Meet Marla, Cindy’s Mother
Cindy’s Mother’s Perspective
As Marla worked her shift at the photo-processing store, she edged to the window from time to time to check on Cindy outside. Again, an after school family day care arrangement had collapsed, and Marla had had no choice but to bring Cindy along to work for the past few weeks. This one had closed because the provider moved out of town. In the prior arrangement, Marla had withdrawn Cindy from the provider’s home for a few weeks, concerned that conditions in the home exacerbated Cindy’s allergies. When Cindy improved, she sent her back, but Marla always felt anxious about it and didn’t know where to turn for reassurance. Other child care arrangements were fraught with their own challenges. At one point a boyfriend’s mother offered after school baby-sitting help, but Marla felt she and the boyfriend were headed for breakup and didn’t want to be obligated to the boyfriend’s mother. All her kin lived in another part of the country, and Marla often felt depressed and bereft without a family safety net. She would’ve loved to have her kinfolk baby-sit. She was divorced from Cindy’s dad, and he was not a part of his daughter’s life.
Marla valued working and harbored some small pride at her ability to stay off welfare, but it was a round-the-clock challenge to raise a child and hold down a job. She worried constantly about how to arrange after school care for her daughter and all the associated logistics. She wondered when Cindy would be old enough to walk with a schoolmate from school to Marla’s job site or directly home. Right now, Marla saw the community as unsafe and lurking with dangers for her daughter — dangerous traffic patterns not far from school, crazy people hanging out on the streets.
More than anything, Marla hoped for a job with hours that would allow her to be home with Cindy in the afternoons. Not that being with Cindy was easy. They lived in a small two-room apartment without much room for Cindy to play. Marla was often frustrated when her daughter came home from school and made a mess, and she frequently lost her temper. In her mind, one big problem was transportation. Marla did not have the money needed to repair or insure her old car. And, unless they had been able to hitch a ride with another family, Marla had had to coax a tired eight-year-old to walk a mile and a half home from her daycare provider when she picked Cindy up at the end of the day. She dreamed about taking Cindy to a big amusement park in a distant state, but as it was, she had to push the laundry in a stroller many blocks to the laundromat.
Marla did enjoy being out of the house with Cindy. Sometimes she walked her to the park. But Marla missed the excursions that she and Cindy used to take as part of their participation in a program for families with preschoolers at the Family Support Place, like the time the group drove to visit a real working farm. Marla had even offered a few times to chaperone one of Cindy’s second grade class trips and ride on the school bus with everyone somewhere. She had hoped to go with the class to a zoo in a nearby city, but although she volunteered, she wasn’t one of the ones selected to chaperone. Cindy’s teacher, Nikki, had asked her on several occasions to come over and visit Cindy at school in the classroom, but somehow Marla just hadn’t gotten around to it.
Marla remembered Nikki mentioning after school programs to her at one point, but it was more than Marla could manage to even think about arranging this. The programs probably cost much more than family day care. And how could she ever pick up Cindy from some program way over on the other side of town without a car? The bus system in the community was slow, practically nonexistent. Marla had tried to save up money to get her old car going again. She had disconnected her phone to avoid those big long distance phone bills from calling her kinfolk, but then it always seemed like Cindy was growing so fast that the money was needed for new clothes and sneakers.
Marla had not graduated from high school, and her school experiences had never been happy ones. But she did trust Nikki, and thought that Willow School was good. She was content to allow the school responsibility for many areas of Cindy’s life. For example, the school had arranged for Cindy to attend Friendship Day Camp over the past two summers, and Cindy had loved the camp.
