A Fighting Chance

He was a beautiful child. Big for his age, sturdy, with blond hair, dimpled knees, and huge brown eyes.

I picked him up. His diaper was soggy, and I tried to lay him down on the cot to change him, but he clung to me and cried. I gave up and carried him to the car. By now, he was going full force, crying louder and kicking. I had tears, pee, and baby snot on my blouse.

By the time we got home, he was exhausted and so was I. I called our neighbor Sue and asked her to send Amelia home. I gave Alex a bath and started crumbling up hamburger in a skillet as I made dinner. I put in a load of laundry.

When I was in law school, Amelia and I had been buddies. She allowed me to believe that a life that combined inside and outside—family and not family—could actually work. But Alex cried for hours at a time, turning red and sweating and seeming to be furious at my inability to fix whatever was wrong. Once I started teaching, mornings were torture. Alex knocked his cereal bowl across the room and cried when I dressed him. He kicked me while I tried to fasten him in his car seat and clung to me when I needed to leave. He was heavy and strong for a toddler. I was outmatched.

I was so tired that my bones hurt. Alex still woke up about three every morning. I’d stumble out of bed when he cried, afraid he’d wake Amelia or Jim. I’d feel around in the dark, wrap us together in a blanket, and then rock him back and forth in an old rocking chair I’d had since I was a kid. We held each other, and for a while each night while I drifted in and out of sleep, I prayed that he forgave me for my many shortcomings.

But on that Tuesday night, I couldn’t forgive myself. I knew the day care place wasn’t good. Alex had been there only a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t quite say why. Maybe it smelled funny. Maybe the people weren’t friendly. I wasn’t sure what was wrong, but I knew it wasn’t working.

I’d been teaching only a short time, but I had cycled through one child care arrangement after another. The pain of each transition was intense. Each represented a failure. A sitter who never showed up. A neighbor who changed her mind. A child care center that left Alex in dirty diapers all day. I knew I was failing my son.

One night after I had put both kids to bed, Aunt Bee called. By now, she was in her late seventies. She asked how I was doing. I said, “Fine,” and then abruptly started to cry. “I can’t do this. I can’t teach and take care of Amy and Alex. I’m doing a terrible job. I’m going to have to quit.”

I hadn’t even thought of it until I said it: Quit. Once I started to cry, it was as if something inside me broke. I cried harder.

Aunt Bee, one of my mother’s older sisters, had been born in 1901 in Indian Territory, before it became the state of Oklahoma. She was short, with an ample bosom and small, arthritic hands. From her teens, she had worked variously as a secretary, a typist, and a clerk. She had lived with my grandparents on and off, pitching in her paycheck to the household budget. She was a highly independent woman in every way except one: she never learned to drive. As a young woman, she’d gotten a driving lesson in my grandfather’s old Model T, and she had run over a wild turkey. Fifty years later, she still teared up when she told the story. After that, she swore she’d never drive again—and she hadn’t.

“Bee” was short for Bessie Amelia, and when my parents had a baby girl, my mother said she would be named Bessie. Aunt Bee was tickled, but she asked my mother to name me “Elizabeth” and use “Betsy” for short. Aunt Bee carried me home from the hospital, wrapped in a pink blanket with a pink satin ribbon tied in my dark hair. She bought me two new dresses each year—one for Easter and one for the first day of school. She never had children of her own. In her fifties, she had married Uncle Stanley, a butcher at the meat packing plant. Now she was a widow.

That night on the phone, Aunt Bee listened to me fall apart. She didn’t try to soothe me or tell me it would be all right. Instead, she let me cry and cry.

After a while, I wound down. I blew my nose and got a drink of water. Aunt Bee said calmly, “I can’t get there tomorrow, but I can come on Thursday.”

It took me a moment to understand what she was saying. She never even asked. She just walked away from her life so she could come fix mine.

Two days later, I drove to the Houston airport to meet the late afternoon flight from Oklahoma City. Aunt Bee had arrived with a Pekingese named Buddy and seven suitcases. She and Buddy lived with us for several months, both of them sleeping on a pull-out couch.

At last I was able to breathe again. It was as if someone turned off the Tilt-A-Whirl we had been riding, and life stopped spinning.