Me and my Wa

I don't like my Wa messed with.

This is not surprising; none of us like it when someone comes along and tries to alter the structure of our lives, which Tim refers to, a little deprecatingly, as the Wa. Wa actually means, according to Wikipedia, 'harmony, peace, balance' - so he's not that far off.

To live alone successfully, at least for me, it helps to develop habits and schedules. Maybe it's even inevitable. In the morning, I get up, drink something caffeinated, listen to NPR's latest grim assessments while I check for mostly nonexistent, and certainly nonessential, email. On weekends, I toddle out the door with my bike when the temperature finally hits above 40, then clean or perform some other life-maintenance until it's time for the evening's festivities. During the week, I come home from my job to a workout long and strenuous enough to keep thoughts centered on whatever's on the TV screen 'till it's time to soak, read Mellville, and sleep.

Sometimes, of course, one schedule collides with another - Thursday night's rest night because it's when Tim and I have dinner and watch CSI, but once a month Great Books interferes. I have to make myself go.

Most disquieting are the relatively infrequent midweek social events, when I have to force myself not to, at the last minute, cancel a coffee or dinner date that I made, claiming an untenable level of busyness. Part of this is because I'm just uncertain enough of my ability to keep up a conversation that could be described as sparkling; but mostly, I think, it's because I just like my predictable little routine.

And then along comes a Jake weekend. I wake on Saturday morning to Anime aliens' stylized movement on the screen of the computer I can see from my bed, and the crackles from the headphones announcing their upcoming annihilation, and I feel a mild, nagging dread.

This is hard to admit. I love this boy. He was an accidental child, but was wanted and is cherished at a level that would be beyond reason if he wasn't mine. However, his presence means always that I can't just worry about myself. I need to cobble some kind of meals, make sure that he spends some time at least reading, if not with a more productive task. I need to make sure he has clean clothes, and a somewhat neat and organized place to lay his head.

Most of all, I need to ensure a level of entertainment, not an easy trick given the proportion of my income that goes to the child support payment. According to the law, my ex-husband carries all of the expenses of raising this child - that means that everything we do has to be pretty close to free, or expensed on the ever-shrinking credit line.

Then I get up, and we make it through the crepes or scones or cinnamon toast I remember I know how to make for breakfast, and the day lays itself out. I ride or run, and usually take at least one call in the midst of either, appreciating that Jake uses the cell connection for both reassurance and lifeline. Later, his neighborhood friend shows up, and I take them both to the library, the pool, the park or the store. In the summer we roast marshmallows in the chimenera on the patio. Sometimes we hike or cook together, and I remember that none of us were born knowing how to do either.

Jake asks a lot of questions, talks about things that don't always interest me, and likes to make funny noises. My house is tiny and trying to negotiate the kitchen with another person in it can verge on dangerous.

But we laugh, too, and when he isn't here, I drown in the weekend silences and, like Mrs. Robinson, suffer from too many choices.

And when Jake's father picks him up on Sunday night, I invariably require the comfort of a phone call to a friend, or at least a hard run through the neighborhood, to assuage the riptide of loss that floods through me.

The unreliabiliy of noncustodial parents, fathers especially, is a trope well known to TV shows and movies - and for good reason, because it happens. A few years ago I stood at a window next to a student teary because he missed his father, who hadn't called him in weeks, and didn't pick up his son's phone calls. My anger at this man, for hurting his child so, hasn't diminished. But if I'm brutally honest, at some level I almost understand.

The kids that don't live with us are an interruption of the comforting routines we've so laboriously built. They mess with our Wa.

But maybe, my Wa, for one, needs some messing up.