The Proof My Mother Never Expected

My marriage did not survive the strain of it. I do not blame my ex-husband entirely, though I have had years to be angry at him and I used most of them. A marriage needs honesty to breathe, and I could not give him the one kind of honesty that would have explained everything else, the missed anniversaries, the unexplained bruises I passed off as clumsiness, the nights I came home smelling like a stranger’s cigarettes because I had spent six hours in a car with one. He filed for divorce three years ago, and when he did, he filed for custody of Sylvan right alongside it, citing my unstable income, my erratic schedule, and what his attorney’s paperwork called, in the careful language lawyers use to make cruelty sound clinical, “a pattern of behavior inconsistent with a stable home environment.”

I fought for shared custody and I won it, because even without being able to explain my job, I could show up for Sylvan in every way that mattered when I was not underground. I made every school event I could reach on short notice. I kept a bedroom for him in the little apartment above the old hardware store, painted the color he picked out himself, a green he called “frog green” and insisted on with the total confidence of a seven-year-old who has never once doubted his own taste. I read to him every night I was home, and on the nights I wasn’t, I called, when I could, and Verlaine or my mother sat with the phone against his ear.

What I did not expect was for my mother to file her own motion two years later, asking the court to award full custody to my ex-husband, on the grounds that in her judgment as Sylvan’s grandmother, I remained unfit. That is how I ended up back in the Camden County courthouse on a gray Tuesday in March, watching my own mother take the stand against me.