Awful Enough

My daughter wakes me up at 6 a.m. I am torn from sleep like a baby from its mother's womb.
I hadn't even reached R.E.M. yet.
My dreams are a mixed bag these days. The previous dawn, for instance, I had been dreaming that I was a student at the school at which I teach. I was to take the English matriculation exam that day and I was nervous because I didn't know anything.
I teach English.
Also, if there's something in this life I'm sure of it's my English. I'm a total grammar nerd, a punctuation nerd, you name it. I can get lost for hours in an article on the semi-colon.
And there I was, me-but-teenage-me, in high school, worked up. I mean, well, anxious. Like deep inside I know I know the material but right now I'm stressing out.
My brother appears often in my dreams, too. One night he was skeletally thin and singing pop tunes, another he was a civil rights activist guilt-tripping me into letting himself and four other activist acquaintances stay at my house, for some reason. I said no.
None of these dreams make any particular sense to me, but I have heard having them is important for the completion of the sleep cycle, so I am concerned.
I get up, turn on the coffee machine. By this time my daughter hears me and starts to call out "Eema!" If she sounds annoyed I make her a bottle... fuck it I make her a bottle anyway. I need a minute.
I go back to bed and curse my life with my eyes closed. I have to be a school at 8. When I can bring myself to, or when she starts to cry in earnest, I get up and go to her. Put her down on he floor and she waddles away to the playroom.
Coffee.
By this time my son is up and asking questions. Do fish sleep? What's bacteria? (We put bacteria in the fish tank he got for his birthday recently.) When is grandma coming over? When is Tuesday? Tomorrow? Why isn't it tomorrow?!
By this time my daughter comes over to us to demand her share of the attention. She reaches up her arms and makes a face like, mmmmmmmhhhhhhh! If I pick her up, I can't make coffee. If I don't, she cries.
She cries.
My son yells over the cries, "The day after tomorrow?! What day is it now?!" and his shrill voice blends with my daughter's cries until it becomes a horrid cacophony like alarm bells and an offbeat drum beating together at the walls of a room with really bad acoustics.
I pick up my daughter so at least she'll stop, though I have only managed to take a bit of bread out of the freezer to defrost so I can make my son breakfast to take to kindergarten cause they're fucking assholes, I mean just buy a few loaves of bread and some hummus and leave us poor parents alone with this shit.
I get the cheese out of the fridge with a 12-kilo baby on my hip even though I know my son will resist this poor attempt at 'healthy' and say all his friends get chocolate in their sandwich, I mean who the fuck is packing chocolate in this day and age? Most likely a divorced dad.
I still haven't had coffee.
She's stopped now and I put her down and hope for the best. I tell my son to take her to feed the fish... and finally coffee!
I have a second to breathe so I glance at my husband asleep on the bed. All the noise hasn't even wakened him. Or it has but he went back to sleep. Not sure which option is more infuriating. I'm hungry but I WILL NOT eat bread!
Last night he came home around ten p.m. and said he still had work to do. I was already in bed half asleep.
"What work is this?"
"Project X," he said. It's his nickname for a company he started with his friends to invest in real estate in, of all places, Ohio, which is where I grew up. Who knew, as a kid, that the world was so fucking small? It's like those roller rinks we would frequent as kids, where we all go round again and again, watching the faster among us get ever more rounds in, noticing, as we go along, how drab and noisy the place is. How ever more droopy and sad.
"You know you've come home at a normal hour just once these past three weeks? And even then it was like, seven fifteen," I say.
He just looks at me. He's been with me long enough to recognize what's coming. In a word, guilt. Secretly I wonder how long this will continue to work. I mean, he's Moroccan so possibly forever, depending on frequency of use.
He knows enough, too, to avoid the word "sorry". Stuff your sorries in a sack mister.
He explains, "The plan is to work really hard for three years and then sit back and relax, watch the money flow in."
I want to say, And when, exactly, will I sit back and relax? but I don't have the energy for a fight.
Instead I say, matter-of-factly, "In three years our son will be eight and our daughter almost five."
He just looks at me.
I've heard this type of talk before, from my exes. One of them swore he'd make a million dollars in a couple of years in China and then move back and work as a public school teacher. I guess in his mind this justified making morally questionable deals with mafioso-type businessman at Beijing strip clubs, where they would get drunk before signing any and all deals. All this in the name of an Israeli real estate tycoon who wanted us to moved to the Chinese town closest to the Siberian border. Population a thousand or so, summer temperatures rarely rising above zero. On the upside in the winter it has an ice festival where people build enormous castles, bridges, and other structures that will, inevitably, melt. (Though granted it takes a while.)
For another ex the setting changes to Silicon Valley, the dubious businessmen into tech valley entrepreneurs and the strip club to - I wanna say yoga retreats? I was gone well before each scheme's time limit, but I think it says enough that I don't personally know anyone for whom such a scheme has ever succeeded, and I think I know some pretty smart people.
Or perhaps you have to be a little bit dumb to concoct such a scheme in the first place?
Anyway to my husband I say, "That doesn't sound likely. And in the meantime I am a single parent, which I never signed up for, so can you please scootch your ass home every Wednesday at five so I can at least take our son to ballet class in peace." (Nevermind that he hates ballet class right now, hates his desire to do 'girl things' and I blame the patriarchy and gender, which is evil and basically the bars on the jail that is the patriarchy.) This last bit is implied, I don't have to say it because he knows it's what makes me so angry all the time. He also accepts that, as the patriarchy's representative in our home, he will often be at the butt end of this anger.
Though he is much better now than he was. He used to say chauvinist shit like it was nothing. Now he only says it only to piss me off.
My daughter comes up to me again. She is upset because of something her brother did, I know because he's smiling to himself over by the fish tank.
"What did you do to her?"
"Nothing!"
Of course.
"Where's daddy?" I say to her. At the mention of the moniker she quiets down, looks towards the bedroom and daintily points one sweet, stubby little finger. "Dadda."
"Yes, dadda! Look at him over there. Go say hi, go."
She starts to waddle over then looks back at me wistfully. "Dadda," I say again, and she goes. For my son this never would have worked but girls belong to their daddies. There's just a certain fit there, a softening that acts as glue, and it never goes away. A few days ago he asked her for a hug and as I watched her hug him with slanted eyes (when I ask for a hug she finds it funny to slap me instead), he asked plaintively, "What will I do when you stop hugging me?"
"Don't worry, she'll always have a hug for you," I said, thinking of my own father.
I promise myself all the time I won't be as jealous as my mother, who refuses to recognize the inevitability of this bond, though she could easily choose to relish the obsequious love of my brothers instead. She wants me, though she has two and my father just has one, so how is that fair? Like I'm the ultimate prize, for some reason.
It all seems so pointless sometimes. No one can break the cycle. Or, I guess some people can, those who quite simply forgo having kids. No wonder they walk around like they have it all figured out.
"Dadda!" my daughter yells. He lacks the ability to get mad at her, so I know it will be okay, and I go back to the sandwiches. Cheese for my son, vegetables for me.
Actually fuck it, I'm having almond butter and jam. Life is awful enough.