The Weight – Kate Kinney, Writer/Teacher

Published in NomadArtX Journal, September 30, 2022

I had a dream before Dan and I were married, one of the times that we had broken up. I was in a web like a moth’s cocoon, suffused with a feeling of safety and inner peace.

I remember feeling like that as a child, lying on a patterned green carpet in our living room, hiding within a jungle of indoor plants, watching the snow through the windows outside and the dust mites flutter through sun beams inside. In Battery Park, lower Manhattan, there is a sea glass carousel that I used to take the kids to when they were younger that feels magical in the same way. The frosted lights and muted colors create a dream-like experience of being securely inside an orb, protected, apart from the outside world.

When my oldest daughter Úna and I had COVID this past January, I had a similar feeling. I was exempt from work, excused from doing errands, free to order takeout and Fresh Direct with no guilt about the expense. Úna didn’t have to go into school. Her younger brother and sister had tested negative, so they stayed with Dan and his new wife that entire week. We were just sick enough to feel justified doing nothing. It was a pleasant five-day stretch of companionable isolation. We ate banh mi, soup dumplings, burgers and fries, binge-watched The Walking Dead and Kim’s Convenience, stayed in pajamas.

I run from my apartment building to Littleneck Bay three or four mornings a week. As women, we are told not to have predictable patterns so that stalkers won’t know when we will be at an isolated point in our journey. But I like to have a routine. It’s how I measure my progress. My concession to safety is waiting until the sun rises to go out. Lately, at the halfway mark of my route, I have been taking a photo of something unexpected in Queens: a sandy beach, sailboats on the bay, bright geraniums, sun filtering through cat-o-nine tails, blades of sharp green grass pulsating with saturated color. I have been saving the images in a “Running” folder on my photo app; when I feel despair, I look at them to remind me of movement, change, surprise, and beauty.

Three weeks ago, Jack, the man I thought I would grow old with, revealed that he hates the city and will never move here. Then he told me that he may no longer be interested in a long-distance relationship. He also admitted that he has a problem with all three of my children, but especially Úna. The night he told me all this, Úna heard me crying and talking on the phone and crept out of bed to listen. She overheard the whole conversation.

I listen to the same playlist every time I run, in the same order. “The Weight” by the Band starts playing the last half mile. My mom loves The Band, Dylan, Creedence, early Stones; their albums are a soundtrack to my childhood. The lyrics to “The Weight” don’t make much logical sense, but the song makes me think of the selfless acts of love we engage in for those we care about and how we take on burdens for our friends and family when they can’t bear them alone. I have read that Robbie Robertson claims the song is about “the impossibility of sainthood” and that it references “folklore—stories handed down through generations, truth and fiction blurred to create a sense of mystery” (Blumenau).

This morning, when I got home from my run, I heated up my coffee and sat down in the peaceful silence of the living room for a few minutes before waking up the children. I reread an email my mom sent the day before: “You know, whether to stay with Jack is your decision, too. Úna shared with me that his criticism of her hurts. She is carrying a heavy load.”

Úna was two months old when she figured out that when she kicked the plastic fish that dangled above her feet in her bouncer chair, a musical chime went off and the water in the arch above her head bubbled and lit up. The first time it happened, she was randomly cycling her legs, then she kicked the pink fish and it bubbled. She kicked it again, and it bubbled again. Her other foot kicked the yellow fish and the bells chimed. Then she worked her feet, furiously kicking, rocking the bouncer, making it bubble and chime. Her feet became a blur.

I used to wake up when she was a newborn and feel an almost unbearable weight pinning me to the bed. I did not know how I would get up and shoulder my responsibility. I carried her in utero in a desperate and sad marriage that I rushed into, knowing the man was an untrustworthy, violent, pathological liar. In later years, after the divorce, I lied to myself and others. I said he had tricked me, but I knew what he was when I married him; I just did not want to believe it.

Throughout my pregnancy, Dan routinely went out drinking late and combed online dating sites. I stayed in graduate school—I had started my PhD program at the City University of New York about six months before becoming pregnant and had no intention of leaving it. I kept teaching for the university to keep my fellowship, and I went on Medicaid to get prenatal care.

When she was born, my milk did not come in as robustly as it should have, and I could not get her to latch on. The lactation consultant at the hospital grabbed my breast roughly, shoved it in Úna’s mouth, and jiggled it. She told me not to give her formula, that she would never learn to nurse if I did. At home, I breastfed her every hour and pumped in between feedings to get up my milk supply. After two days, I bundled her into her pink bunny snuggly and carried her to the doctor. She wasn’t gaining enough weight. She was hungry. The doctor told me to feed her more breast milk—to wake her up every forty-five minutes, around the clock, and feed her. My neighbor told me to take Fenugreek. My mom told me to drink one stout beer each day. My best friend told me to drink more water. Finally, my milk turned from a trickle into a flow. I calmed down and started getting through the 30 papers I had to grade for the undergraduate Chaucer section I was a teaching assistant for. But two days later, when she was eight days old, Dan got the flu, then I did. I called the doctor, panicked; the flu can be deadly for infants. The only immune protection she had was from me, the doctor said, from my breast milk.

I stayed awake for three days, feeding her hourly. I was fevered, weak, and dizzy, but she stayed healthy. I graded as best I could, but everyone got As and Bs no matter what they wrote. On the fourth day, I no longer had a fever and aches, but I could not differentiate my dream state from reality. My hair was falling out in clumps. I was bleeding profusely; the hospital-issued mega-pads overflowed hourly with fresh blood. I felt disconnected from my body—as if I was on an astral plane observing events unfold.

Dan was recovered and back at work, back in law school, back to being gone from 8am-11pm every day. We had no clean clothes; everything smelled like sickness and fatigue. My mom came over to watch the baby, and I hauled our laundry down the five flights of stairs and out to the street. While I was waiting to cross Second Avenue, I felt a rush of mortality that cemented me to the ground. “What if I get hit by a car and die?” I thought. “Then she will die. Dan can’t take care of her.” It took me several minutes to get up the courage to cross the street and enter the laundromat. I washed everything in hot water and shrank the baby afghan that my grandmother had knit, and my mom had used for my brother and me. I felt awful. It was completely ruined. Generations of care, shrunken and shriveled.

We moved from the East Village to Queens when Úna was three months old. About a week after moving, I woke up one morning with half of my face frozen. I could not close my left eye, widen my left nostril, or close the left side of my mouth. I was terrified. I thought I’d had a stroke or developed multiple sclerosis. Testing revealed that it was Bell’s Palsy. I had to wear an eye patch, drooled uncontrollably, and had trouble eating. The doctor prescribed a heavy dose of Prednisone. I would have to stop breastfeeding while taking it. I tried to keep up my milk supply by pumping, but it didn’t work. My milk dried up as my face gradually unfroze.

One afternoon when Úna was six or seven months old, I missed the train I usually took home from school. Once the train went above ground, my phone started buzzing. I had fifteen missed calls from Dan. My feet turned into ice—I called him back, expecting something horrible had happened. Úna was screaming in the background. “I can’t fucking take it,” he yelled. “She’s fucking screaming all day.”

“Wait, what is going on? Is she okay?”

“No, she is not fucking okay.” He hung up. I started shaking and crying. A woman across the aisle moved to sit next to me.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I don’t know what is happening with my baby,” I said. “I have to get home.”

She took my hand and sat silently next to me until my stop came. I half-ran, half-walked the mile home from the train. Dan was waiting on our street with Úna in her red stroller. As soon as he saw me, he pushed the stroller toward me and said, “There. You deal with her now.” Then he stormed off.

We divorced after seven years and two more children. Between the ages of eight and 10, Úna routinely ran out of Dan’s house and tried to run back home. He would put her in time-outs for hours. He complained that she was sweaty and smelled bad. Yet he also drank until he passed out and expected her to take care of her younger siblings.

When Úna was 10, I brought Dan to court to try to force him into sobriety. This is when he turned on his charm for Úna. She was transfixed, mesmerized by his sudden adoration. He can make someone feel completely loved, but it is not real—it is an act that he will take away when it suits him. She told the attorney for the child that I was lying about his drinking and that she wanted to live with him. Suddenly, the fight became about my worthiness as a parent, rather than his drinking.

In the middle of the bitterest part of the custody fight, Úna pleaded with me to put her in swim class twice per week. She was 11. My parents agreed to watch the younger kids while I drove her, and I rearranged my work schedule. But when it was time to go, she refused to get ready. I said, “Okay, I will just cancel the classes.” Then she hit me, screamed at me, called me cruel and cold. She told me that the only way I would listen to her was if she hit me. She told me I deserved to be hit, that there was something wrong with me, that I only cared about myself. Then she told me she would go, but she would not wear any of the three bathing suits she had at our apartment. She claimed that the only one she could wear was at her dad’s. “Maybe your dad should take you to swimming,” I replied.

“You idiot,” she screamed, her eyes full of tears, “he has better things to do, Mom.”

I drove her to Dan’s and pulled into the driveway. Úna ran in, tears soaking her cheeks. He came out. I rolled down my window. “Don’t park in my driveway,” he said, and went back in. I reversed and double-parked in the street. She came out, black Speedo balled in her fist, stomped angrily into the car, and fell asleep when we hit traffic on the Cross Island Parkway. While she slept, my tears came, unbidden, filling up my eye sockets and spilling over my glasses.

She had used the exact terms and inflections, and the same types of accusations that Dan used to hurl at me. It was unnerving because I thought I had escaped and heartbreaking because she had either learned those words from observing him say those things to me—she was the only one of our children who had any clear memories from our life together—or from him saying them to her.

Life will take what you hold most precious. Your core beliefs will be shaken. What was true in the 19th century remains true in the 21st—as a woman, if you marry the wrong man, your life will be broken. You will become Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic, or Jane Eyre, tying your life to a damaged man in an unclean forest. Jane, don’t you realize that if Mr. Rochester could fully see you, he would kill you? He is just pretending to love you because he has nothing else left.

Once the custody case ended—I gave up because I ran out of money and stamina—Úna’s relationship with her dad went back to how it had been for most of her life. Last summer, when she was fourteen, I picked her up from him for probably the last time. She was supposed to be with him for an entire week, but two days in, she messaged me, begging me to get her. I was staying upstate with Jack, but Dan agreed to meet me halfway with Úna, in the parking lot of the El Dorado diner just over the Tappan Zee Bridge.

Úna had brought a few bags of things and all her stuffed animals. She was ravenous—she said she hadn’t eaten in two days because Dan had locked her in her room. She had tried to run away during the night, intending to go to the train station and tell a conductor she was in danger, but her father found her and brought her back to his house. The next morning, when he realized she had taken her sister’s iPad to message me, she claims he smashed her head against the wall of her closet and stepped on her toes. She also told me that her stepmother took all her clothes and bedding away, called her a bitch, and told her that she was going to drop her off at a mental institution.

I called Dan and Pamela later that afternoon and told them what Úna said had happened. Pamela admitted to calling her a bitch and taking her clothes away. Dan assured me that he and Pamela would say that nothing happened: “It is us against you: we say it didn’t happen, so I feel pretty secure about those odds.”

Child Protective Services sent a very nice, very young case worker to investigate. Úna told him her account. Dan and Pamela claimed that none of what she said was true. The case worker told me he believed Úna, but he had to close the case as unfounded because her testimony alone was insufficient.

Now she is lying on my bed, on her phone, as I am working on my laptop in the easy chair next to the bed that functions as my workspace. She is fifteen and seems to just want to be close to me right now. Jack says that me having her all the time has been good for her, but bad for our relationship. He needs a break.

It is true that she can be difficult. She has unmanageable bouts of anger and irritation: she is reeling from years of instability and trauma. I am so worried about how she will negotiate the world. But then there are quiet, beautiful moments like this, and I think it will be okay. I reach over and touch her feet. She looks up from her phone, puzzled.

“Uh, Mom? Why are you touching my feet?”

I want her feet to hold her, bear her weight. I want her to kick them and unexpectedly find magic, movement, beauty, and wonder. “Oh, I don’t know,” I reply. “I was just thinking about when you were a baby.”

She shakes her head and goes back to her phone. “Weirdo,” she mutters, but she says it with a slight smile.