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Authors: asha bandele
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know how sheâd get out of. She said to me, that night on the phone, âYou have to wonder what these mother fuckers would do if somebody just didnât give them their paycheck for months on end. I mean damn!â
We commiserated about not getting paid, and wondered out loud if our colleagues who made the choices not to process our payment ever considered the collateral consequences of not paying a single mother, the way it threatens, in real terms, the quality of our childâs life. âAnd not even in the big ways,â Raquel continued. âI mean I know why I donât have health care. I know why sometimes I buy food I normally wouldnât but we have to have something on the table. I mean I think about the way it affects me psychologicallyââ
âAnd then what impact that has on our daughters,â I said, interrupting her, but completing her thought. But the subtext of all this is instability. Money, being paid on time and being paid a livable wage, allows a mother to plan, to think clearly. It reduces anxiety, which in turn reduces what are sometimes the results of being overanxious: smoking, overeating, drinking, compulsive shoppingâthe list nearly has no end.
We talk, not just my girlfriend and I, but everyone, about how children need stability, consistency. But how are they to get it if nothing in their parentâs life is stable or easily stabilized? Itâs sort of fun and maybe even powerful to imagine that one can create anything and everything one needs in life to bring one joy and peace. But that kind of theory that keeps many people rich on the lecture circuit has little reality for people who live, in one way or another, in the margins of this society. And those people who do are usually poor, the working poor, but poor nonetheless. This is likely the relevant place to note that of all groups in society, single mothers are paid the least in every category. And no, despite the fact that fifty percent of households are now headed by single moms, no, that has not changed.
Yet, while I donât subscribe to the theory espoused generally by the privilegedâthat you can talk into existence whatever life you wantâI do know we can work to make choices to edge ourselves up out of a hole. Money, or the lack thereof, was an anxiety that I resolved I would live with as long as I continued to choose writing as a career and pretty much be a stay-at-home mom. But what could be left behind, cast out, in the nervous breath of my world? The answer to that seemed cruel but there came a time when finally I could not avoid it.
Â
T HE IT IN MY own life, the one I could not avoid, happens in a phone call, like nearly everything else that has reordered my life with Rashid. I learn it via a monitored call. It is July 15, 2000. Our baby is three months and one day old.
He says he got the paperwork from INS in the mail the night before. As it stands now, he is still under a deportation order, the result of a retroactive change in law instigated by Bill Clinton in 1996. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Whenever he is finally paroled, he will likely be sent back to Guyana, the place of his birth, the only place where he holds citizenship. There can be no appeals, according to the law as it currently stands.
I said nothing to Rashid that day on the phone. What words would mean anything? Back ten years ago, when I was first falling for this beautiful Guyanese man, I asked him if there was any chance he could be deported. He assured me then that immigration issues had been taken care of. When the new law changed this in 1996, if he mentioned it to me, it was a casual thing, nothing for me to think or worry about. And I didnât. Until now. Now I feel betrayed. I want to scream, cry, use my anger toward him to make this all go away. But thatâs stupid, pointless. Thatâs why I say nothing. But Iâm thinking.
Iâm thinking that for years
We commiserated about not getting paid, and wondered out loud if our colleagues who made the choices not to process our payment ever considered the collateral consequences of not paying a single mother, the way it threatens, in real terms, the quality of our childâs life. âAnd not even in the big ways,â Raquel continued. âI mean I know why I donât have health care. I know why sometimes I buy food I normally wouldnât but we have to have something on the table. I mean I think about the way it affects me psychologicallyââ
âAnd then what impact that has on our daughters,â I said, interrupting her, but completing her thought. But the subtext of all this is instability. Money, being paid on time and being paid a livable wage, allows a mother to plan, to think clearly. It reduces anxiety, which in turn reduces what are sometimes the results of being overanxious: smoking, overeating, drinking, compulsive shoppingâthe list nearly has no end.
We talk, not just my girlfriend and I, but everyone, about how children need stability, consistency. But how are they to get it if nothing in their parentâs life is stable or easily stabilized? Itâs sort of fun and maybe even powerful to imagine that one can create anything and everything one needs in life to bring one joy and peace. But that kind of theory that keeps many people rich on the lecture circuit has little reality for people who live, in one way or another, in the margins of this society. And those people who do are usually poor, the working poor, but poor nonetheless. This is likely the relevant place to note that of all groups in society, single mothers are paid the least in every category. And no, despite the fact that fifty percent of households are now headed by single moms, no, that has not changed.
Yet, while I donât subscribe to the theory espoused generally by the privilegedâthat you can talk into existence whatever life you wantâI do know we can work to make choices to edge ourselves up out of a hole. Money, or the lack thereof, was an anxiety that I resolved I would live with as long as I continued to choose writing as a career and pretty much be a stay-at-home mom. But what could be left behind, cast out, in the nervous breath of my world? The answer to that seemed cruel but there came a time when finally I could not avoid it.
Â
T HE IT IN MY own life, the one I could not avoid, happens in a phone call, like nearly everything else that has reordered my life with Rashid. I learn it via a monitored call. It is July 15, 2000. Our baby is three months and one day old.
He says he got the paperwork from INS in the mail the night before. As it stands now, he is still under a deportation order, the result of a retroactive change in law instigated by Bill Clinton in 1996. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Whenever he is finally paroled, he will likely be sent back to Guyana, the place of his birth, the only place where he holds citizenship. There can be no appeals, according to the law as it currently stands.
I said nothing to Rashid that day on the phone. What words would mean anything? Back ten years ago, when I was first falling for this beautiful Guyanese man, I asked him if there was any chance he could be deported. He assured me then that immigration issues had been taken care of. When the new law changed this in 1996, if he mentioned it to me, it was a casual thing, nothing for me to think or worry about. And I didnât. Until now. Now I feel betrayed. I want to scream, cry, use my anger toward him to make this all go away. But thatâs stupid, pointless. Thatâs why I say nothing. But Iâm thinking.
Iâm thinking that for years
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