My son Tyler came into the world at seven pounds and two ounces, with a specific and fully formed opinion about every single thing.

I know this sounds like the kind of thing mothers say.

I mean it literally.

The nursery nurses told me that most newborns have a period of quiet observation in the first days, a kind of adjustment to being outside the womb, a settling-in.

Tyler did not observe quietly.

Tyler was, from the first hours of his life, a person with things to communicate.

He communicated them loudly.

He communicated them without ambiguity.

My mother, who has always been honest in ways I find more useful in retrospect than in the moment, held Tyler when he was four days old, looked at me over his head, and said: you are going to have your hands full.

She said it with love.

She said it with the knowledge of a woman who had raised me, and who therefore understood something about what a child with strong opinions and a high tolerance for making noise could become.

She was not wrong.

My name is Laura Hendricks.

I am thirty-three years old.

I am a dental hygienist.

I work Tuesday through Friday at a practice in the part of town with the good coffee shop on the corner, and I take Monday off because Monday is the day I try to do the things that do not get done when I am working.

I am also, for the past four years, doing all of this alone.

Tyler’s father, Jason, left when Tyler was three.

Not in the dramatic way.

In the quiet way that is actually harder in some respects because there is no clear event to point to, no moment where something breaks, just the gradual withdrawal of a person who had decided that the life they had was not the life they wanted and who backed out of it slowly and then all at once.

Ezoic
Jason lives in Columbus now.

He has Tyler every other weekend.

He calls on birthdays and at Christmas and occasionally on a Tuesday for no particular reason and I have made my peace with this arrangement in the specific way of someone who has accepted that the arrangement is not ideal and is also what there is.

Tyler has made his peace with it in the way seven-year-olds make peace with things, which is by not fully understanding it yet and by occasionally expressing the not-understanding in ways that are hard to watch.

He says, sometimes: how come Daddy doesn’t live here?

And I say: because Daddy lives in Columbus.

And he says: but how come?

And I say: because that’s where his life is now.

And he looks at me with the eyes he has, which are Jason’s eyes in my son’s face, and he processes this in the interior way of a child who is not satisfied with an answer but who has run out of follow-up questions for the moment.