve learned I need deadlines to thrive.
I remind myself that I’m not back where I started.
I may be in a familiar place, but I’m in a very different mental space.
And so I work as a lawyer, I write, I parent, I run.
I cover this familiar ground, finally refocused on what matters.
A roof over our head.
Photo Credit: Susan Pittard
