When I was 14, I woke up one morning around 4am to hear my mother screaming and sobbing in the living room. I climbed out of bed and went out to find her on her knees with the phone pressed to her ear. For a little over a year, since my father left, she had been raising two teenagers, working her regular full-time job as a preschool teacher and then spending her nights, seven days a week, delivering newspapers.
On the weekends and holidays, my brother and I would crawl out of bed at 2am to help her, especially with the mammoth Sunday paper route, which took almost twice as long, even with my grandfather, my brother and myself helping.
We would pull into the parking lot of an abandoned Dairy Queen around 3 in the morning, where two of us would sit rolling endless stacks of newspapers and stuffing them into plastic sleeves, while the other two would take the rolled papers and deliver them around the neighborhood. The smell of newsprint still makes me queasy. I honestly don’t know how my mother did it seven days a week.
My mother went straight from her father’s house to her husband’s, and my father kept a tight rein on the finances, giving her a small weekly allowance for groceries but not allowing her to get otherwise involved. Once she was on her own, she was suddenly hit with all of the bills, the mortgage and the cost of keeping two teenagers fed and…
