"Yes, Justin, I'm here. You want a snack?" He looked so... so different. She felt suddenly queasy, as she always did when uncertain. His thin young voice, bent into bell-tones by a trick of the alcove window, rang back "No, Ma... Uh, Mel... I want to talk. Meet me in the Talking Place."
The Talking Place. It'd been a long time since he'd asked her to join him there. "Sure, Justin. Be right down." She brushed the palms of her hands anxiously down the sides of her favorite jeans. The jeans her husband would grouse nastily about, "They make you look like a fat aging hippie."
She moved quickly downstairs, trying to will her rising queasiness away. By the bottom of the stairs she had convinced herself she had nothing to worry about. And by the time she could see the back wall of the old orange garage, she was in her familiar iron calm again.
Justin was sitting on the patchy grass, back against the garage wall, feet drawn up to his chest. She remembered the first time she'd found him here. He'd been crying so hard he was hiccupping. Between gulps and gasps he'd asked her, in his heartbreaking toddler's voice, why she and Daddy fought so much. After that night the grassy patch behind the garage had become their private safe space to meet and talk over troubling things. But what was troubling him today? His father had not been home much the last year or so. "Working extra long hours, " he'd rant, "to meet the rising taxes from the damn Kids Rights Law," he'd yell, punctuated by threatening pounding.
As she neared the Talking Place, Justin lifted his head from his knees. He was crying, but seemed strangely calm. She sat next to him, exactly copying his posture, and waited, the queasiness escaping the careful barrier of her tensed stomach muscles.
"Mel... Ma... I'm going to use my rights under the kids' law and look for a new home and family." The effort to speak stopped his tears as he stared straight ahead, chin on his knees. Melanie's heart jumped. This was what she'd been dreading, without knowing it.
"But why now, Justin, when things around the house are quieter than they've ever been?"
Justin closed his eyes and sighed. "Ma, that doesn't mean anything's changed. He's just as mean to you the way he talks. And... and, he ignores me now. Like he's afraid of me. I guess that's better than when he used to hit me, before the kids' law. But, Ma, I'm miserable. Aren't you?" He turned slightly toward her. His sad dark eyes stirred something forgotten, deep inside her. Something she quickly brushed away.
She managed to compose herself. "Honey, you know your Daddy and I have to abide by the law, if you really want to have the Social Services Agency help you pick a new family. But I love you. And Daddy does too, in his own way. And I won't make any excuses for him or for me. You've heard them all, here, in the Talking Place, too many times already. But I just don't know if leaving is the answer...."
Her son rubbed his nose on his sleeve. More tears. Where were her own? "So you won't fight me, Ma .. Melanie? My advisor at school says loving is also knowing when to let go. So I guess you really do love me. But she also said a lot about me loving myself. And, Ma, I can't really love myself staying here. I only really begin to feel I'm even a little bit OK in school, cause I feel really seen there. You know what I mean, don't you, Ma? Cause I know Daddy doesn't see you... or me... not really...."
Melanie knew, all too well. Then she was stunned, straightening her back so quickly that she thumped her head against the garage wall. Maybe she'd not been a completely awful mother, after all. True, her son would be one of the first kids in his school to try out the new law, exposing her family's problems. But for him to do so and in the face of the heated controversy surrounding the barely four year-old law, took great courage and an even greater sense of self. Had her listening to him all those times, here in the Talking Place, counted for more than she had ever dared hoped for?
She started to shiver. "Justin, I've never even allowed myself to think this, much less say it, but maybe I'll leave, too." The beating of her heart in her throat hurt as she spoke the unthinkable. "Maybe we could leave together." She waited and shivered, smoothing down the tufts of grass by her sneakers.
He seemed to puzzle something out. "Are you sure you want to leave Daddy? My advisor says parents can say and do some strange things when we kids decide to leave."
Melanie sighed deeply, trying to calm her frantic thinking and galloping heart. "Oh, honey, no, I'm not really sure, I...." And she could talk no longer. The tears came, from some bottomless well she'd never known existed. Justin sat quietly, one small hand in hers, as she cried. As she sobbed for her son, for his bravery, for her fear for him; and ultimately, for her own pain-filled childhood. A childhood that she thought had been buried, until now. A childhood in which there had been no option to leave.
"Ma? You OK? I'm sorry you hurt. My advisor says it's not my fault if you hurt. But that doesn't mean I don't care. Because I do. I might even want to stay only it really wouldn't help. We'd just go on being miserable together."
She wiped her eyes with her palms, cleared her throat, and managed to speak. "Did your advisor tell you that, too?"
"No, Ma, I figured that one out by myself. Just like I figured out I have to go, that I have to take the chance."
Her son's sweet voice was calming, even as a hollow ache began spreading through her bones. "Well, your advisor sounds awfully smart, just like you. And I hope she's right. I hope she knows what she's doing telling you all this. I hope she does. Because I don't know anything anymore. Except that I love you.... and please be very careful picking a new home."
Justin's sigh of relief tore at her heart. But there was nothing more she could say. She would not burden him with her fears. She would not say that maybe he'd feel terribly guilty the way those first kids to try out the law had, or that maybe he'd feel like an outsider because he wasn't blood family. She would not ask what would happen if he chose a family that looked good, but wasn't. She would not point out what it might cost him to be a pioneer. And she would not tell him what it would cost her to let him go.
They sat in silence in the Talking Place, holding hands as the sun fell slowly down the sky. Finally, all Melanie knew was that her courageous determined son was going to leave, and that she would help him on his way.
