It’s Cold Here in the Winter
The first time I meet Jada’s mom she’s ringing the buzzer and demanding to speak to the principal. She tells me she left work early to come over here because some lady in the office hung up on her.
“I work at a school. She thinks I don’t know but I know you don’t hang up on a parent like that. This is a new school for my daughter and I’m concerned.”
She doesn’t exactly tell me all this. There’s a small group of us new parents, standing around confused because they keep telling us different times for pickup. We nod and shake our heads at Jada’s mom’s story. I’m grateful for the human contact. This town is weird. Parents don’t hang around chatting in the playground after school like they did in Brooklyn. They walk straight to their cars. I haven’t yet learned to drive but I’m working on it.
For the first week or so, we talk about the ridiculous pickup system in which every parent has to stand in line and wait to sign their child out one by one. Two dads almost get into a fist fight over whether one of them was skipping the line.
“They need a better system,” says Jada’s mom. “It’s gonna be cold here in the winter. We’re right by the water.”
It’s true. The Hudson River is just beyond the trees. The beauty of our surroundings makes everything more painful.
“I think my daughter’s in your son’s class.”
This time Jada’s mom is speaking directly to me. She asks me how I like the school.
“So far so good?” I say. “How about you?”
Jada’s mom agrees that the teacher seems nice, the school seems fine. Parent teacher conference is coming up and for a moment I feel hopeful. I’ll get to go inside the school building, meet the teacher, see the other parents. I’ve already met Jada’s mom.
“We love having Sam in the classroom,” Mrs. Oban tells me at parent teacher conference. “He participates. He’s sweet with everyone. He’s happy all the time.”
At least something’s going right.
It seemed like such a great idea at the time, to leave everything we’d known for the past sixteen years and move to the suburbs. “The pandemic made change seem possible,” I chirped when friends asked why the sudden move. Because I was never one of those people who talked about leaving the city. I was ride or die Brooklyn. But we were buying a beautiful house, and what would we really be leaving?
“The train station’s a twenty minute walk. I don’t need to drive,” I reassured friends.
“You should probably learn to drive,” they said.
But being a non-driver was an important part of my identity. On road trips, I relaxed and enjoyed the view from the passenger seat while Paul drove. We always laughed at the billboard ads: The “Very Serious Attorneys” looking very serious. The ad for a diner with a picture of a chicken wing that looked like an aardvark.
“You could drive if you had to,” friends said, as if that was a helpful thing to say.
Stuck in our beautiful new house over the summer, I can’t take the kids to the beach or the pool. I can’t take them anywhere. We walk down the hill to the nearest playground and slump on a bench in the shade, gazing at the sad plastic playhouse. But playgrounds in this town are not like they were in Brooklyn. We’re the only ones here. Sam tries one of the swings, eight-year-old legs dangling awkwardly over the toddler seat. After a few minutes, we admit defeat and traipse back up the hill.
I sign up for driving lessons. There’s a part of me that wants so hard to be right in this narrative I’ve constructed about myself as a non-driver that I hope my driving instructor will tell me I’m a hopeless case. That I shouldn’t even try to learn.
After the first few weeks of school, the bugs in the pickup system get resolved and there’s nothing else to talk about. Parents sign and stand against the wall, scrolling or talking on their phones, some in leggings and Crocs, cardigans pulled tight against the wind, others in business casual or janitor’s uniforms. There are no more threats of fist fights.
Jada’s mom and I still smile and say hi when we see each other. More often than not, she’s talking on the phone. If not, she tells me what’s going on in her life.
“This tree branch just fell on my car and smashed my windshield. Now I gotta get the windshield replaced.”
“Oh my god,” I say. “It just happened right now?”
I tell Jada’s mom that I don’t drive but I’m taking lessons.
“Oh, best of luck to you,” she says, with that slightly amused look that people get when I tell them I’m learning to drive now, at the age of forty-two.
I wonder if I know Jada’s mom well enough to suggest getting the kids together for a playdate. Lately I find myself obsessing about the families we used to hang out with in our old life: afterschool playdates at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, weekends in Prospect Park or the water playground at Pier 6. I can’t go on Facebook without being reminded of everything we’ve lost.
One morning in November, I run into Jada’s mom at the optician. I’m making an appointment for Sam. She’s with Jada, whose prescription needs to be upgraded.
“Everyone in my family wears glasses,” she tells me. “My mother, my sisters, my other daughter. So I wasn’t surprised when they said Jada needs glasses.”
“Really?” I say. “Nobody in our family wears glasses. Not me, not my parents, not my husband…”
Something flickers in Jada’s mom’s face and I regret mentioning my husband. Why do I assume she’s married, that she will like me better if I indicate that I am? It’s a thing I do when I’m trying to fit in, even though fitting in with heteronormative nuclear family ideals is the opposite of what I want.
It’s not even true anymore. Paul and I broke up two months ago, but nobody knows that.
A week before winter break, Mrs. Oban approaches me at pickup.
“What’s going on with Sam?” She tells me he threw a pencil case at another kid. “He wasn’t like this at the beginning of the year. Is he worried about Christmas or something?”
Why would Sam be worried about Christmas?
I know you’re supposed to tell your kids’ teachers if there’s something going on at home, but I thought I could get away with it. We never argue in front of the kids. People don’t buy a house together and then break up, as Paul pointed out.
My driving test is scheduled for January 4. In the days between Christmas and New Year, Paul and I drive around town every day so I can practice. He sits in the passenger seat, demystifying the road signs and helping me get comfortable with lane changes. Being in the car with Paul feels safe and familiar, but also the exact opposite. The realization that this might be the last time we laugh together at the Very Serious Attorneys sticks in my throat and I want to take my hands off the wheel right now.
When schools go back in January, I’m looking forward to telling Jada’s mom that I passed my driving test but she’s not there. I ask Sam if Jada’s still in his class.
“I think so,” he says. “Actually, maybe not.”
When parent teacher conference comes around in February, I call in instead of going in person. I don’t want to face Mrs. Oban, this stranger who knows all my personal business since I cried on the phone the last time she called me to ask, again, what’s going on with Sam, the insistent “Mrs” in her name now seeming so passive aggressive. I don’t want to hear about Sam throwing pencil cases.
I think about asking Mrs. Oban what happened to Jada but decide against it. I didn’t even know Jada’s mom. She could’ve been anyone. It’s just that, in Brooklyn, there were so many people like her, people I talked to even though we didn’t have much in common, contacts in my phone with the last name “…’s mom” or “…’s dad.”
But there was always something missing, preventing these friendships from solidifying. There I was, smiling in the face of comments about how girls play and how boys play because I didn’t want to be confrontational. There I was, going along with the way our babysitting co-op had a Moms’ Night Out and a Dads’ Night Out, the assumption that we all had husbands. Well I did have a husband, so why couldn’t I just relax and enjoy a glass of wine with the other moms?
Maybe now that I don’t have the word husband to fall back on, I can make friends in a different way. Maybe I have to.
Now I drive to pickup like the other parents. I sign and stand against the wall. It’s cold here in the winter, as Jada’s mom predicted. We’re right by the water.
About the Author
Rachel Aimee is a queer writer, parent, and nonprofit development person living close enough to New York City. She is a co-editor of $pread: The Magazine That Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution (Feminist Press, 2015) and the former executive director of Drag Story Hour NYC. Find more of her writing at RachelAimee.com and follow her on Instagram @rachelaimeeee
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