Middle School Blues

My son, N, started middle school last week.

We had been rejected from the first few (relatively close) schools we applied to, and ended up getting into a great school in LAUSD - ten miles away.

Ten miles in LA traffic is basically half a day of driving. It’s a lifetime. School starts at 8am. So we were looking at a 5am / sixty mile / three hour roundtrip drive just to get N to school. The school, by the way, is excellent. But - come the fuck on.

Fortunately, it is a Magnet school in an insanely wealthy area, which means every student is guaranteed transport. This was the only way I could sell the school to N’s father, who wanted to put him in a nearby (but still six miles away) school which was renowned for having the worst mini sociopaths in all of LAUSD. Little shitheads who enjoyed stabbing fights with silverware in the cafeteria. I put N’s father’s address down for the bus route, and was told they would assign me a separate route two weeks into the semester. I could deal with the hassle of the first two weeks if it meant N went to a great school.

Two weeks into the semester, they informed me that they will not provide transportation for me. I have to send N home on the bus to his father’s house in a completely different neighborhood, and then I have drive a half hour each way to pick him up every day.

Every aspect of my and N’s life is molded to suit his father.

In order to get N into a better school, I have to make sure everything is as simple as possible for his Dad. I set the situation up so the dude literally steps outside his house and puts N on the bus, then steps back inside again. In contrast, we have to navigate the public bus system at 6am, and then I send N back home on a school bus which goes a half hour out of my way. This is all pretty standard fare for women - we are accustomed to constantly accommodating the needs of men over and above our own. We are resigned to the invisible labor of organizing and responding and emailing and paying and coordinating and inconveniencing in order to appease, to soothe, to calm, to settle, to placate. I believe N is much happier in this school than he would have been in a crappy closer school. This does not make the inconvenience better. It does not make it go away. Most of the time I don’t even pay attention to the injustice and unfairness of it all. But sometimes, when the hits pile up and I’m alone with my thoughts and rent, the rage bubbles over. I try not to say mean shit these days. I’m too busy dealing with the dumb shit that sneaks out unintentionally. But yesterday, I raged like a maniac at my ex. I am so tired of bottling it all up, keeping it down, controlled, hidden and inaccessible. I’m so tired of having to behave like any of this is OK.

For the last ten years, I’ve paid for N’s music, and dance, and martial arts, and basketball without help. His father has finally started contributing more or less equally only very recently. His reasoning was “I pay you 400 bucks a month in child support so why should I pay for extracurriculars?” (yes, we have a custody agreement which states otherwise. No, no one listens to it). I actually waived the child support years ago in exchange for more travel time with N to the UK. It was two or three years into this endless court battle. I had just moved from a home I loved in Venice, to a home I hated in Pico-Union where a pregnant woman got shot in the park blocks away from my house and the students next door loathed me with a coruscating passion and kept pointedly throwing N’s stroller into the recycling bin and piling salt around my house to ‘ward off evil spirits’. I was having to rent out the second bedroom, and an assortment of pissed off comedians and tourists would leave their toenail clippings and steal my passport and my credit cards over the coming months. I was worn down by court, I was brutally lonely, I was completely fucking traumatized and I was done trying to to even attempt to co-parent with J. I’d now had to leave my home in Venice with the only community I had, and move to a crappy, overpopulated neighborhood. I just wanted to go home.

I applied for a relocation order for the first time.

The Judge at the time was a nasty little jerk who presided over an assortment of cases - family, criminal, civil. Like most judges, he had an air of patronizing condescension and a certainty that everyone who stepped foot in his courtroom was a piece of shit. I had to beg for the court assessment, and when he granted it, he seemed angry, inconvenienced and sniped at me.

With a relocation hearing on the agenda, J was spurred into an unprecedented period of helpfulness. The man who refused to negotiate was suddenly begging me to stay in LA and offering all kinds of incentives to do so. The reason I had to leave was because the last few years of constant court motions, and the accusations levied at me that I was trying to ‘alienate’ N from his father and ‘abduct’ him, had resulted in me being trapped in LA far from family and friends and work. My income had shrunk from over 100k a year, to whatever unemployment and government aid brought in. I was hugely in debt. I’d apply for a job, then realize the job paid less than the twenty bucks an hour childcare demanded. I was completely desperate. J realized that, and negotiated with me. If I stayed in LA, he bargained, then I could travel to the UK with N for three months a year.

I consulted with lawyers. They suggested I should accept the offer. The alternative: a custody evaluation and the discretion of this particular judge, may not be as kind to me. At the time, I was told over and over again that if I applied for a relocation order, and it was denied, I would have to leave my son behind and move alone. What no one told me was that if I applied for a relocation order and it was denied, I did not lose existing custody if I just stayed where the fuck I was. No one could make me move alone. It was complete horseshit. Not knowing this, I accepted this dumb ass offer.

I remember the Judge at the time saying scornfully, “you sold your son”.

At the time I didn’t understand what he meant. I’d waived child support in exchange for precious time with my son in my home country, time I needed to get work and see family and rejuvenate from the prison of LA and constant surveillance from J. I hadn’t taken more money. I’d taken less. How was I selling anything? I thought I had made the smartest and most cautious decision. Now I think the Judge meant that he would have granted me the relocation. That he considered my decision to be as stupid as it turned out to be. In retrospect, I think the Judge loathed both J and me, but he knew that my relocation back to England with N would solve a lot of issues which were compounded by J’s proximity. The ease by which he could use our current agreement to cause harm.

I agreed to stay in LA with the provision that I could travel to the UK for three months a year. As soon as I signed, I bought a ticket back to the UK. And J filed a motion in court to try and nullify the agreement, ban all my travel, and give all custody to him. I had, of course, been fucking suckered. J never had any intention of letting me travel. He just wanted to trap me in LA without any child support, work or community.

But DCSS hit the roof when they found out J had finagled his way out of child support. There is some kind of law which states that anyone who collects public assistance like CalWorks and Foodstamps, has to have their child support and / or alimony garnished to cover the costs of the assistance they’re getting. This means that I did not get benefits plus child support. I just got benefits - all 700 dollars cash and 456 bucks of foodstamps - in exchange for giving the government my paltry 400 dollars a month of child support. Clearly it was a better deal for me, and government assistance was clockwork and reliable, unlike my ex. This meant that when I waived the child support, DCSS blocked the motion. They sent a middle aged black lady with a light brown bobbed wig and a polyester royal blue suit down to Santa Monica courthouse to announce the good news.

“Your honor, I’m from DCSS and I’m here to state it is unlawful for the Petitioner to waive Child Support from the Respondent ….” My ex started muttering at her agitatedly, slapping his hand theatrically on the small bench. She eyed him with hostility. The Judge looked nonplussed. “Well, I don’t know about this. I don’t know. It seems to me that this is a case between DCSS and the Respondent,” he said. “If the Respondent simply signs this paper then there’s no need to go to court at all,” she said helpfully. The Judge looked like he was exhausted by this conversation, and waved us all away. “The parties should confer,” he said wearily. The Sheriff looked straight through us, and the Court Stenographer twittered, agitated, in the corner. Respondent noisily pushed past a row of people none of whom could be arsed to stand.

In the corridor outside the courtroom, J and Royal Blue talked for a few minutes, before he yelled “Fuck you. Fuck you”, and she raised her voice just a touch as she spat back, “Sir, I am just telling you what the law states. It is what the law states”.

“You can’t fuckin’ do this,” he screamed. “Fuckin’ bitch”. He charged out of the courthouse and lit a cigarette outside, black American Spirits, thick and tarry. His breath smelled of old garlic and alcohol, his un-ironed shirt had a stain on it, and he wore his work black pumps under too small trousers, his laptop in a satchel slung around his neck.

Royal Blue looked at me as if I had been the one who screamed at her. “I’m really sorry,” I said lamely, not sure what else to say. “Get a job,” she hissed cruelly, straightened her royal blue jacket, and stalked off in pointy cream kitten heels.

A few weeks later I went to Standing Rock to report on the protests for Marie Claire magazine.

I collected a 1500 dollar paycheck for the trouble. It did not help much with the money issues, which were epic by this time, and then my ex was incensed that I’d left our son with him for the seven days I was away. “How can you state that I’m an unfit parent, and then voluntarily leave him with me?” he sneered. I did not have the answer for that. None of this made sense. I was constantly handing my kid over to people I didn’t like or trust or care about, and being told I didn’t have a choice. I did not have agency. I did not have the ability or right to make these kinds of decisions. But the minute I did so because I was out of options because of the stupid situation I had not asked to be in, I was told it made me a shitty parent. The truth was I needed the Standing Rock paycheck, but I also needed to throw myself in front of iniquity, again and again and again. I needed to feel the weighty, thick pelt of its punch. I needed that slap from someone I hadn’t once loved. It reminded me that all of us were going through some heavy shit, all of us. No one cared about my injustice, so instead I cared about theirs. It was preferable to feeling the full gravity of the shit that I was in.

DCSS took J to court. He lost. Court reinstated child support to me aka themselves. The Royal Blue lady said to me in the corridor, “But seriously though. Just get a job like the rest of us”.

The decision was not a victory for anyone. It enraged my ex and pushed him into more and more punitive court filings. It made him feel like I had outsmarted him, that I had planned the whole thing, that I had shown him up, made him into a fool. It provoked him. It made our life even more unsafe than it already was.

I went for a meal with Jonathan P. Linton Jr last week.

He has found love with a gothic stylist, and is soon to move to New York. He has abandoned his flirtation with Ethical Non Monogamy, stating instead that he realized he’d rather have the same gothic stylist in his life than a stream of varying but uniformly irritating women from Hinge. “Life is all about friends, Rio” he explained with the air of one who is dealing with a very simple and possibly intellectually challenged child, while chomping on a steak at some vile little chain restaurant in a shiny part of West Hollywood near The Groundlings Theatre. “At the end of the day, it’s just about spending time with the people you care about.”

I flirted briefly with the idea of stabbing him in the eye with the steak knife. The knife was dripping with chimichurri sauce. That did not deter me. I desisted because he was picking up the check and I was really hungry. I wondered if he remembered that I am the one person who cannot spend time with the people I care about. I have had to choose between them and N. I chose N.

The people I care about have slipped further and further away with each passing year. They have died, stopped talking to me, slipped away, moved on. As I become older and more jaded and the cracks in me get stretched out and deeper and wider until they resemble gaping canyons, the possibility of finding new people, a new family, chosen family, seems ever more remote. A friend gets married, moves to Dubai. Another quits her job. Someone else gets divorced. Meets a new love. Has a baby. Adopts twins. Elders die and we mourn and move on. My god, the change a person can make in just a few months! It’s incredible. Whole lives forged and formed and fractured and conjoined and morphed. And I am still here, living the same fucking life which does not make any goddamn fucking sense. I don’t have work, I can’t afford to be here, I don’t have a support system, please make this stop. In life, when something is not working, we change it. That ability to take stock of our situation and to say to ourselves, ‘This isn’t working. I’m going to do something different’. That is a cornerstone of freedom. A fundamental fucking right. It’s how we grow, and develop, and become better humans.

The removal of that freedom results in Gaza. Nazi Germany. The US.

I can’t change the foundations of my life, the essential shape of this small glass prison here. I cannot leave LA as much as I want to, I cannot create friendships despite my desire, I cannot change the stubborn intensity of my cracked and leaking self, even more fucked up with each aching year. And so I change the details within the prison. I forensically scrutinize myself - so wanting! I pathologically push myself into new classes. New knowledge. New communities. USC, Groundlings, pole, capoeira. Silence, stillness is not good. It’s too painful. Have to keep moving. Keep busy. Anything to somehow change the melody, the fact this life is playing on, discordant, dissonant, jarring, off key.

Each day that passes the misery subsides into mute resignation. Sometimes, like today, the rage boils up and overspills. But mostly it’s rage at myself, for being stupid enough to get into this situation. For having an awkward and irritating personality. For being blunt and clumsy and neurodivergent and stupid and angry and reactive. For loving the wrong person, and being too afraid to even try loving the right one.

I don’t like myself much these days. Either empty and rattling, sedated by SSRI’s, or frothing in a rage I keep thinking must have run out but never does. “Don’t react,” my friend in London says, concerned, in a voice note, “You know every time you react he’ll use it to hurt you.” This is the very pinnacle of the insanity: that eventually you are so worn down, so fucked up, so utterly destroyed and broken and weak that they no longer have to do anything. Everywhere you go, your corrosive touch burns shit down: friends, jobs, homes, acquaintances, everything. You cannot move without warping metal, imploding, exploding, detonating little bombs which start a ripple effect, a horrible chain reaction.

All they have to do is smile and watch.