Growing Pains

It happens. Young couples go through periods of distressingly terrible times, maybe more so now than it used to be, and one of them walks out.

It happened to me. I suddenly found myself with a three small children, no job, a house and a lawn invaded by grub worms. One thing at time, I thought, so I put the children at the table eating macaroni and cheese while I went out to battle the worms.

In a normal situation, even a tipped over glass would have been the cause for twenty trips to the door to inform me, but only one small voice called out the door, “there’s water in the basement.” I ignored it because I was getting no water pressure outside and the toxic chemicals I was spraying on the lawn really concerned me.

The reason I had no water pressure was a broken pipe in the basement that was gushing water over carpeting, furniture, and finished walls by the gallons, but my children wanted to help so they took all the towels down there to help mop up. By the time I came in, my basement had eight inches of water with large terry cloth towels floating around all over it. Luckily none of the children had been electrocuted by it all. Of course everything down there mildewed and I spent nights afraid some critter was going to climb in through those open, screen less windows.

We eventually worked it out, but it was terrible. The only thing that might have made it worse would have been him taking my children with him. I don’t know how I would have coped.

Tonight a young woman has packed up her baby daughter and left the child’s father. Not because he is a bad man, but because she is tired of the poverty and helpless to really do anything about it, has turned her anger and hostility on the father who is working two part time jobs and doing any other work he can find. Tonight he not only goes to bed hungry, which is normal, but he goes alone in a cold and empty apartment, not knowing when he will hold his daughter in his arms again.

I don’t know if I could have survived that.