I sat at a stoplight today, my mind wandering as it does when there are no children in the car screeching or whining or asking for my iPhone so they can "move the buttons".
I watched her cross the street. She was tiny. Her hips as wide as one of my thighs. She was wearing cut-off jean shorts. Short shorts, actually, and a tank. Her curls bounced with every step. Around her neck were the arms of a little guy, maybe three years old, from what I could see and his chubby legs and sandal-ed feet were wrapped around her waist. His head bounced too, as his eyes moved from the cars, the buses, the people sitting at the bus stop, hot and tired and wearing dirty baseball caps.
She wasn't carrying a diaper bag or a grocery bag or even a handbag. My guess? They were walking to the gas station for a soda. Some gum? Maybe a pack of smokes? I don't think she was quite twenty years old. I'd be surprised if she were.
Before the light turned green I flashed back to twenty and did the math, I'm thirty-eight and it's 2009 so that would make it 1990... 1990? I didn't even have my tattoo yet and I look at that thing and feel down-right ancient.
I never got pregnant before I wanted to. I have thought many, many times of what if I had and thank God I didn't. That child would be graduating from high school now. High School. My phantom not-child born in 1990. Or maybe not. I don't know if I could have done it.
I really mean, I don't know if I could have done it well enough. Raised a child at twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-eight. Done it and not suffered the consequences of a complete lack of wisdom and a tendency to make choices by what was deemed to be the least painful at the very last moment when those decisions needed to be made.
That child's father would have gone on to battle addiction. Or would he? Maybe if we had stayed together I could have set him straight and he wouldn't have moved to that city with those friends during those years. That child's dad would have made a terrible husband but a childlike father who may have really shone at baby-rearing but would have used taking care of a baby as an excuse to not get a job.
That child would have been brought up shuffling between apartments and friends who would have taken care of him while I worked waitressing shifts. Slept in a bed with me in my sister's basement, indefinitely when we couldn't make rent or when watched it because she was pushing me to take those last few classes so I could finish school and get my degree. Because me and that child's dad would have never, ever, made it work.
The light turned green and I watched them.They walked entwined with each other and with the sidewalk beneath her flip-flops. She shifted him to her other hip. I drove on to buy diapers.
I wonder where she was going.
