A Mother's Goodbye

I try not to think about Heather for the rest of the evening. Instead I go into Isaac’s bedroom, lie next to him on the floor where he’s playing his iPad, his precious hour of screen time. Outside it’s starting to get dark, and I know I should tell him to get ready for bed, but I don’t want to go into good-mother mode. I just want to be.

Eventually Isaac puts the iPad aside and flips over onto his back. The glow-in-the-dark planets and stars we stuck to his ceiling a year or so ago are coming out as twilight settles outside, fluorescent yellowish-green and fluorescent twinkles above us.

Isaac’s room has changed a lot from the pristine elephant-themed nursery of seven years ago. He grew out of the elephants by age four, asking for race cars, and then a year ago I redid his room in a more age-neutral scheme that I hope will last through the teen years – varying shades of blue with red accents and a fairly subtle solar system theme with a lava lamp that has stars showering through its glass base and a framed, antique map of the solar system on the wall. And of course the stars above us.

‘Where’s the Big Dipper?’ Isaac asks as we look up at the stars together.

‘I’m not sure.’ I tried to follow a pattern of constellations when I put them up, but some have peeled off and it’s hard to tell now. ‘Where do you think it is?’

‘There.’ Isaac points straight above us, and I can make out the vague dipper-esque shape.

‘I see it, Isaac.’

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He shoots me a grin, and my heart expands with love. I feel so grateful for this moment, for every tender, little, unimportant exchange that matters more than anything in the world. And for a second my mind flicks to Heather, to how few moments like this she has, and I feel a pang of guilt. Am I being cruel, taking Isaac from her? Am I being selfish, demanding more when I know she has so little?

And yet I know, I absolutely know, I can’t go on the way we have been. Isaac can’t. Maybe if Heather wasn’t so needy, or I wasn’t so paranoid, but the way we are, the way it’s been… I can’t do it any more, and I don’t want Isaac to suffer through it, either. Something has got to give.

The next evening I pick Isaac up from Stella’s apartment on Eighty-Sixth and Park. Close enough, I’ve thought more than once, for them to walk to each other’s apartments when they’re a bit older. I picture him riding his scooter down Park Avenue, kindly doormen casting a benevolent, watchful eye, and it makes me smile.

‘Grace.’ Stella throws open the door with an expansive gesture as soon as the elevator doors open onto her floor. She lives in huge, sprawling apartment with her husband, Eric, who works in corporate litigation, and her two boys – Will and his younger brother, Jamie, who is a lovable terror.

‘I’m making cocktails,’ she says as she ushers me into their hallway, which is a welcoming mix of clutter and style. ‘Since it’s Friday. And you must need one, since you’ve had this childcare nightmare.’ Stella has a tendency to talk in italics, but I love her warm-hearted enthusiasm, so different from my own cool containment. Perhaps that’s why we work as friends, why we hit it off from that first play date in early September, spending forty minutes chatting by the elevator, exchanging our life details along with knowing smiles, while Will and Isaac raced around us.

Now I follow her into the huge kitchen, which is a happy mess in a way my kitchen will never be. Mixing bowls are out, and kids’ artwork is papered all over the walls, and Justin Timberlake is singing about the sunshine in his pocket, blaring from her phone stuck into a set of speakers.

Stella dances around to it as she fetches a large glass and salts the rim with a flourish. ‘Margaritas,’ she says, ‘because it’s so warm out.’ She takes a sip from her own as she pours mine from a pitcher she’s made up, and then garnishes it with a wedge of lime. ‘Ta da!’ She dances over to me to hand me my drink, and I laugh, heartened by her exuberance.

I take a sip. ‘Oh, this is fantastic. Thanks.’

‘Come sit down.’ She pats one of the high bar stools around the huge marble island. ‘Tell me about it. So she just quit?’

‘Yes, but she kind of had to.’ I slip onto the stool and take another sip of the margarita, which is delicious, and heavy on the Patron.

‘Had to?’ Stella wrinkles her nose. ‘Couldn’t she have given you some notice?’

‘I guess it came up kind of suddenly.’ I don’t want to be disloyal to Dorothy, whom I still miss and love, but a tiny dart of bitterness fires through me all the same. She knew how difficult leaving so quickly would be for me.

‘So have you found anyone else yet?’ Stella slips onto the stool next to mine, her half-started dinner preparations forgotten. It looks like she was making some kind of paella, with pink, unpeeled shrimp lying in a fat pile on the island, along with a bag of Arborio rice.

Since having Isaac I have tried to cook a little more. A couple of times a week I manage to make something healthy and fun – homemade pizza with a whole-wheat crust, a colorful stir fry. But the other nights I’m late home from work or I’m too tired, and so we have take-out or something simple, pasta and sauce from a jar. I try not to feel guilty about that, but inevitably I do. Motherhood feels like constant tug-of-war between guilt and love, fear and joy.

‘No, I haven’t found anyone yet.’ I take another sip of my margarita, which is going down nicely. ‘I was thinking about putting him in the after-school club, actually.’ We both grimace, as if I’ve said I want to stick him in a Romanian orphanage.

‘Surely you can get someone. You used the same agency as I did, didn’t you?’

I nod. I used the same elite agency just about every mother on the Upper East Side uses. Not that Stella has a nanny any more; after ten years as a human rights lawyer, she quit work after Jamie was born, and is a happy and satisfied stay-at-home mom.

‘It just takes such a long time. Reading the applications, figuring out the ones I want to interview. It’s such an important decision.’ I think of Dorothy with a pang. I miss her so much – her comfortable confidence, the way she filled my apartment with her presence, her belly laugh, her easy manner. I’d interviewed six prospective applicants before I found her, and when I found her, I knew. It felt like coming home.

‘You were lucky to hold on to Dorothy for so long,’ Stella says with a knowledgeable nod. ‘So many nannies quit when the kids start school, don’t they? I’m lucky I never had to go down that route.’

‘Do you miss work?’ I ask impulsively, and Stella pauses to seriously consider her answer.

‘Yes, of course I do,’ she says at last. ‘How could I not? But I still wouldn’t change a thing.’

‘And when Jamie starts kindergarten?’ It’s always the million-dollar question for the moms who were lucky enough to be able to stay at home. When do you go back to work? What kind of job do you get? Back into the eight-to-six slog (nine-to-five doesn’t exist in the corporate world) or do you let yourself be shunted into part-time purgatory? It’s a choice I’ve never had to make, and never will. If I want to stay in New York and see Isaac through school, I’ll be working full-time until I retire.