Snapshots
Mona
My husband gave me this locket on the night before our wedding. I was a bride and a mother to be — our baby would join us to make our family complete in another 3 months. The locket was an excellent choice for a pre-wedding gift. I could fill one side with a picture of him, the love of my life, and the other side with our new baby boy.
That was the initial plan, anyway. Now here I am, 11 years later, wearing the locket (I wear it every day); but it’s empty.
Brady
There are 5 other kids in my class whose parents are divorced. There’s another kid who lives with his dad and his grandma. The non traditional family is pretty normal now.
Bill
When things between Mona and I stood still, they grew stale. The conversation was stale. The routine was stale. Even our parenting got stale. We were stuck.
No one would’ve known it from the outside. We made a pretty picture, the three of us. I always had a smile on my face when we were outside the house, or when I looked at Brady. But inside the house, the picture wasn’t as pretty. We didn’t fight a lot. We just…I don’t know…stopped moving outside of these tracks. Tracks around the house, tracks to and from work, tracks to and from the playground. It was the same everyday. We just got really boring, Mona and me. Not Brady, though.
A person could not not smile looking at Brady — with his big grey-blue eyes and his sandy blond hair and that dimple! More than that, though, from a really young age, Brady had comic timing. Whenever a grown up would do something silly to make him laugh, Brady would lazily point his finger at the person, close his eyes, smile and shake his head, as if he were saying to himself, “This guy is crazy. How ridiculous!” How ridiculous, indeed, for an 18 month old or a 2 and a half year old, or a four year old to react that way!
Strangely, when Mona and I sat Brady down at four and a half to explain that the three of us wouldn’t be living all together anymore, he had that exact same reaction. He closed his eyes slowly, shook his head and smiled as if to say, “You guys. How ridiculous!”
I had already packed my bag. It was sitting in our narrow hallway. I went to pick it up, but I stopped. I pulled out my camera, turned around and snapped a picture of Brady.
“You really want to capture this moment?” Mona whispered.
“Things will be different after this,” I answered. “I want to freeze him here for a minute. Well, for always.”
She, apparently, did not think drawing things out or lingering in that moment was necessary.
Brady
I usually go to the after school program at my school Monday through Thursday. On Fridays, ever since I turned 11, I either take the bus downtown to meet my dad at work, or I take the bus uptown to meet my mom at work. It’s good practice for me because next year when I’m in middle school, I may have to travel to and from school on my own using public transportation. It all depends on which school I get into. I’m still waiting to find out.
When my mom and dad and I were looking at that huge list of middle schools, we were obviously looking for the “best” schools. We were also looking for the “best fits.” Mom and Dad made a list of the schools that were the “best fit” in terms of class size, extra curricular activities, school philosophy…things like that. I looked for if a school was in walking distance from or an easy train ride away from either of their apartments AND if it was a good school. If it was, we wrote it down on the “best fit” list. The school we selected as my first choice was a 10 minute walk from my dad’s apartment.
Mona
For the past two weeks, I’ve been obsessively checking my email for a message from the Department of Education. Any day now, we’ll find out which middle school Brady got into. What this city does to its young students in the name of choice is unconscionable. The tests, the test scores, the school visits, the interviews, the applications. Why in the world should an 11 year old kid have to worry about whether or not he can attend a “good” middle school. It’s middle school! It’s going to be awful no matter where he goes!
Brady is trying to play it cool, to maintain his incredibly even-keeled demeanor, his ability to find humor in the world around him. But I know the anticipation of this news is weighing on him. It’s certainly weighing on me.
Brady
My mom and I were walking across the park on our way to school a couple weeks ago, and we saw a man standing on one foot. Isn’t that bizarre? He was in normal everyday clothes, not athletic clothes, and he was wearing a backpack. Everyone around him, no, everything around him was moving — runners, bikers, dogs, people walking to work, cars, everything! And there he was, this oldish man, wearing a backpack, frozen, standing on one foot. It was as if he was challenging himself to see how long he could stand there without falling. I mean the sight of this guy…it was just so ridiculous.
I laughed and shook my head and reached down for the camera that Dad gave me on my birthday. I had to snap a picture of this guy. Mom said, “He’s already frozen. You don’t have to trap him in a photo.”
“But I want to remember him.”
“Why?”
“Because, look at him! He’s standing in the middle of this busy place on one foot!”
“So?”
“So…so the sight of him is so bizarre, it’s worth saving! Plus, with the fog and everything, the light is amazing.” By the time I raised my camera to eye level, the man began walking again. I missed it — this awesome, strange picture.
Then, suddenly, my phone started blowing up. I got, like, 10 text messages in a minute. Before reading the messages, I scrambled to shut off the sound and to apologize to my mom. She hates all the “bloops and blings” as she calls them. She’s not crazy about me having a phone at all, but, now that I’m traveling around on my own, she has to have a way to check to make sure I’m safe. I’m really not on it that much, but these messages were obviously important.
I opened them up one after the other: “So, what school did you get into?!?” “Dude, why RU holding out on me?” “I got into the Center School! You?” “PPAS. U?” And so on and so on.
“Mom,” I said, “Check your email.”
She looked at my face and put all the pieces of the puzzle together lickety split. She knew. Today was the day. She swiped her phone screen, tapped an icon, scanned, tapped, read, and then smiled.
“Give me your camera,” she said reaching out to grab it. I was annoyed that she was drawing this out. I handed it over to her anyway. “I want to capture your expression when you find out you got into your first choice school.” I made a funny face — a cross between a monkey and a gargoyle.
Bill
Last Friday, Brady met me at work around 4:30. When he got there, I already had on my coat and bag.
Brady
I took a deep breath before I knocked on his office door. It had been three days since we got the middle school news, and all I could think about was what my life was going to be like next year. I was super excited that I got into my first choice school, but I was also nervous about how much harder it was going to be. My friend’s older brother who was in 8th grade said that I would have, like, two hours of homework each night. On the nights that I would stay with Mom, I’d have to get up an hour earlier, and I’d get home an hour later. So I started thinking that maybe I could just stay with my dad most of the time. I wasn’t sure if my mom would agree to that plan. Actually, I wasn’t even sure that my dad would agree to that plan.
As soon as I knocked on his office door, his eyes darted up to mine and a huge grin crossed his face. “There he is! Next year’s brightest 6th grade student at Columbia Secondary School.” He held up his hand for an ultra high-five — the kind I have to jump to reach. I jumped. I reached his hand. When I landed, I crouched down holding my hand so low that my fingertips brushed the floor. My dad looked down and laughed. “I suppose that’s only fair.” He crouched down and slapped my hand down low. “Good. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s go. I’m starving, and I have something to show you.”
“And we have things to discuss,” I said with an exaggeratedly suspicious tone.
“Ooh, sounds exciting. What is it? Girls? Plans for the summer? Creating a new middle school persona?” he asked.
“Patience, my boy,” I said patting Dad on the back. “All in good time.”
Bill
We headed to the diner around the corner. I requested a booth. When we sat down, I slid in right next to Brady. I opened up my bag and pulled out the new camera — a Sony A7R.
Brady
He launched right into his pitch. He sounded as if he were either trying to justify buying the camera or justify buying the camera without me — on an “off week.”
“The thing that’s amazing about this camera is that it is so light and small you can just stick it in your pocket, but it has the capability to shoot incredible photos and videos,” Dad explained. “We could make a feature film on this thing that would look as good as something you’d see in a movie theater.”
Bill
The waitress appeared out of nowhere and stood in front of our table staring at us. She didn’t introduce herself or tell us that she’d “take care of us today,” she just appeared out of nowhere and stood staring at us. Frozen. I looked up at her and read her name tag. Her name was “Kellee.”
Brady’s eyes slowly moved from the creepy apparition of our waitress to me. He closed his eyes, tilted his head downward to hide the smile that broke out on his face and shook his head. After a few seconds, he opened his eyes again and looked up at Kellee and jumped a bit as if he was startled to see her still standing there staring at us. That kid is hilarious.
Brady
“Why hello, Kellee,” I said. “Will you be taking care of us today?” I knew that would make Dad laugh, and it did. He played along.
“Kellee, you know what would make me feel great today? A nice big bowl of steaming hot vegetarian chili,” Dad said. “How ‘bout you, Sport?” (He didn’t usually call me Sport. That was part of the game.)
“Well, Dad, I’m thinking that a bowl of matzo ball soup with extra saltine crackers on the side would just make me feel…cared for.”
“Excellent!” he practically shouted. “Kellee, can you take care of my boy here and get him a bowl of Matzo ball soup with extra saltine crackers? And, one more thing — this might sound strange — we need a straw with it. He likes to drink the soup with a straw. Even the matzo ball. He slurps it up with a straw. Isn’t that cute?”
Expressionless, Kellee finished writing down our order and disappeared.
Bill
Brady looked at me and pointed a finger at the space in front of our table that used to be our ever so charming waitress. His expression said, “Unbelievable!” He smiled and shook his head.
Then he looked at the camera. Slowly, his smile faded. It morphed into a furrowed brow, a look of confusion.
Brady
“You’re not really into video, are you? I thought you mostly cared about still photography,” I said. And why are we talking about your new camera when we just found out which middle school I got into, I thought.
“Well, I mean, yeah, that’s how I make my living. That’s what my eye is accustomed to. But if I wanted to venture into video, this would be the perfect camera to do it with.”
Dad works at this auction house called Sotheby’s. He takes pictures of all this really high-end art and jewelry that people are trying to sell. If he takes a really good picture, and a bunch of rich art collectors see his picture online or in the catalog, then they’ll come to the auction ready to bid a lot of money. It’s like his pictures can convince people that the art is more valuable than it really is. He says it’s all a matter of light and shadow. Cast the perfect light on the perfect feature and hide the rest of it in the shadows.
“But I thought you said that a person could never finish learning about photography, could never finish finding images and ways to frame them.”
“Yeah, I did say that,” he said as if he were talking to a four-year old.
“Well, so, if you never finish learning about photography, why are you all of sudden talking about video?”
Dad sounded confused. “What?”
“Why are you so excited about what that camera can do with video? You’re still a photographer, not a videographer.”
Dad chuckled. “Well that doesn’t mean I’m allergic to video. I mean, I like making videos of you, of things we do together, places we go. Why not have really really good looking family videos? Like professional level home movies!”
“I don’t think they’d ever look like professional level family videos,” I muttered.
“Why not?” he asked with a this-is-just-a-playful-back-and-forth-banter-we’re-having-right? Smile.
“Because we’re not a professional level family. It’s just us. And then it’s not. Then it’s me and Mom. Then it’s just you. It’s not exactly like we’re one family unit.”
Boom. His smile disappeared. His brow furrowed. His eyes squinted.
In a much quieter voice, Dad said, “I’m just trying to explain all the features of the camera and why I’m excited about them. I’m not saying I’m going to use them all equally. I’m just saying they’re there, and they’re kind of cool.”
“Okay, whatever,” I responded.
Bill
“Is this camera upsetting you?” I asked Brady in the gentlest tone I could muster.
“No.”
“Then what’s with the ‘whatever.’ You know I hate when people say that.”
“Do you?” Brady shot back. “Actually, I didn’t know that. That must be another one of your ‘features’ that I didn’t know about.” Now he was using air quotes. My second biggest pet peeve after ‘whatever’.
“What are you talking about? What is happening in this conversation?” I asked. This was like a sneak attack, only I didn’t know who was attacking me or why. I’d heard this happened with adolescents sometimes. They could get suddenly aggressive, angry or even sad, and not even know why it was happening. Adolescence is a really hard time. I just hadn’t realized Brady was an adolescent yet.
Brady
“I’m trying to follow you, that’s all. I’m trying to fill in the blanks.” I hadn’t planned on our conversation going this way. I really just wanted to ask if I could live with him most of the time once I started sixth grade.
“What blanks? Is there something that I didn’t explain clearly? Are we even still talking about the camera?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know. The camera, what you do with the camera, what you hate, what you love, what the hell you do half the time when I’m not around.”
“What I do? What do you mean what I do? I work. I watch tv. I take pictures–”
“–or videos apparently,” I interjected. In some ways, I was still in control of this conversation. In other ways, I had no idea what I was getting at.
“No, not that many videos. At least not yet. I read, I talk to you on the phone. You know what I do…the same stuff I do when you’re here. Except you’re not here, so I do it alone.”
“And how is that?” I asked.
“How’s what?”
“The alone time,” I explained. “Do you like it? I mean, obviously, you’re going to tell me that you miss me and all that, but be honest. Isn’t it kind of nice to have time to yourself to do whatever you want? To not have to worry about when to pick me up, what to feed me, what sort of ‘fun things’ we can plan to do together? You know, to just be ‘you’, and not ‘my dad.’”
The squint in his eyes went from confused to slightly offended. He scooted a little farther away from me.
Bill
“First of all, stop with the air quotes. Second of all, I’m always your dad. That doesn’t stop when you’re at your mom’s house. Don’t you still consider me your dad when we’re not together?”
“Yeah.”
“So? Same goes for me,” I said under the illusion that my point had been made.
“It’s not the same,” Brady insisted. “I didn’t ask for you to be my dad. You just are; so, of course, to me you always feel like my dad. There’s no other alternative. But you made the choice to have me. You had a lot of your life when you weren’t my dad, so you’ve had a life outside of me…you have a life outside of me.”
“No, I don’t. Not anymore,” I stated emphatically.
Brady
We were verging on a courtroom tone. Usually my mom and I had these kinds of back and forth conversations. It was usually more fun and games with my dad. But not today. Before I pitched the idea of living with him pretty much full time, I had to keep pressing him.
“Well, yeah, Dad, you do. I’m not with you half the time. You have your own life half of the time when you don’t have to be a dad.”
“It’s not about have to be. It’s about want to be. No, I mean, it’s even more than that. I am. End of story. I am your dad always, all of the time, when you’re with me and when you’re not with me. Just all the time.”
I threw my hands up to signal a temporary surrender. “Fine. Okay.”
Pause.
Awkward pause.
Bill
Kellee appeared again, out of nowhere. She silently laid our bowls in front of us, reached back into her apron and pulled out 10 packs of Saltines (a bit of overkill if you ask me, but it showed a sense of humor) and a straw. She didn’t look at us or smile to indicate that she, too, was playing along with our earlier game. She just disappeared again.
Brady
As I dipped one Saltine in the soup after another, I wondered why I couldn’t just ask him a simple question? It felt like my brain was having one conversation and my mouth was having another.
After about 15 minutes of silent awkward eating, Dad said, “Let’s get the check and get out of here. Are you done?”
“Yeah.”
My cell phone made a ding to indicate a text message. I read it. “Oh, Dad, can I meet my friends in the park?”
“What friends? What park? To do what? Details please.”
“Central Park, Dan and Ryan, just hanging out.”
“Well, Brady, you just got here. I mean, I haven’t seen you in a week, we just ate and had a somewhat intense, confusing conversation and now you’re going to take off? Why don’t you and I go do something together? Or maybe you could invite Dan and Ryan to come and do something with us? What do you want to do?”
“I want to go meet Dan and Ryan in Central Park for a while, hang out and then come home.”
“And I’m supposed to…?”
Well, I don’t know what you’re supposed to do, I thought. I only knew what I wanted to do. I mean, I sort of knew what wanted to do. I wanted to try this new thing, this new arrangement. I was starting this new school in the Fall, and it was a 10 minute walk from his apartment and almost an hour on the train from my mom’s apartment. I couldn’t do this back and forth thing anymore. I needed to have one home. They could come to me. Why should I have to get shuttled back and forth and feel like I’m always a guest in someone else’s home, I thought. They should try spending one week here and one week there. I just didn’t know how to ask my dad if he wanted to go from being a part-time dad to an almost full-time dad. I didn’t know what he’d be giving up to have me around the other half of the time.
Plus, he shouldn’t have made me feel guilty just because I wanted to hang out with my friends for a couple of hours. If I was living at his apartment all of the time, or most of the time, then it wouldn’t be a big deal if I had just gotten home from school and wanted to go hang out with friends.
Bill
“All right, listen, I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “If we can order dessert and you will answer a few questions for me, I will let you go to the park. You can tell Dan and Ryan that you’ll meet them in a half hour.”
Brady inhaled and exhaled loudly. “Fine,” he answered.
“Great. Thank you. What do you want?” I asked handing him the oversized menu.
“I want to live with you during the week next year so that I don’t have to travel so far to school,” he blurted out. I lowered the menu onto the table.
After a minute of silence, I said, “I was actually wondering what you wanted for dessert, but okay. Yeah, of course you can live with me during the week. That makes a lot of sense. Have you talked to your mother about this yet?”
He shook his head. “I thought I should ask you first.”
Mona
The day Brady returned from his week with Bill, I asked him to run a few errands with me. On our way home, we decided to stop in the park. He was acting strangely sweet all day. I had become accustomed to the constant ding of text messages and emails lighting up his phone as if he was orchestrating diplomatic efforts between the world’s superpowers. But that day, it was silent. I felt like I could breathe now that my energies weren’t being funneled through the frustration of the mom vs. technology battle. The silence created by the silencing of that phone was refreshing, albeit a bit awkward. We were like two strangers on a first date, or a married couple knowing the end was in sight. We were searching for things to say, until, finally, he piped up.
“Mom, can I talk to you about something?”
“Sure! Of course! What’s up?” Perhaps I responded a little too enthusiastically, but he didn’t roll his eyes or exhale sharply with judgement the way he sometimes did. He…smiled.
“It’s about next year.”
“Are you feeling nervous about starting at a new school? I really think we made a good decision about where you’re going.” Pleeease, tell me you’re feeling nervous, I thought. Then I can discuss those feelings with you and reassure you. Maybe you’ll even cry a little, and I can hold you and console you.
“No, well, sort of. I mean, I’m not that nervous about the school part, really. Not yet, at least. I mean, I might be more nervous at the end of the summer. But that’s not really the part I wanted to talk about.”
“Okay.” Is it your friends? Are they excluding you? Bullying you? Is that why your phone is on silent? “What part did you want to talk about?” I asked.
“The living situation part.”
I’ll admit, when we received the notice a couple of weeks ago that Brady had gotten into our first choice middle school, I was 90% elated and relieved, and 10% exhausted. I was already thinking of the commute he’d have to make every other week from my apartment on East 34th street to the school on West 123rd street. Not to mention the commute I’d have to make to pick him up, attend events and conferences.
Brady
They made their decisions to make things more convenient, so why shouldn’t I? They didn’t love each other, and so it was more convenient to separate than stay together. It was okay for me for awhile when I was totally dependent on them picking me up and dropping me off and chaperoning every playdate. But I was traveling on my own now, and I didn’t want to have a 45 minute subway commute when I could have a 10 minute walk instead.
I knew she was going to want me to call her every night. Whatever. I’d call or FaceTime. It would be really awkward, but I’d do it so that she still felt like she had a connection to me.
Mona
“This sounds pretty serious,” I said trying not to sound overly serious.
“It’s just, you know, the school is so much closer to Dad’s apartment that I was thinking I could stay with him during the week and then stay with you on the weekends. Or every other weekend, or something.”
“Every other weekend? So I would see you for 2 days every 2 weeks?”
“Well, I mean, of course you could come see me when I was staying at Dad’s. It’s just that I would stay there most of the time. It would just be so much easier.”
“Yes, it would certainly be much easier for you.”
“I’m not saying this because I’m trying to hurt your feelings or anything. You have to admit, it’s a little ridiculous to commute for almost an hour to school if I don’t have to,” Brady stated.
“Unless it means not seeing your mom more than once every two weeks.”
“This school was your first choice, too. You knew where it was. Did it seem fair when we were filling out that form that if I got into this school that I would travel for an hour to get there every day? I’ve been traveling back and forth my whole life. Shouldn’t you be trying to make things a little easier for me now?”
“Now?”
“Yes, now. I’m almost an adolescent. Adolescence is hard. Haven’t you read anything about it?”
I felt like I was falling into a hole while still trying to continue the conversation. It felt like my little boy was looming over me. His tone grew loud, almost aggressive.
Pull back, I thought. Dial it down a notch.
“I’m not saying you can’t live there during the week…and possibly every other weekend,” I explained quietly. “I’m just saying I don’t want you to. But I get it. It makes sense, of course.”
He started to say something, but stopped. He inhaled sharply sucking the words back in before sound would bring them to life. He silenced himself. But this time the silence wasn’t awkward. Painful, but not awkward.
Finally, he moved. He reached down to the ground and picked up his backpack from beside the bench. He unzipped one of 5 different compartments and pulled out an envelope.
“I got you something,” he said extending the beige colored envelope to me.
“Should I open it now?”
“Yeah.”
I stuck my index finger into the gap in the corner of the sealed envelope and sharply pulled the envelope open with a clean, swift motion upward. I carefully pulled a card out of the envelope. Despite my care and precision, something fluttered out of the envelope and onto the ground 2 feet in front of the bench. Brady jumped to the ground trapping this something as if it might fly away. He picked it off the ground gently, cupped it in his right hand, covering it with his left.
“Read the card first,” he instructed. So I read:
Dear Mom,
I know things will change, so here is something to keep close to your heart to remember this moment. It’s not much, but I figured it was about time.
Love, Brady
I looked up at my boy, and then he opened up his cupped hands. I half expected a butterfly to flutter out, but then I saw it — a tiny heart shaped picture of Brady. It looked like it had been taken a moment ago.
Brady
I sat really close to her on the bench. I opened up her locket and slid the picture into the heart shaped frame. Then I reached my hand in my pocket and pulled out a small heart shaped piece of glass that I got at the photo shop. I clicked it on top of the picture, and there it was: I was frozen in this moment, trapped behind that little piece of glass. When I heard that click and saw my frozen image, it felt like everything started rushing around me. It felt like I might get sucked away from my mom into the vacuum of…of all the space that was around me.
“What are you going to do when I’m not around?” I asked.
“Oh, you know, the same stuff I always do when you’re not around. Hang gliding, skydiving, hobnobbing with celebrities…”
“Is that what you do when I’m not around?”
“Well, yeah, when I’m not talking to you on the phone, or cleaning the apartment or doing work, or looking at pictures and videos of you that your dad sends me everyday.”
“I didn’t know he did that.”
“Yeah, your dad and I know how to text message and email, too, believe it or not. We’re very 21st century. Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask you what to do when my phone fills up. I have so many videos on here,” she said pulling her phone out of her purse. “I keep getting a warning message that I’m almost out of memory.”
“Let me see.” I took the phone and opened up her photos app. Sure enough, she had over one hundred photos and videos from the past few years. I randomly clicked on one from a few months ago. It was a picture of me, taken from behind. I was waiting for the train on my way to school. I closed that photo and chose a video from a few months earlier. In it, I took a bite out of a scalding hot piece of pizza. All the cheese slid off the crust and slapped against my chin. I yelled out in pain. I could hear my dad laughing from behind the camera.
Mona
I put my arm around Brady’s shoulder and said, “Let’s go get some pizza.”
He looked at me, smiled and pointed, in that way that he does. “Hah. Hah. Okay.”
Brady
I handed the phone back to her. She put it in her purse. “We can download the photos and pictures onto your computer so that you don’t run out of space,” I said. “You’ll need to clear a lot more room for all the precious moments. Maybe Dad can send you videos of me getting brain freeze while eating ice cream, or me stepping in dog poop.”
“Precious moments,” she said smiling.
I grabbed my backpack. As we stood up from the bench, I waited for a feeling of relief to wash over me. I mean, I got what I wanted. They both agreed to the new arrangement. Why did I still feel so nervous?
“You okay?” Mom asked. I nodded and forced a smile. She grabbed my hand as we started walking. “I know, you’re not four years old, and I don’t have to hold your hand anymore. It’s probably not ‘cool’ (air quotes) to hold your mom’s hand when you’re eleven years old.”
I smiled and shook my head. “It’s okay,” I assured her. Our clasped hands swung back and forth as we walked. With each step and each swing I felt a little calmer. We stood at the street corner waiting for the light to change. When it did, Mom squeezed my hand twice very quickly, the way she used to do when I was little. It was her signal that we should start walking again.
We stepped off the curb and hustled across the street watching the countdown on the traffic light. Seven, six, five…we made it to the opposite curb when number four blinked above our heads.
“We made it,” Mom said. I quickly squeezed her hand twice, and we kept walking.
