III – You Live Above a Garage?
It was extremely uncomfortable attending these school meetings. I was self conscious of the fact that I was always there alone. Most everyone else had come as a couple, as parents. The few other solitary persons were mothers whose husbands were assumed to be working late. Whether this was true or not didn’t matter, it was believable and didn’t help with my shame. It felt like other parents were looking at me and whispering opinions and comments to each other. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but I didn’t think so.
Even parents that I knew and had spoken to many times before seemed to deliberately stay on the opposite side of the classroom and avoid eye contact or any contact with me. It hurt me deeply not knowing what they had heard or were thinking about me. I thought we were supposed to be there for each other in hard times. As parents, that was a primary responsibility we had to our children and in turn to other humans, at least as an example to our children. The opposite seemed to be true at these meetings.
I felt like a leper. An unclean and tainted monstrosity. I did my best to not express the discomfort externally. I must have seemed a bit desperate trying to make eye contact with anyone in hope they would interact with me as they were doing with practically anyone else in the room… but they didn’t. Standing there alone in the classroom, waiting for the teacher to arrive was eating away at me. I desperately tried to look busy on my phone or reading a bulletin board. I just really wanted someone to be kind and acknowledge me. Make me feel just a little less awful with a tiny bit of attention. I should have been more careful about what I was wishing for.
Eliana was a classmate and friend of my daughter and her mother was zigzagging her way around the miniature desks and across the room, heading straight towards me. In my current mental state this normally should have been a relief. Someone was noticing me and would validate my existence. Exactly what I asked for, but Eliana’s mother was an old world gossip and loved nothing more than mining for dirt in people’s lives. I could tell from the look in her eyes that she was on a mission to interrogate me for juicy details she could share with others and thus make her own life seem better than it was.
“Hello. You are here alone?”
I couldn’t help but feel she had deliberately started with a jab at my sore open wound as a way to throw me off balance and more easily scavenge for information she could use.
“Hello. How are you doing?” I tried to redirect the conversation, but she was completely ignoring me.
“The girls are good?”
“Yes, yes.” I smiled, trying hard to disguise my unease. “They’re doing well.”
She had absolutely no interest in how my daughters were doing. She looked around as if to make sure no one was looking. A false gesture that spiked my anxiety as my gut was telling me something awful was about to happen. She squinted her eyes and leaned in towards my face as if sharing a secret.
“So… you live above a… garage?”
I knew something bad would be coming but didn’t expect it to be about our living arrangement. A few months earlier the girls and I had moved into the only place we could afford in my town after the divorce, a tiny two bedroom apartment above a garage. She must have noticed us going in and out of it.
She may have faked checking her surroundings to mimic discretion but she had strategically asked her question in a high enough volume to allow several parents nearby to hear. I was getting flush and a bit faint. I had experienced a lot of surreal moments and shame in the past year but I never seemed to get used to them. I had to get out of this trap. I would act normal and ignore certain details.
“Yes, it’s convenient. It’s only two blocks from our old house. The girls love…” She was not interested and interrupted.
“You live above a garage?” She seemed determined to humiliate me until I answered.
“Yes.”
She squinted her eyes as if evaluating my answer then stood up straight proudly and pretended to be sympathetic. “That’s a shame.” She swiveled around looking at the several parents who had overheard the short exchange and smiled. “Well, nice to see you.”
As she walked away I tried to seem unaffected. “Nice to see…” I was not successful and lowered my voice completely, “you, too.”
For more than a year I had had to endure, manage and mitigate all the mental, emotional, financial and surreal damages that come with a messy divorce. All the while doing my best to be a father, mother, friend and therapist to my daughters, whilst keeping my own head somewhat together. I blamed and punished myself for everything as I wasn’t allowed to blame anyone else. We were all drowning in the accouterments of a horrible life event.
To have awful people feel the need to humiliate me and my daughters to distract themselves from their own miserable lives was just the kind of thing that could push me over the edge. Thankfully at that very moment the teacher finally arrived. I felt a small amount of relief. I crouched down to sit in one of the tiny chairs, focusing my eyes solely on the teacher. When her talk was over I smiled and immediately weaved my way to the door, avoiding eye contact with everyone. I walked fast, but not too fast. Once I exited the school it was as though I had been holding my breath for the past hour and was finally taking a breath. I could feel the tears starting to build up in my eyes. I walked quickly towards my car.
I had luckily parked far from the school in a desolate area. A tiny blessing for the evening. I could comfortably sit in the car’s interior darkness and cry as much as I wanted. Thankful that no one would see me and there would be no more chances of humiliation. Grateful that I would be safe for a short while as I reassembled the broken pieces in my mind that had been so forcefully scattered about before returning home to the girls.
Renato Passalacqua 