I’m sitting in the lobby of the YMCA. It’s pretty loud. The air conditioning – or, I guess, the heating (it’s below freezing today, when it was 30C on Friday, which is very typical of spring in the Midwest but never ceases to surprise me) – is running, a steady hum coming from the exposed ceiling.
The door opens every few seconds; a man enters, two women, a mum with her three kids, bags and jackets and water bottles swinging in all directions.
I’m sitting in the lobby of the YMCA, awaiting the call that comes, inevitably, a few minutes after I’ve sat down. Last week it was nine minutes, then seven. The first ever day I came here, I did a workout – ambitious – and the call didn’t come for 47 minutes. It was, as it happens, a record, multiples of moments longer than the attempts that were to follow.
They’re always polite, friendly, almost apologetic. “Yeah… he’s still crying. He hasn’t stopped since you left.”
I think about how guilty I would have felt, if this was Atlas I was dropping off at the Y’s childcare facility, if this was Atlas who’d spent nine, then seven, minutes crying, panicking, wailing, wondering where I’d gone and, most likely, if I was ever coming back.
With Atlas – “your first,” I can hear other, more seasoned parents say, in a way that explains it all – I was incredibly sensitive to his needs, to his moments of upset. I found dropping him to a babysitter, those first few weeks, very difficult, even if I would receive photographs, a mere 10 minutes after I’d left, of him smiling, laughing, playing with friends.
He’s now four and a half, and hasn’t been to a babysitter for almost two years, bar a day here or there, as he started preschool four mornings a week, and just last night he told me that he remembers “when I went to [my babysitter’s] house yesterday –” (every day in the past is “yesterday”, and every day in the future is “tomorrow”) “– and I cried and cried and cried, because I just wanted to be with you”. Precious! I thought. But also, you were grand. (He was grand.)
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If he’d told me that, then, I think I would have pulled him out entirely. Crying and crying and crying?! Never mind the photographic evidence that said otherwise, I would surely have been overcome with guilt, convinced that the best thing for my child was to bring him home, to keep him home with me, to hold on to him for as long as he’d let me.
With his baby brother, however… I don’t know. Sometimes I worry that I don’t love him as much, because I’m less worried about him. The panic I felt at letting Atlas go – letting him go to his babysitter’s, letting him go up the ladder of the climbing frame, letting him go down the slide alone… so much letting go to do, a practice that no one warns you to anticipate being difficult – is entirely absent, when it comes to Roman.
I yearn for a time when he climbs ladders on his own, when he doesn’t look for me across the room, when he doesn’t climb into my lap at every opportunity, cling to my hair, my clothes, my skin (the sunburn, you’ll understand, makes this especially challenging).
Oh! A handsome man has just walked past. He’s wearing caramel brown pants (Snickers-adjacent, I think to myself, a sartorial weakness of mine when it comes to straight men of a certain ilk), a flannel shirt. He’s carrying what looked like a weekend bag, rather than a backpack.
I hate a backpack on a man.
Once, years ago, after drinking two bottles of wine (each!), I hooked up with a good friend of mine. We’d been friends for years, and for most of those years both of us had been in a relationship. Now, here we were, drunk and single – what else was there to do?!
I remember worrying that things might be awkward the next time we saw one another. Would we have ruined our friendship? Would I feel a sort of… yearning for him that I’d never anticipated feeling, that I didn’t want to mix into the soup of our relationship and just have to leave floating until it finally disintegrated into the broth?
As it happens, the next time I saw him, he showed up at my front door with a backpack on. Both straps up, an even distribution across his shoulders. I thought of how often, at school, we’d be admonished for wearing our backpacks slung across just one shoulder, how we’d balk at the idea (so embarrassing!) of hoiking up the opposite strap, of walking around like the kind of nerd you’d see in an American TV show about young inventors.
Here he was, a young inventor, on my doorstep. Backpack on right. The yearning, you can imagine, disintegrated on sight.
We did get together one more time, I think experimentally, really, to see if there was anything between us without the lubrication of the wine and the late hour and the kind of kismet of that first night. There wasn’t.
Our friendship wasn’t affected by the hook-up at all, although it did fade away over the ensuing years. Maybe it was, then, affected. Maybe without that fateful decision, we would have grown closer, rather than further apart. Who knows.
Anyway. Back to the weekend bag. Though I’m glad it’s not a backpack, it has given me pause. Is bringing a weekend bag – it didn’t look like a sporty weekend bag, either, more the kind of bag you sometimes see male models carrying in a shopping centre fashion show, when they just don’t really know what to do with men’s accessories, other than pair them with a neatly ironed shirt and a cardigan, tied around the neck – to the gym a bit… I don’t know. Precious?
Still, I don’t feel like I see good-looking men all that often these days. I was going to write, “there are no good-looking men in Fort Wayne”, but that feels unfair. There are at least five; I live with them. But to see one in the wild?
Even if you catch a glimpse of hotness, it’s usually ruined when they turn around and you realise they’re wearing a jaunty, slogan T-shirt; or when you hear them speak, and they address the cashier as “brother”; or when they lean into their car and emerge with a red baseball cap they place on top of their heads. There’s always a “but” with these guys.
There are two tables in the lobby of this YMCA, at which you can work, or lounge, or just… wait, like me, for the call that will inevitably come, that says you have to get your baby. “He’s just not calming down,” is the usual refrain.
This marks my fourth morning attempting to get Roman to settle at the YMCA’s childcare, and each morning there has been a woman, sitting at the other of the two tables in the building’s lobby, with paints, and an easel, and, I presume, a painting, although she’s facing me, with her back to the window, so I can’t see what’s on the canvas.
The idea that it’s not a painting, now that it occurs to me, is kind of delightful. Imagine if she was sitting there, paintbrush in hand, paints at the ready, child in childcare, with her iPad propped up against her canvas, catching up on her shows or doing the Spelling Bee or playing Royal Match while listening to Giggly Squad. (Yes, I’m deep into the Summer House culture now. I follow Hannah Berner on Instagram. I’m excited about her Hulu special. I listen to Giggly Squad. I’m all. In.)
She never seems to get any calls. I wonder if her kids are older, or better adjusted to the idea of being without her (or both)? I suppose it’s possible that she doesn’t have children, but why else would someone come to the YMCA to paint?
She could, it’s true, be painting the YMCA. Maybe she’s been commissioned to do a series of paintings of the YMCAs all around town – although who would pay for that? The Y itself? Not the city, or the state; Indiana is a Republican state, with a Republican governor who, I suspect, is not a big patron of the arts. (I could be wrong. Please tell me I’m wrong.)
My cousin is an artist. A really good one. I’m not just saying that because he’s my cousin; in fact, his relation to me, it is quite possible, would make me less likely to say he’s a good artist. This is another of my fatal flaws. I find it hard to see genius in those close to me. It’s all just kind of cringe; I worry my bias is showing, that I’m bigging someone up simply because we share (a shred of) the same DNA.
I’m not related to Dermot Kennedy, but he went to my school and, in my early 20s, friends of mine would go to a lot of his gigs – in Whelan’s, or in any random pub around town. Some of them would even go to support him while he busked on Grafton St. I never went because I found it all very embarrassing.
It’s not that I didn’t think he was any good; I don’t think I’d ever listened to his music. He was just another boy with a guitar, likely to bring it out and ruin a perfectly good house party by earnestly playing Wonderwall while staring dolefully at whatever girl he wanted to kiss that night.
It’s safe to say that I was wrong, to worry that he wasn’t any good, or to suspect my friends of some sort of bias when it came to him and their enthusiastic gig-going. A few years ago, he played The Clyde in Fort Wayne and Brandin and I went to see him. You know, support the parish, and all that. It’s safe to say that he showed me! He was incredible. (I was embarrassed.)
Anyway. My cousin, Blaise Smith, paints landscapes and still lifes and portraits that are, to me, the ultimate proof that humans aren’t created equally. Sometimes I look at the paintings he’s working on and I think, how did he even do that? How could anyone do that? I have a graphic drawing he did as a child – he was 12 – hanging in my house that’s better than anything I could do now, at the age of 41, and I am, as they say, not bad at drawing.
He says, now, that he’s had a lot of practice. Painting is something he does all the time, every day, sometimes for hours at a time. It’s not a skill he just came to overnight. But Blaise, (is what I should have said), what about this drawing you did when you were 12? How much practice had you had, then?
Anyway; here’s why I came to this. Here’s the tenuous link my mind made between the mystery woman probably-painting at the YMCA, possibly painting the YMCA (unlikely); Blaise was commissioned by the Irish Army, in 2005, to paint a number of their firearms for a collection titled WEAPONS (to be fair, they could’ve come up with a snappier title than that, but maybe that’s why he’s an artist and not a writer, amirite).
I remember thinking, even then, how impressive it was that the Irish Government is so supportive of art as a mode of communication, as a form of documentation, as an integral and life-giving part of our society and culture. It feels like maybe that’s a level of support that’s fallen off, in the intervening years (did an artist show up at the doors of Leinster House one day with a backpack slung over both shoulders and give them the ick, I wonder?), but again, I could be wrong. (Please, tell me I’m wrong.)
Now that I live, truly, in hell, I’m not sure I like the idea of a series of paintings focused on firearms. Yesterday, in Shreveport, Louisiana, a man shot and killed his ex-girlfriend, her sister, and seven of his children, as well as an eighth child.
Today, I logged on to Facebook to see that someone had posted in one of the Moms groups I’m in (why am I in more than one? I’m not sure – I have serious FOMO about mom group drama, but all the drama does when I do see it is give me serious anxiety, so maybe I need to go cold turkey) asking which parks in Fort Wayne are safe to walk in alone.
There’s no nuance, you’ll be surprised to hear, in the comments. Half of the replies are telling her that everywhere is safe, while the other half say that nowhere is. There are people who really know what feeling unsafe is like. “I grew up on the Southside of Chicago, you don’t know how great we have it.” Then there are people who never feel unsafe, because they have guns.
“There’s weirdos everywhere,” says one reply. “It’s just the chance you take unfortunately. I carry when I’m out but I’ve never had any bad experiences. (Yet)”
Another: “The best thing I did as a mom was learned how to use and carry. I hope I never have to use it but I'm not afraid to either.”
That’s… the best thing you did as a mom?! I am baffled.
But I’m also struggling, right now, in a lot of ways. As a mom, as a writer, as a wife… as an emigrant. As a Hoosier (am I a Hoosier?!). As a Green Card holder. As a resident of… hell. Like I said. So I don’t respond. I don’t think anything good can come from getting into an argument with an American – someone who views their second amendment right to bear arms as somehow intrinsic to their identity as an American, and to the sense of being “free” (lol! in Trump’s America?!). This is a debate I can do without, honestly.
You can’t bring guns into the YMCA, as a related aside. It’s forbidden. But the thing is, Indiana is a state with very few gun laws. You don’t need to register your firearm, for example. You can open carry or concealed carry without a permit. There are very few limitations, in Indiana, on the purchase or ownership of a firearm.
This does not, for what it’s worth, make me feel more safe.
Roman lasts 14 minutes today, although when I go to pick him up, they tell me he’s been crying since I left him, so it’s not that he lasted longer, necessarily, just that they waited longer to call me. I appreciate that; I know he’s fine. He’s crying because he doesn’t know where his mum is, not because he’s hurt or scared or anything bad is happening to him.
When he sees me, he immediately stops crying. He points to me, reaches out one chubby hand, and then another. When he lands in my arms, he takes a deep, calming breath and then smiles at the childcare worker who was just holding him while he wailed. He waves: “Bye-bye!”
We’ll try again tomorrow.
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