Marie had been concerned about her son for a while. Ever since they'd moved from Washington State all the way across to Wisconsin. In a way, she felt it would've been easier for Josh had he stayed in Spokane, maybe gone to a community college or one of the smaller schools like his friend Braedon. At least he would've stayed close to some of the guys he'd played basketball with. They'd been a good, tight knit group, & supportive of each other.
She couldn't have predicted the change she saw in him now. Even Josh had expected to make new friends in Madison, after all, it had been easy in Spokane, but things were different now that the young people his age were all hitting milestones he seemed disinterested in pursuing. It wasn't as easy to connect with others, their groups were already established.
To make things worse, she noted he was drifting into a problematic mindset about women. Some of the opinions he expressed around her made her genuinely shocked. She'd been a solo parent, Josh's dad had walked out when he was barely five years old. Too early, she believed, for him to have any real memories of the man who decided AFTER his son was born that the child he'd pressured her to have wasn't what he'd really wanted. Ted had nurtured a vision of himself as a father through a rose-colored lens of nostalgia. A sitcom dad, with a son who barely intruded on his life except for the fun parts.
The first few years of crying & bodily fluids & frustration had blended into the monotony of trying to get the boy to eat his dinner, or put on his shoes, or stop asking the same question a thousand times in a row. Ted had been impatient & reactive. On the day he walked out the door for the last time, Marie had looked at her husband with a clear-eyed realisation, that despite being older than her, he was still in many ways a child himself, a stunted man who'd been coddled by his mother, & then by herself, to be unprepared for the thankless hard work of the reality of parenthood.
She'd been devastated when she'd been left to care for Josh alone, & yet, after less than a month she'd discovered that her life had been made significantly easier. Without her husband's unregulated emotions to factor in, she'd found it easier to provide a stable household for herself & her kid. She'd found it easier to get on with the practical, day to day routine of motherhood. She'd signed the divorce papers with a sense of resignation & relief.
While she'd been pregnant, MANY people had assured her that she'd fall in love with her baby the first moment she held him. Or that the baby-years were the most precious & fleeting pleasures she'd ever experience, among other platitudes. However, Marie had felt a strange ambivalence to Josh when he'd been born, even breast-feeding hadn't created the iron-strong bond she'd been led to expect. She'd wondered if it had been post-natal depression but she'd still functioned, she'd still been the pragmatic, sensible woman she'd always been, she just felt a strange distance that seemed incongruous with other people's stories of motherhood.
She'd LOVED her baby, always. Had known that she would have thrown her body between the child & any danger that approached him, she'd do everything she could to make his life happier, easier. But... she didn't feel like a 'natural' mother as such. Her feelings had been more reserved than magical. Sometimes she'd still been surprised to hear herself referred to as 'Mommy' by the growing Josh.
It had only been after Ted left & the house had become quieter, that she'd started to feel that pang, that unbreakable chain of love that stretched from her heart to his. She'd wake in the dead of night & tiptoe to his room & watch the young boy sleeping peacefully, sheets tangled around his feet, stuffed orange dragon squashed between his soft hair & the wall, his breathing slow & regular. She'd inhale his young scent & marvel at his dark eyelashes resting on his pink cheeks.
They'd become inseparable from then on, she'd felt a love she'd been unprepared for. The tender feelings that sprang up when she watched him spill coco pops at breakfast, or count to a hundred for the first time, or score his first goal in peewee soccer had been so startlingly strong that her heart ached. She'd asked herself if it was simply a reaction to the guilt she felt for being a solo parent, but over the years the emotion hadn't abated, & she'd accepted the newfound sense of belonging; had settled into her role as Josh's Mom. His achievements had been hers, his sorrow had been hers.
So now, pulled across multiple State lines by her career, his loneliness & frustration & stagnation had also been carried by her. She would do anything to ease his unhappiness.
It seemed to have started with comments about Ted, who'd never reached out to his son, who'd never paid child support, that Josh made in a studied 'offhand' manner. Josh seemed to have developed an idea of his father, a sort of underdog persona based on a total lack of evidence. At one stage he'd even asked Marie 'what she'd done that had made Ted leave them' & it had taken all her self-restraint not to inform him that they'd been a happy couple before Ted had realised what hard work parenthood actually was.
She'd carefully avoided disparaging the absent father for fifteen years & somehow, that lack of information had only cultivated an imaginary vision of his father in his mind. For the first few years after he'd walked out she'd emailed Ted about Josh's development & tried to keep him abreast of his son's life. After short replies withered into radio silence she'd given up & now, within weeks of his 21st birthday, Josh seemed determined to rewrite Ted's existence in his life.
She'd felt guilty not being able to provide a 'male role model' for him & for a long time, finding a stepfather to step into that position had been the main focus of her dating life (as seldom as she dated). But pickings had been slim, not for lack of interest in herself, but because many of the men who pursued her were disinterested in co-raising another man's child. One day she'd looked into Josh's smiling hazel eyes, he'd been in his mid-teens at the time, & decided they were simply fine by themselves.
From then on, instead of cultivating romantic relationships with the men she dated, she'd only occasionally satisfied herself with casual, carefully-secret, hookups. When Josh had been young she'd clandestinely slipped a man into her bedroom an hour after his bedtime, when he'd been older she'd 'joined a book club' which had been her excuse to sneak out & rendezvous with guys at their homes, or motel rooms (occasionally seeing married men, she felt it was more convenient in a way).
But since uprooting their lives & moving to WI, Josh had mused more & more frequently about the spectre of Ted, wondering if he'd remarried, if he'd had other children. She'd provided his email address (hoping it was still active) & Josh had even found him on social media, but Ted hadn't responded even once to Josh's missives. Even then, Josh seemed fixated on the gap in his family, had wondered aloud whether Ted would be proud of him, what his advice would be & if they looked alike.
When he wasn't creating scenarios about his absent father, he was complaining about the girls in WI. He'd signed up to several dating apps, primarily Tinder, from day-one. At first it had seemed to be going well, but after a few months, after dozens of dates (that Marie knew about) the scene had seemed to dry up. From what she could gather, her son looked good on the app but wasn't able to hold a woman's attention for long enough to ensure one or two dates continued into a deeper relationship. The girls Josh was interested in just didn't seem interested in following up. He'd complain that they stopped responding to his text messages, that they'd ghost him. Eventually, he decided it was because they were gay, or misandrists, or gold-diggers. Easier to think that way.
Sometimes when she picked up the dirty laundry from his bedroom floor she'd find evidence of girls, condom wrappers, a revealing pair of underwear, someone's abandoned mascara tube... but if she asked Josh whether he was 'seeing anyone' he'd grunt in response. The grunts evolved into resentment & lately, his answers had been seething with a barely hidden resentment, mumbling things about needing a nicer car, or 'feminism' making girls impossible to please.
He'd go on first dates with a preset chip on his shoulder, unable to hide how defensive he was even just to make a good first impression. She was disappointed in him, yet she knew that it was a common reaction for young boys, not socialised to handle rejection healthily, to be drawn into toxic communities online, to find ways to blame progress for their insecurities, to hold on to the old fairytale idea of the 'nice guy getting the girls' simply by existing in the same sphere as them. The first dates stopped turning into second dates. Eventually, it seemed he stopped trying to date at all.
His attitude reminded her of Ted, although she never pointed it out. Like Ted, Josh seemed to imagine a perfect romcom situation where his general geniality & appearance would be enough for the universe to reward him with some idealised young woman, the kind of girl who would agree with everything he said, would admire his opinions without question, would look 'naturally beautiful' without effort or shallowness. He was young. In some ways, young men believed in fairytales even more than young women.
