Single Mom (5 page)

I rode the blue line train back to the West Side and was more pissed than a motherfucker! A damned truck driver! And she didn’t even want
me
inside of her house! Ain’t that some
shit!
But I guess I brought it all on myself.

Y
wife Beverly and I sat at the dining room table in our spacious, two-bedroom townhouse in Lincoln Park, on the lower North Side of Chicago. At the moment, we were in silence. I had just shared my thoughts with her about gaining custody of my adolescent son, and Beverly just stared at me. I realized it would be a tough situation for her to handle. There was no way to break such life-altering news to my new wife without expecting a few waves to smash up against the shore. Nevertheless, I had to get the idea out in the open to at least see what the reaction would be. I figured we needed to have a pros-and-cons discussion on it.

We had just finished eating juicy steaks for dinner that she had excellently prepared. My wife should have been a young gourmet chef in an upscale restaurant, instead of a young college administrator at Loyola. She worked wonders with food. Maybe I could invest in a restaurant called Beverly’s for her in a few years.

“How long have you been thinking about this?” she asked me. She was easing into the process and getting all the facts. Beverly has always been a rational woman; tall, stately, attractive, and reserved. That’s why I felt so comfortable with my decision to marry her.

“Actually, for a few years now,” I answered. “I began to feel more strongly about it after I saw how close you were with your nieces and nephews. They really love you,” I told her.

Beverly had been around my son on a few occasions before we were married. He even went to a picnic with us at Union Park and met her extended family. Beverly had two married sisters and one unmarried, with five nieces and three nephews. Her oldest niece was thirteen. I thought they all got along with Walter quite well.

“And how does
he
feel about it?” she asked me.

“Well, I honestly think that it would have to grow on him.” I leveled with her. “But it’s for his own good, sweetheart. He’s a very intelligent boy, and I just don’t want to sit back and watch him become another ugly statistic, if I can do something about it.”

Beverly began to show her first signs of disagreement with a noticeable grimace. “Well, they
do
live in Oak Park, Walter. I mean, that’s not exactly the ghetto. It’s far from it.”

I nodded to her. “Honey, I know that, but in case you haven’t noticed, my son is what you would call—for lack of a better word—a wannabe. He looks up to his older brother; he lived in the West Side of Chicago for a number of years, and I think he wants to be, you know, what they call
hard core
. He was even picked up for shoplifting in a mall last year.

“I mean, those are the kind of things that a good role model could stop before they get out of hand,” I suggested. “And I just want to make sure I don’t make any mistakes by procrastinating, while trying to convince myself that things are going to be all right.”

Beverly sat quietly again. I had told her enough about my relationship with Denise for her not to be in the dark about things, but I knew that we were ready to have another discussion about it. It was only logical; Walter Perry III was Denise’s son.

“And how does Denise feel about this?” my wife asked, right on cue. We had been married for a mere six months, but we dated for nearly three years.

I took a deep breath. “That’s going to be the biggest problem,” I answered. “I had mentioned the idea of a son spending more time with his father for those crucial teenage years, and she all but ignored me.”

“I can imagine,” Beverly commented.

We were planning on having kids of our own, and I could hear her motherly instincts kicking in. Beverly was twenty-seven and I was thirty-two. Our biological clocks were good and ready for children.

“You never thought about marrying her?”

She had never asked me that before. I figured that before we were married, maybe she just didn’t want to know. My answer was quick and decisive. “Never.”

Beverly peered at me. “I’m just curious as to why not.”

“She just wasn’t my type.”

She was still staring. “Explain that to me.”

I sighed. It’s always tiresome, tedious, and definitely challenging to explain the mistakes of your youth. “We talked about this before,” I said. “I told you. I was a young college student with an interest for a local Chicago girl, who had a lifestyle that was totally alien to my own.

“It was a doomed relationship from the start. And in a more perfect world, it never would have happened.”

Beverly shook her head and stood up from the table. “You know, it really irks me that men continue to have these
flings
with women they don’t care two cents about. These women are human beings, Walter. They’re not pieces of flesh.”

I listened to her words and wondered if she felt ashamed of marrying me. What if women were just as willing to factor out men who had children, like men often did to them?

“Honey, we’ve already agreed that it was a poor decision on my part. Now, at this point, there is nothing that either of us can do to change that, but we
can
make a difference in my son’s life by accepting an imperfect situation and dealing with it on very real terms.”

Beverly seemed to be in so much turmoil that I was impelled to stand up and hold her.

“Have you ever stopped to think about how
I
would feel about this?” she asked me.

“That’s what I’m doing now, by sharing my thoughts with you,” I commented.

She leaned away from me and looked me in the eyes. “Walter, you made it seem more like your future intentions, rather than just some thoughts that you were having. I mean, sure, your son is nice to have around
sometimes
, but what if I like the closeness and the space that
we
have together before we have our
own
kids? And maybe, I would be more accepting of this kind of thing after I had a chance to discover motherhood on my own. I want to go through each stage of it, instead of being tossed right in the middle of parenthood. I mean, I’m sorry, but I just don’t know if I’m ready for this,” she told me, before breaking away.

I had no idea she would react so strongly. “I thought that you loved kids, after seeing how you dealt with your sisters’ children,” I responded to her.

“Walter, that’s because I know they’re not my constant responsibility. I can say no to them, and have time to myself whenever I want. And at
least, while you’re pregnant, you can go through nine months of getting ready for that loss of freedom. You’re asking me to give up that freedom immediately.”

“Beverly, it’s not like he’s an infant. If anything, he would be able to help out, more than get in the way.”

“Okay, well, if
that’s
the case, then why are you so concerned about his future? I mean, it’s obvious that you want to take him on as some kind of project, and if he’s really not intending on being here and enjoying what we have to offer, then how is that going to be helpful to us? You already said it yourself; he wants to run the streets, and I don’t know if I’m ready to deal with that right now.”

“Look, we’re not talking about some at-risk youth from a foster home, we’re talking about my son here.”

“Yes, your son!
Denise’s
son! And I don’t want to be in the middle of this any more than I already am,” my wife blurted out to me. Then she marched off to the bedroom.

I sat back down at the table and thought about taking a couple of Advil. I rarely had headaches before the night Denise Stewart announced that she was pregnant with my child. I thought of her as an exciting and seductive adventure while finishing my undergraduate studies in business at the University of Illinois at Chicago. However, she quickly became a long-lasting headache, and a constant reminder of my stupidity. It took me four years to even admit the mistake to my parents. I thought they may have disowned me. Fortunately, it never got to that point. In many ways, I was still a nervous kid back then, getting all worked up and exaggerating things.

I met Denise at a club in Greektown during those early eighties, where I had an off-campus apartment nearby. After growing up in Barrington, so far away from the action of a big city, I was eager to mingle with brothers and sisters from Chicago. Denise was two years my senior, and at the time, she had a Jheri curl that hid most of her attractive brown face. But it was her body that
I
was crazy about, and she knew how to use it. Whenever we were intimate, I felt like an explorer in an ancient, lost city of treasure, especially when we visited one of her Chicago locations. I think that added to my fantasy, the mission of traveling through a rough city to sleep with a woman who had been there. A native.

I was so strung out for Denise’s pleasures that I practically flunked out of school at one time, for absenteeism, tardiness, and incomplete assignments.
Then she told me that she was pregnant, and everything changed. Not only
was
she pregnant, but she was four months pregnant, past the first trimester. She said she was confused about whether to tell me or not. Therefore, she procrastinated.

I was a blind idiot who didn’t even notice that she was picking up weight. I hung up the phone with her and broke down and cried. After that dreadful night, all I thought about was my schoolwork, my career in banking, and getting back on track with my life, as if my liaisons with Denise had all been a bad dream that would somehow go away. However, I had to face reality.

I wasn’t there for her every day, but I made sure I gave her the money she needed to raise a child. Outside of a marriage proposal, I gave her whatever she asked of me. And Denise had never asked for marriage. I don’t believe she ever thought too strongly about it. It was pretty obvious to both of us that she was still in love with her first son’s father. He was doing time in jail for armed robbery, so I became Denise’s temporary adventure as well. We were trading places, so to speak. Or more like sharing places in our universal lust. So when she got pregnant, it was understood that we wouldn’t become a family, we would simply deal with it.

Since Denise was nearly halfway through the pregnancy, abortion was out of the question. She told me she didn’t believe in abortions anyway. She said that it was for selfish people who had no heart. And she was right, because I was scared to death, and all I could think about from that night on was how much I wanted to be by myself, while focusing on my schoolwork and my future.

UT
see, your situation is unusual for a single mother. Most of us are struggling just to put food on the table. You don’t have that problem. The only thing
you
need a man for is your social life, really,” an angry mother snapped at me. She had brought her two kids along with her to our monthly meeting place at the Harold Washington Library Center in downtown Chicago. Nikita was there with my niece Cheron, and my sister definitely didn’t need to hear comments concerning my healthy income. She already had enough excuses not to straighten out her life.

A lot of the women in our group looked at me as some kind of Cinderella story, and I got so tired of being in the middle of things that I didn’t know how to respond to it anymore. On one hand, I sympathized with single mothers because I
was
one, but on the other hand, I wanted to tell many of the mothers there to stop whining so much and get on with their lives. I wasn’t going to
apologize
to them for having my own money! I worked damned hard for it! Yet, a lot of them wanted to view my success as unrealistic. I’m not saying that every woman had to own her own business, but to provide for your kids, you
at least
had to be motivated to do all that you could.

Sometimes it felt as if I were being punished for my success. I was being punished for being a single mother, never being married, making a living, staying positive about my future, and for being able to live through hell and actually come out on top!