Call Me Cockroach: Based on a True Story

by Leigh Byrne

  “They only want to live there because it’s more comfortable for them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had the big screen TV thrown in my face.”

  She chuckled. “Naturally they’re going to want to stay where the best stuff is. Kids don’t like change, but they adjust. Like I told Chad, my suggestion is to do what’s best for the children.”

  “But I’m not giving up my kids.”

  “You won’t be. They’ll just be living with Chad and continuing school and other activities as usual. Your custody will be fifty-fifty. You’ll see them on the weekends, and of course, there will be more time for them to stay with you during the holidays and in the summer. Chad seems to be very agreeable in this area.”

  “But his family will be taking care of the kids most of the time. He’s only doing this because he doesn’t want to pay child support.”

  “Well, no man wants to pay child support. But in Chad’s case, I believe he honestly can’t pay it. Look at it this way. At least he’s willing to take the kids. Most men aren’t. It would be much harder on you if you had to try to find a means to support your children on your own. I can try to get you a small support payment to help out when the children are living with you.”

  I hung up the phone and dropped my head into my hands. What do I do now? Do I force Molly and Daryl to live with me against their will? Or do what’s best for them and let them live with Chad in the house they love surrounded by family?

  It didn’t take me long to make up my mind. I decided to force them to live with me. It’s a mother’s natural instinct to want her kids with her, to expect them to be with her, whether she can support them or not. Usually the father doesn’t want them because he doesn’t think he can care for them. But this father has help. Lots of help. It doesn’t matter; it’s a given; the mother gets kids, the father pays support. Done deal.

  Not long after I’d made my decision, the situation got even worse. Chad called to tell me that Molly—from out of nowhere—announced she would testify in court that I was an unfit mother if I didn’t let her live in the house with her dad.

  “I don’t know why she said it,” he said, his words tinged with sarcasm. “I think it’s got something to do with the camel jockey you’ve been seeing.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “You can ask her yourself.”

  “I will!” I slammed the phone down.

  I dialed Dani’s number. “Dani, something terrible has happened! Chad just told me if I don’t let the kids live with him Molly said she’s going to testify in court that I’m an unfit mother!”

  “That bastard!”

  “Do you think she actually said it?”

  “Honestly? With the way she’s been acting whenever she’s at your apartment—like she’s miserable—yes. Sweetie she’s only a kid. Chad probably told her you would come back home if she said that. Or the lawyer said it was the only way he could get custody of the kids and not have to pay child support, and he told Molly it was the only way she could live with him. You know Chad and the Suttons put the idea in her head and the words in her mouth. How else would Molly even know what an unfit mother is? It’s not something that normally comes out of the mouth of a twelve-year-old.”

  “I’ve never abused my kids! Maybe I haven’t given them the attention I should have, especially lately…”

  “Stop it, Tuesday! You are not an unfit mother. Just because you have to work a lot, and don’t have a family to help you, and you can’t afford a nice place to live and a big screen TV, doesn’t mean you’re not a good mother. And because you go out to dance once in a while, maybe have a laugh or two, doesn’t mean you don’t love your kids. Chad goes out—does that make him an unfit father? No. Just because you put yourself first for once in your life, and claim some happiness you rightly deserve doesn’t make you a bad person, or a bad mother.”

  “Thanks Dani; you always know what to say to make me feel better.”

  “I’m not saying it to make you feel better; it’s true.”

  “I just thought of something else. Chad’s family would probably testify against me too. They would do anything to help Chad get custody. What if they reveal that I was a victim of child abuse? You know what they say about abuse victims.”

  “I don’t care. It’s simply nonsense and it won’t hold up in court, even if Molly does testify. They’d have to prove it and they can’t. I’ll testify if I have to.”

  “I know you would.”

  “But to be honest with you, sweetie, you are in a bad position. You don’t have family to watch the kids while you work, or help you out financially, and Chad does. I wish I could help, but I’m hanging on by a thread myself. If I didn’t have my own family I don’t know how I would make it.”

  “Dani, what am I going to do?”

  “The way I see it you have three choices. None of them are pleasant, and two are probably out of the question. Do you want to hear them?”

  “I think I already know, but yeah, go ahead.”

  “You can, one, force the kids to live with you. Two, let them live in the house with Chad. Or three, you can go back. But don’t do the last one. You’ve already tried that once and it sent you into hysterics.”

  “I’ll force the kids to live with me.”

  “I don’t blame you. But if you do, you run the risk of Molly saying you’re an unfit mother, just so she can live with Chad and the big screen TV. Even though it would never hold up in court, to hear her say it would crush you even though we both know she doesn’t mean it. It would be your worst fear coming true. And if Chad doesn’t pay support, how will you afford to buy the kids’ clothes and school supplies on your own? What about court costs and lawyer fees? The bills will pile up fast if this goes to court.”

  “I’ll keep Daryl then. I know he will stay with me.”

  “You can’t afford a sitter for when you work nights and weekends. And what about summer?”

  She was right—about all of it. Staying with me wasn’t what was best for Molly and Daryl. It was best for me. Because I didn’t have money or family, unless I caved in to Chad and went back, I had only one choice. “I have to let them live with him.”

  “It’s not like you’re losing them.”

  “At least I’ll know Chad’s family will see to it they’re taken care of.”

  “Tuesday, whatever you decide to do you need to try to be happy for once in your life—if for no other reason than to see what it’s like.”

  After almost a year of dragging our feet, Chad and I finalized our divorce. He kept the house, and so the kids’ lives wouldn’t be disrupted, we agreed their primary residence would be there with him, for the time being. I would get them on weekends and in the summer.

  The day I signed those papers agreeing to let Molly and Daryl live away from me was when the descent began. As soon as I put down the pen, I began sinking back into the black abyss I’d known as a child, and this time I knew pulling myself out wouldn’t be easy. I wanted to curl up in a ball on the floor, but instead, I did what any true survivor would have done in my situation—I shut off my emotions so I could get up, put one foot in front of the other and go on functioning. Like I had done so many times as a child, I became numb.

  Dani had said it would crush me to hear Molly say I was an unfit mother, but even though I hadn’t heard the words come out of her mouth, I still I felt like I’d been run over by a tank. Ironic how the one person who had turned my emotions on was responsible for turning them back off again. But I tried not to blame Molly, and kept telling myself Chad and his family were behind it all. I never confronted her about her decision to live with Chad—I couldn’t bring myself to even talk about it. I’d become the coward my daddy once was, inherited his most despicable trait—the ability to turn away from problems and pretend they didn’t exist.

  I was used to having my children close by every day, knowing they were safe, hearing their laughter. I missed Molly’s sleepy eyes at bedtime. Tripping over Daryl’s toy
cars scattered around the floor. I was afraid I had made the biggest mistake of my life.

  Chad and I divided up our belongings amicably. Because the kids were with him, I agreed to let him keep most of the furniture and all the appliances. I settled for 100 dollars a month child support for when the kids were with me, but Chad didn’t even pay that. He could no longer afford the payment on my car—a used Firebird we’d bought a few years earlier—and neither could I, so we sold it, paid off the loan, and split the remaining money. With my part, I bought an old beater to get me to work and pick up the kids, a rusty Chevy Chevette with a rickety engine and a black smoke shadow.

  Chad recovered and was doing fine. Better than fine. He was happier than I’d ever seen him. He’d been seeing someone he had met not long after our separation, and she had already moved in with him. Into our house. The house we built together. She was a pretty hairdresser who ran her own business. The kids liked her. She had great hair. Chad was obviously crazy about her. I could tell by the way his mouth turned up at one corner when he said her name, like he was trying to be cool and suppress a smile, but his joy was so overwhelming he couldn’t. I’d seen him smile that way only once before.

  I was happy for Chad, happy he’d found someone. Truly I was. He was the kind of man who needed a woman in his life, and knowing he had companionship helped to ease the guilt I still carried for leaving him. But I was jealous. Not of his new woman, or even them being together, but of his tolerance of her independence. From talking to the kids, I’d learned she spent most of her time at her beauty shop. Why was it okay for her to be away from him so much? Had there been something about me that made Chad possessive and controlling?

  The divorce papers had been signed. Molly and Daryl were content with the custody arrangement. Chad had found his soul mate. And I was lost, as usual. Freedom was not what I had expected. Being on my own reminded me of when I was a kid, and had finally succeeded in picking the lock on my bedroom door so I could steal some food from the kitchen. For so long, I had wanted nothing more than to be out of that locked room, but the instant I stepped into the world of the free—the world in which the rest of my family lived—I was overcome with fright. There was too much space outside my tiny room, too many choices. As depressing as it was to be locked up every day, somehow the boundaries of my confinement had made me feel safe. There were no more boundaries for me now. No getting my old life back. No more chance for a sure thing. Every day that lay ahead of me was a big fat scary mystery. But that’s what I’d signed up for, what I had to have.

  Without Molly and Daryl by my side, I was miserable, except on the nights Dani and I went out. On those nights, I wore tight dresses and puffed on cheap cigarettes while I mingled with strange men, pretending the drinks they bought me were for reasons other than to try to take me to bed. In the low light of a smoky bar, I was almost pretty and the drunken men that came on to me found me to be almost desirable. Out on the dance floor, with a decent buzz, was the only time I could clear my head of Mama’s belittling words, Chad’s possessive control, and the fear—there was so much fear. I danced for every party I never went to, every date I never had, and for a few hours, I was happy—superficial, tequila-soaked happy. Happy, until the next morning when my head was cleared of alcohol, and the sunlight found my mascara-streaked face and I remembered my children were not there. That’s when I pulled the covers over my head in shame for daring to have fun without them.

  Matt remained a distant, blurry figure in the ever changing landscape of my life. He filed for a divorce from his wife, Fatma, and showed me a copy of the papers he had yet to finalize. For the sake of their sick son, and perhaps convenience, they agreed to continue living together in the same house after their divorce, but they would sleep in separate rooms. Or so he said. I didn’t pressure him to leave Fatma, because I didn’t want him to. She was my safety net. Her presence prevented him from trying to force a commitment from me. Matt was always there, somewhere nearby, looming in the parking lot at Ashley’s, or waiting for me at a secluded table in a dimly-lit restaurant. I met him discretely once or twice a week, and we drove to a neighboring town for drinks or dinner. Sometimes we got a room in an out of the way motel. He was always there, but he was never really with me.

  Neither Matt, nor Chad, nor any other man was equipped with the tools needed to knock down the stout wall I’d erected between me and the rest of the world. Matt kept insisting we would be married someday, and I listened as he made plans for us, knowing all the while we would never be together in that way. Being the coward I was, I didn’t tell him otherwise, or put a stop to whatever we had. I wasn’t quite sure how to break off a relationship that had begun with a lie, and therefore, in my mind was not legitimate. So I kept seeing him, waiting for something to happen to make it go all away.

  Matt’s wife somehow found out about me. One night, as I was closing up at work, I spotted her looming outside the door. Draped in a black hooded cape, she stood staring dead at me like the Grim Reaper waiting for a chance to take me out. Even though I’d never laid eyes on Fatma before, I knew the shadowy figure I saw was her. She was the only darkly exotic, forty-something woman that would’ve had an interest in me. Later, when I told Matt, he confirmed it had been her outside the store, and said she was just curious to see what I looked like. I said she was nuts.

  Ashley’s went out of business and I was temporarily unemployed, until a friend got me a job at the local newspaper selling ads. Every now and then, they let me write a feature story. The writing I enjoyed, but I wasn’t good at the selling part, because I got lost all the time while servicing the ads. The job didn’t pay much, so I started looking for something else right away.

  Jobs were scarce in the area, unless you wanted to work in the coal mines, or the pants factory, or Job Corps, the delinquent youth rehabilitation center where my daddy had worked. Retail was all I knew. There were a few mom and pop stores, but most of those positions were filled by relatives of the owners. It took a while, but I found work at a furniture store owned by one of my newspaper advertisers. The pay was better—a small base hourly wage plus commission—but the evenings I sometimes had to work were challenging when the kids were with me.

  FLICKERS IN THE DARK

  Dani landed a great job as an administrative assistant at a product research company in Evansville, Indiana, right across the Ohio River from Henderson. She quickly made plans to move away from Uniontown and get an apartment in either Henderson or Evansville. We both had shared our dreams of breaking away from Uniontown’s stagnant economy and moving up in the world. Her good fortune inspired me to make a change in my life too. I decided to go back to school. I figured studying would keep me from thinking too much about the mess my life had become.

  One good thing that came out of my short time working for the newspaper was I discovered I could write well. Growing up, I’d loved to write, and my essay papers were always the ones chosen by the teacher to be read aloud in class. When I was about fifteen, I started writing down my childhood memories as they came to me, and found the process to be cathartic. But I never realized I was a good writer until, while working for the newspaper, I began to garner praise from my boss for the feature stories I wrote. A community college in Henderson offered an associate’s degree in journalism, and I thought that would be a good place to start.

  I attained a government grant to pay my college tuition and a student loan to cover the rest. Dani drove me out to the college and helped me get signed up for all my classes. Everything seemed to be going smoothly—too smoothly for me—when it dawned on me I had a big problem that could stand in the way of me and my college degree: my driving phobia.

  Because this irrational fear of mine embarrassed me so, I hadn’t even told Dani about it. No one knew I got lost when I went to places I’d been dozens of times, like the grocery store and even work. I had to leave thirty minutes early whenever I went somewhere to allow for lost time. On my way to pick up the kids from Chad’s, I’d be driv
ing along fine when suddenly everything around me would turn foreign. Whenever this happened, I panicked, thinking I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, and pulled into the first side road I saw to try to backtrack and figure out where I made my mistake. From there on, I took one wrong turn after another, until I found myself driving around in circles in a frenzy. Eventually I always made it to Chad’s, but when I got there the kids were angry because I was late.

  The thought of driving to Henderson every day was almost inconceivable to me. I needed help, and Dani was the only person I had to turn to. I didn’t know what I expected her to do; I just thought she should know. In the car on our way back from the college, I inhaled a breath of gumption. “Dani, you know how I’m scared of water and heights?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s something else I’m afraid of I haven’t told you about.”

  She glanced over at me. “Really? What?”

  “Driving; especially in a strange place, and sometimes if I’m in a lot of traffic and the cars around me are going fast.”

  “Huh. Well it’s a good thing there’s not much traffic where we live.” She laughed. “Nobody gets in a hurry either.”

  “Actually, I’m more afraid of the getting lost part.”

  “That’s funny; my mom is too!”

  “She is?”

  “Yep; she even gets lost in the Wal-Mart.”

  Hearing someone else had the same problem reminded me of when Aunt Macy took me to the doctor because I ate toilet paper, and he told me his sister ate chalk—like less of a freak. “She does?” I asked. “I get lost in the Wal-Mart too! And when I was a kid I got lost in the school halls at least once a week.”

  “Mom’s so bad she says when she’s driving in a strange town and her mind tells her to turn one way, she turns the opposite.”

  “That works?”

  “Does for her. But she’s okay as long as she stays in Uniontown,” She chuckled. “It’s real hard to get lost there.”