My father told me the real reason when I was fifteen. "Your mother and I got divorced because I couldn't afford her." When he said this, the slightest hint of a smile appeared on his face. "What I mean is she was expecting a certain way of living and I...I just couldn't afford it. I guess I thought that love would be enough, but that might have just been me being blind. Or stupid."
My parents had divorced when I was twelve. It had made no sense at the time, yet at the same time I wasn't surprised, as your parents splitting up just seemed like a rite of passage one went through in my neighborhood, like riding your first bike or going on your first overnight field trip. Other kids had said they thought it was weird that I ended up living with my father, as everybody I knew ended up with their divorced mothers, but had they known my parents better, it would have made more sense to them.
It wasn't that my mother didn't love me (I thought), it was that her interest in me, my father, and her friends seemed like more of a hobby she could pick up and then set aside for a while, like a knitting project or a story one was writing. She was there for me at the toughest moments, as I recall; it was mostly all the other moments where she was somewhat lacking.
My father and I initially moved just across town from her in Tacoma, but then he was offered a job in Illinois, so he decided to relocate me, my step-mom and step-brother, and himself. When he told me why he'd divorced my mother, I'd initially wondered whether he was making enough money now where, if he had wanted to, he could stay married to her. It wasn't until I got a little older that I understood he wasn't just telling me a straightforward reason for their separation, but instead painting her as a gold digger who put material things over any other sources of happiness.
I started to reevaluate her in that light when I would see her, which was maybe twice a year. It was hard to tell from any of her personal interactions with me—she was still enthusiastic about seeing me and would still spoil me with presents—but she did end up dating two men after my father who it seemed were pretty loaded. I reaped some of the benefits (tickets to a Seattle Supersonics game, a trip overseas), but it still seemed to confirm my father's suspicion. However, it didn't seem to affect my relationship with her in any way. I imagine she found it easier being a devoted mother when she only really had to do it biannually.
Even if my dad could have given my mother the finer things the mid-level management job he'd moved us for, it wouldn't have lasted long. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had trouble working, eventually quitting. My stepmom Carolyn ended up taking a second job to supplement her administrative assistant position, and they were just barely able to hang onto the house. As for me, I made it through college, and fell into teaching high school English even though I wanted to be a writer.
My school was in a rural Michigan town, and I barely made it through the first year of school. I started getting panic attacks on certain days when I had to get up in front of the kids to teach, and they can smell fear. Some of them treated me like a friend, more of them treated me like a joke, and a handful treated me like an adversary. Additionally, the job had forced me to move away from my girlfriend, Jessa. We had been dating for a year and a half, and I expected her to follow me to my new job, and she gave me every indication that she would.
We communicated by phone, mostly, with her still back in Illinois deciding between graduate school or continuing to work. When we spoke, because things were going so badly for me at school, I avoiding talking much about my day, not wanting to sound like I was constantly complaining, yet at the same time, she was really the only one I could talk to. It turned out even sparing her my whining wasn't enough sustain things, though, and she broke it off with me just I was preparing for my second school year.
As it turned out, this abysmal state of personal affairs was actually a boon to my writing. Fiction was the only thing that seemed to make sense, so I worked on my projects whenever I could grab a spare minute. Still, even I wasn't ready for what would happen in the span of about nine months. Shadowfields, a horror screenplay I'd written and submitted almost on a whim to a fairly prestigious screenplay competition, garnered a runner-up prize of $500, plus guaranteed exposure to some pretty big names agencies that represented screenwriters. I was contacted by an agent, Sheldon Broadview, who told me that he would take me on as a client. Within five months, he was able to find a studio who optioned my screenplay for around $80,000 dollars.
I couldn't believe it. I had no idea what to do next. Sheldon urged me to work on more screenplays, which I began to do, even as I had to finish out the year of my teaching contract. He was able to get me an assignment on spec, where I rewrote a script to a psychological thriller and was guaranteed a payday, no matter whether they used my version or not. I didn't have the slightest idea of what I wanted to spend the money on, so I paid off my student loans, purchased a brand new but still fairly inexpensive car, and placed the rest of it in a savings account. My family was just as shocked, although my dad told me he always predicted something big would happen for me. My mother insisted I fly out to Washington, now that a plane ticket wasn't such a burden, and celebrate with her, even though we'd just seen each other around Christmas.
I was hesitant—I had a spring break coming up, but I was burned out from teaching and really just wanted to time to myself for writing and relaxing. I didn't know how to convey this to my mom without hurting her feelings, and my dad's attitude toward her did enter into my mind when thinking about why she was so insistent I go. Still, I liked being back home in Washington well enough, and thought I might be able to slip away to do some writing when she went to work. Also, she had broken up with her latest boyfriend in the last few months and had seemed genuinely upset around Christmas, so I also thought my presence might help cheer her up.
I said "yes," and was soon being picked up from the airport by Mom. When I saw her across the terminal, she wore a big smile. As usual, she turned quite a few heads—even at 44, I could see what my father had seen in her when he married her over twenty years ago. She was a radiant woman with dark, fiery reddish-brown locks and a fashion sense that always seemed (at least to me) ahead of its time, regardless of the year. She was wearing black pants that were billowy down near the calves but that hugged the contours of her legs further up her thighs and a rosy pink top with frilly sleeves. "There's my son the big shot Hollywood writer," she said, embracing me.
"Hey, Mom." On the way back to her house, she continued to gush over me.
"I can't believe they're going to make a movie out of your words," she said. "Or I can believe it. I can't believe it took them this long to make your movie."
"Well, don't get too excited. Sheldon told me it's never a sure thing with movies until you actually sit down in a theatre, and that's if I'm lucky," I said.
"What do you mean?"
"That's if it doesn't go direct to DVD," I said.
'they thought it was going to be huge," she said. "The money is guaranteed, right?"
"Oh, yeah," I said. "I just mean—there are so many people involved and so many egos, that sometimes these things get bought and never made into films."
"As long as somebody bought it though, am I right?" she said, beaming.
"Yeah. It'd be nice if they could make it into a movie without changing a bunch of stuff, though," I added. "Although sometimes they pay you to make the changes yourself."
"Ooh," she said, sounding a bit like one of my teenage students. "Make sure you make clear to them how in demand you are, honey."
The first two days of the trip were fairly routine—we went out to eat (she wasn't too thrilled about cooking), visited Olympic National Park and the Space Needle, and talked. A recurring theme in our conversations was the things she seemed to be going without. She apologized (a few times) for the water temperature in the shower, saying that the hot-water heater needed to get fixed when she "had the money." At dinner, she told me she would have offered to pay, but that she was a bit short lately. She alluded to her most recent break-up leaving her in a "bad place," and I inferred she didn't just mean emotionally.
It was becoming more and more clear the reason behind the invitation. Finally, when she offered to cook rather than me buying her another meal, I decided to cut to the chase. "How much do you need, Mom?"
"What?"
"How much money?"
"Honey, I—"
"Can we just get this out of the way?" I said. "Rather than spend the whole rest of my stay just dropping hints?"
"Dropping hints? What are you--?"
"It's alright. You're my mother. I can afford to help you now."
"I don't want to put you on the spot, Jacob." She looked genuinely concerned. "It's not like I've been the best mother." It was difficult figuring out to say to such a clear statement of fact.
"Please, Mom. Don't make a big deal out of it. How much do you need?"
"I don't know. It's just—why don't we talk about this some other time?"
"I just want to get it over with, Mom," I said. As it turned out, she had somehow racked up $10,000 in credit card debt that she was expecting her last boyfriend, the airline pilot, to help her pay off, yet that hadn't happened. I refrained from asking whether that was a factor in their breakup. Never having this much money in my possession before, and without a real sense of what I should really be doing with it, I decided to take care of her credit card debt and add $2,000 to help her get her car and water heat fixed, with maybe a little left over for whatever else she needed.
I had one condition: under no circumstances should she disclose to my dad how much I had given her. She broke down in tears of joy, and I questioned why exactly I was doing this for a woman who would likely go on to spend half that money in clothing within six months. "Thank you so much, honey," she said, putting her arms around me and getting some of her smeared mascara on my face. "I could never ask for a better son than you."
That night, we ate dinner out again, and she continued to thank me throughout. "It's just—it's what you do for your family, Mom," I said. "You know—no matter what it is, we're all here for each other. I'd do the same thing for Dad or Lily or anyone," I said, Lily being my stepsister.
"But you need to save that money," she said.
"Yeah, I guess," I said.
"I mean, have you thought about buying a house?"
"A house?" I replied, in between mouthfuls of pasta.
