Rita pointed at me.
“There, you heard her.”
She has school. She has her whole life ahead of her. She has school.
I need you to remember that line because I will hear it again. 19 years from now, on the worst day of my life, those four words will come back to me in a gymnasium full of 200 people, and they will mean something entirely different. I drove home that night with the yellow blanket on my passenger seat.
I had not said yes yet, but I had not said no. And in my family, silence was the same as agreement. Two weeks later, I called my mother and told her I would do it.
I withdrew from my master’s program the next morning. Dylan was born on July 14th at 3:17 in the afternoon. 6 lb 9 oz, a full head of dark hair and a scream that could strip paint.
I was in the delivery room. Vanessa was there, of course, because she was the one in labor. Rita stood by the door, arms crossed, watching the clock.
Gerald waited in the hallway, probably staring at a spot on the floor. The delivery took 11 hours. Vanessa was brave.
I will give her that. She did not complain. She gripped the railing and breathed the way the nurse told her to and pushed when they said push.
She was 16 years old and her body was doing something extraordinary. And I watched her face through every contraction and thought. She is so young.
When Dylan arrived, the nurse cleaned him and wrapped him and held him out. Who wants to hold him first? Three people in that room.
Vanessa turned her head toward the wall. Rita did not move. The nurse looked at me.
I took him. 6 lb 9 oz. His eyes were closed.
His fist curled around my index finger and he stopped crying just like that like he had been waiting for the right person to hold him. The nurse asked who was taking him home.
Silence.
The longest silence of my life. I am. I said.
Three days later, I carried Dylan into my one-bedroom apartment on East Willow Street. I had a crib borrowed from a coworker, a box of diapers from the dollar store, and the yellow blanket from my mother’s closet. I wrapped him in it that first night.
The same blanket that had wrapped me 22 years earlier. It barely covered him, but it was soft and it was warm and it was ours. The first year nearly broke me.
Dylan had colic. He cried for 4 hours every night between 8 and midnight. I walked circles around my apartment, holding him against my chest, humming songs I half remembered from childhood, watching the clock and praying for silence.
I was working as a teaching assistant at Willow Creek Elementary 7:45 to 3:30, then home to a screaming infant. I learned to function on 4 hours of sleep. I learned to eat standing up.
I learned to shower in under 3 minutes because 3 minutes was exactly how long Dylan would tolerate the bouncy seat. I called my mother once at 11 at night after Dylan had been crying for three straight hours. I was standing in the kitchen in sweatpants and a formula-stained shirt and I was crying too.
“Mom, I need help,” I said.
“Just for one night, please.”
Rita’s voice was steady.
“You chose this, Myra. You are an adult. Figure it out.”
She hung up. Vanessa, meanwhile, moved to Boston for college in August. She had been accepted to a small private school.
Tuition paid by a combination of scholarships and our parents’ savings. The same savings they said could not cover Dylan’s pediatrician bills when I asked. In October, a family court in Franklin County granted me legal guardianship of Dylan.
The paperwork was straightforward. Vanessa signed the voluntary relinquishment forms by fax from Boston during rush week. I filed the papers in a small fireproof safe I kept under my bed next to the yellow blanket.
Next to Dylan’s hospital bracelet next to a photograph of him sleeping on my chest at 4 days old, mouth open, fist curled, peaceful for the first time since birth. He was mine legally, finally completely.
Let me give you the next five years in snapshots.
Dylan at one: first steps. He walked from the coffee table to the couch. Three feet of open air, arms out, grinning like he had conquered Everest.
I recorded it on a flip phone that barely held 30 seconds of video. I still have that video. Dylan at two: “Ma” was his first word.
Not mama or mommy, just ma. short, efficient, like he had already figured out the most important thing and did not need extra syllables. Dylan at 3. I started teaching part-time at Willow Creek Elementary, mornings only, while a neighbor named Patty watched Dylan for $40 a week.
Patty had six grandchildren and the patience of a geological formation. Dylan loved her. Dylan at four.
He could read not just letters, words, sentences. He read the cereal box at breakfast and asked me what riboflavin meant. I had to look it up.
Dylan at 5, first day of kindergarten. I stood outside the school gates for 15 minutes after he walked in just in case. He did not look back.
He marched in with his Spider-Man backpack and did not look back. And I was so proud and so devastated at the same time that I sat in my car and cried. No one from the Summers family visited during those five years.
Not once. No Christmas presents, no birthday cards. Rita called occasionally to ask how I was managing, never to offer help.