The Mother's Burden

My name is Linda Chen. I am forty-five years old and I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens where the subway shakes the walls every twelve minutes and I have learned to sleep through it the way a soldier learns to sleep through artillery.

I raised my daughter Julie alone. Her father left ten years ago and took nothing with him except a note that said "I'll come back when I have enough money." He never came back. What he left behind was debt. Twelve thousand dollars in medical bills. Eight thousand in credit cards. Three thousand I owe to a man named White Rat who collects in cash and does not accept excuses.

People ask me why I don't get a real job. I tell them I have tried. I worked the checkout line at the supermarket until my feet bled. I worked nights at a nursing home until I couldn't tell awake from asleep. I washed dishes at a Chinese restaurant until my hands cracked and bled and the manager still docked my pay for "excessive breakage." None of it was enough. Twelve thousand dollars does not disappear because you work hard. It accumulates. It is silt in a riverbed, layer upon layer, until you are buried alive and you cannot feel it happening.

So last year I put together a traveling act. Not a professional one—just neighbors from the building, widows and unemployed factory workers, performing in church halls and VFW lodges between Albany and Pittsburgh. We sold cheap medicines and girdles and my own stand-up routines that I wrote at night after the kids were asleep.

Julie helped me. She is seventeen and she is brilliant and she wrote every joke, designed every poster, taught herself to use a typewriter at the public library so she could print price lists that looked professional. She was good at it. God help me, she was good at it.

"Mom, this isn't right," she said one night. "You should pay me."

"Pay you?" I laughed, the way you laugh when someone asks you to laugh at a joke that isn't funny. "When you go to college, I'll give you a bonus. I promise."

She didn't argue. She never argues anymore. But I hear her at night, when she thinks I'm asleep, crying in the closet where she goes to hide the sound. Those cries are needles in my ears and I let them stay there because if I pull them out, I'll have to feel them.

Her father's debt was not her fault. But the debt I have now is mine, and someone has to pay it. It's not cruelty. It's survival. That's what I tell myself when I look at her face and see the resentment building behind her eyes like storm clouds.

In October, Julie lost her wallet on the dock. Her phone, her cash, her ID—all gone. She called me from a payphone, her voice shaking. "Mom, I can't get home."

I held the phone and looked at myself in the mirror. Forty-five. Crow's feet. Hair going gray at the temples. I wanted to say "I'll come get you." I wanted to say "I'm sorry, Mommy was wrong."

I didn't.

"Then don't come back," I said.

Silence on the other end. Long silence. Then: "You said I could go back to school."

"Yes."

"Before school starts, earn your tuition and living expenses yourself. Then I'll let you come back."

"I don't have money. I don't have ID."

"Figure it out."

I hung up. I sat in my kitchen and looked out at the New York night. The lights were blinking across the river like a thousand eyes watching me. And for the first time in ten years, I questioned everything. Am I doing the right thing?

White Rat came by and said, "Why are you doing this? Julie's a good kid."

I told him, "She brought it on herself."

But late at night, drinking cheap whiskey alone in my apartment, I look at the photograph Julie's mother left behind—the young woman smiling, believing her daughter would have a better life. I raise my glass to the photo and I whisper, "I'm sorry."

The whiskey burns. The tears are salt. This is my life. A mother torn between love and survival, choosing the wrong thing every single day because it's the only thing she knows how to choose.